Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery (10 September 1923 – 20 August 2018) was an Israeli writer, journalist, politician, and activist. He founded the Gush Shalom peace movement. Avnery served two separate terms in the Knesset, from 1965 to 1974 and again from 1979 to 1981. From 1950 until the magazine shut down in 1993, he owned and edited the news weekly HaOlam HaZeh.

Israel–Palestine peace activism

He gained international attention on 3 July 1982, when he crossed the front lines during the Siege of Beirut to meet Yasser Arafat—the first time an Israeli had met the Palestinian leader. Avnery wrote several books on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including My Friend, the Enemy (1986), 1948: A Soldier’s Tale, the Bloody Road to Jerusalem (2008), and Israel’s Vicious Circle (2008). He received the Right Livelihood Award in 2001 and the Carl von Ossietzky Medal in 2008.

Early life

Born Helmut Ostermann in Beckum, near Münster in Westphalia, he was the youngest of four children in a well-established German Jewish family. His father worked as a private banker in the town, and his grandfather, Josef Ostermann, was a teacher in the local Jewish community. The family roots were in the Rhineland, though Avnery later forgot the name of the small Rhenish village his mother had mentioned.

He grew up in Hanover, where his father later became a court-appointed receiver. Among his childhood companions was Rudolf Augstein, who would go on to run Der Spiegel. After Hitler came to power, Avnery and his family emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in November 1933.

All relatives who remained in Germany died in the Holocaust. He attended school in Nahalal and then Tel Aviv, leaving after seventh grade at age fourteen to help his parents. For about five years, he worked as a clerk for a lawyer.

In 1938, following the British execution of Shlomo Ben-Yosef—who had thrown a dud grenade into a bus carrying Arab women and children—Avnery joined the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group. Unlike his contemporary Yitzhak Shamir, Avnery was considered too young to take part in operations such as killing suspected Jewish informers or bombing Arab markets.

When World War II broke out at age sixteen, he developed a lifelong interest in military strategy, eventually reading “a few hundred books” on the subject by authors like Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Liddell-Hart. His only brother, Werner Ostermann, enlisted in the British Army and was killed in 1941 at Gondar on the East African front with No. 51 Commando. In his brother’s memory, Avnery changed his surname to a Hebraic rendering of Werner.

Avnery left the Irgun in 1942, disillusioned with its tactics. In a 2003 interview, he said he did not support killing people in retaliation for Arab attacks. From 1941 to 1946, he wrote for two far-right newspapers, HaHevrah and BaMa’avak. His early political thinking was shaped by Canaanism.

He abandoned Zionism at a young age but remained a nationalist, viewing it as a natural desire for belonging—legitimate for Jews as for Arabs. In 1946, he coined the term Hishtalvut BaMerhav (“integration into the region”), arguing that a future Jewish state should align itself within a broad “Semitic space” that included Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—a term chosen to counter Western imperialism and colonialism. In 1947, he founded his own small group, Eretz Yisrael HaTze’ira (“Young Land of Israel”), which published the journal Ma’avak.

Military service

During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Avnery fought on the southern front as a squad commander in the Givati Brigade and later in the Samson’s Foxes commando unit, for which he wrote its anthem, “The Foxes of Shimshon,” considered one of the enduring battle anthems of the campaign. He sent dispatches from the front line to Haaretz, later collected as the book In the Fields of Philistia. His wartime experiences convinced him that the Palestinian people existed.

He noted that soldiers would enter villages where fires and Primus cookers were still lit, showing that residents had fled moments earlier—a rational response, he believed, to being fired upon. Avnery was wounded twice, the second time seriously near the war’s end. He spent his final months of service convalescing and was discharged in summer 1949.

Journalism career

Though soldiers were forbidden to write for newspapers, Avnery published articles about his frontline experiences during the war. Shortly after, in 1950, he and Shalom Cohen, along with two others, bought the failing magazine HaOlam HaZeh. Avnery edited the weekly, which carried the motto “without fear, without bias,” turning it into an anti-establishment tabloid known for sensational scoops. Its influence was such that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion refused to mention it by name.