Semitic Action

Semitic Action (Hebrew: הפעולה השמית‎‎, HaPeulah Hashemit) was a small Israeli political group of the 1950s and 1960s which sought the creation of a regional federation encompassing Israel and its Arab neighbors. Created in 1956, the group's key members were Uri Avnery, Natan Yellin-Mor, and Boaz Evron, with other members including Maxim Ghilan, Shalom Cohen, and Amos Kenan.Joel Beinin describes the group as "a political expression of the Canaanite movement" which "advocated that Hebrew-speaking Israelis cut their ties with the Jewish diaspora and integrate into the Middle East as natives of the region on the basis of an anticolonialist alliance with its indigenous Arab inhabitants."

In 1958 the group published a platform, titled "The Hebrew Manifesto." It described the "Hebrew nation" in Israel as a new entity, albeit one linked to the Jewish diaspora, and called for moving beyond outmoded Zionist ideas that were now holding back the nation's development. It put forward a program of secularism, complete civic equality between Jews and Arabs, support for anti-colonial movements, and a relationship with the diaspora based on national interest rather than ethnic, religious, or cultural ties.Jacob Shavit writes that the manifesto emerged from the meeting of three groups: former Canaanites, former Lehi members who had moved to the Left, and Avnery and his associates, who Shavit describes as "neither Left nor Right."

The group published a journal, Etgar (אתגר, "Challenge"), edited by Yellin-Mor, weekly or biweekly from April 1960 until March 1967. It also attempted to run for the Knesset. One of its founders, Yaakov Yeredor (a former Lehi member), represented the Arab nationalist group al-Ard in three of its trials.

In December 1960 several members of Semitic Action (Avnery, Yellin-Mor, Ghilan, Cohen, and Kenan) created the Israeli Committee for a Free Algeria, a group supportive of the FLN in the Algerian War, in opposition to Israel's official policy. The impetus for this decision came from Henri Curiel, who had introduced Avnery to members of the FLN and suggested to him that an independent Algeria would repay Israeli support by becoming Israel's first friend in the region.

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