Akiva Orr

Akiva or "Aki" Orr (1931 – February 9, 2013) was an Israeli writer and political activist. He was an outspoken critic of Zionism and supported a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since 1968 Orr was a leading advocate of radical direct democracy.

Orr was born in Berlin in 1931. His parents left Germany when he was three years old, in the aftermath of the Nazi rise to power, and moved to Palestine, then under British rule. Orr grew up in Tel Aviv and attended the First Municipal School of Tel Aviv. He was a keen swimmer and was the Maccabi 200m breast-stroke champion in 1946 and 1947. In 1946 he was drafted into the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization that was to develop into the Israeli Defence Forces following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. He joined the Navy, which played a minor role in the 1948 War of Independence.

Orr served in the Israeli navy until 1950, and then joined the merchant navy. He participated in the Israeli Seamen's Strike of 1951, which lasted 40 days. It was during this time that he became politicized as a result of a beating incurred at the hands of the Israeli police. In the same year he joined the Israeli Communist Party. He remained in the merchant navy until 1955, when he moved to Jerusalem to study mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University. There, he served as secretary of the Union of Communist Science Students at the University. Following his graduation in 1958, he started teaching mathematics and physics at the AIU Technical College.

In 1961, Orr published his first major work. Written with Moshe Machover under the pseudonym, A Israeli, Shalom, Shalom ve'ein Shalom (Hebrew: שלום, שלום, ואין שלום‎‎; Peace, Peace, and there is no Peace) set out to demonstrate how Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had colluded with Britain and France in a colonial war against Egypt and disprove Ben-Gurion's claims that the 1956 Suez War had been a war fought to save Israel from annihilation. (See: )

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