Uri Avnery
| Uri Avnery | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Date of birth | 10 September 1923 |
| Place of birth | Beckum, Germany |
| Year of aliyah | 1933 |
| Knessets | 6, 7, 9 |
| Faction represented in Knesset | |
| 1965–1974 | Meri |
| 1979–1981 | Left Camp of Israel |
Uri Avnery (Hebrew: אורי אבנרי, also transliterated Uri Avneri, born 10 September 1923) is an Israeli writer and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement.
A member of the Irgun as a teenager, Avnery sat in the Knesset from 1965 to 1974 and from 1979 to 1981. He was also the owner of HaOlam HaZeh, an Israeli news magazine, from 1950 until it closed in 1993.
He is famous for crossing the lines during the Siege of Beirut to meet Yassir Arafat on 3 July 1982, the first time the Palestinian leader ever met with an Israeli. Avnery is the author of several books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including 1948: A Soldier’s Tale, the Bloody Road to Jerusalem (2008); Israel’s Vicious Circle (2008); and My Friend, the Enemy (1986).
Avnery was born in Beckum, Germany, as Helmut Ostermann, to a well-established German Jewish family. Avnery and his family emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933, following Adolf Hitler's rise to power. He attended school in Nahalal and then in Tel Aviv, leaving after 7th grade, at age 14, in order to help his parents. He started work as a clerk for a lawyer, a job he held for about five years.
He joined the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group, in 1938, but unlike his comrade-in-arms Yitzhak Shamir who joined up at roughly the same time, was judged too young to engage in action, and wrote for some of their internal publications. At one point he edited the internal Revisionist journal Ba-Ma'avak ("in the Struggle"). He started writing for independent publications at the age of 17.
He left the Irgun in 1942 after becoming disenchanted with their tactics, stating in a 2003 interview that, "I didn't like the methods of terror applied by the Irgun at the time", noting he did not back killing people in retaliation for similar acts by the Arabs. In 1947 Avnery started his own small group, Eretz Yisrael Hatze'ira ("Young Land of Israel"), which published the journal Ma'avak ("Struggle"). Avnery's early political thought was influenced by Canaanism; in 1947 he proposed a union of the countries in the "Semitic region": Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
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