Jossi Sarid

Jossi Sarid

Jossi Sarid ( Hebrew יוסי שריד; born on October 24, 1940 in Rechovot ; died December 4, 2015 ) was a left-wing Israeli news commentator and politician. He became known as an important exponent of the Israeli peace movement.

Life

Jossi Sarid's maiden name was Sneider. His father Yaakov, who was the only one of his family to survive the Shoah , changed the family name to Sarid (Hebrew: remnant) in 1945. Both parents grew up in the then Polish town of Rafaliwka (Rafałówka) and emigrated to Palestine in 1934. His deeply depressed mother Duba Sarid committed suicide on the 19th anniversary of the massacre committed by the Nazis in a forest near Rafałówka, in which her mother, father, sister and brother were shot. His father, whose will to live was unbroken, worked as a teacher and became head of all socialist schools and employees in the Israeli Ministry of Education.

Sarid served in the Artillery Corps from 1958 and as a military correspondent in the Israel Defense Forces . After his military service he worked as a correspondent for Israel Radio . As a journalist, he was known for his polished Hebrew. At the age of 24 he became the press spokesman for the social democratic party Avoda . He quickly won the trust of Levi Eschkol , Pinchas Sapir and Golda Meir . Shortly after the Six-Day War, he studied political science at the New School for Social Research in New York . There he took part in the Students for a Democratic Society's protest against the Vietnam War , which also changed his view of Israel's military policy. He did not understand that Golda Meir refused to return the West Bank to Arab administration after Israel had won the war. His relationship with the party leadership clouded over. After the military triumphs of Moshe Dajan , he was soon considered an outsider.

After the near defeat of the Yom Kippur War put the balance of power into perspective, he was a member of the Knesset for Ma'arach , Ratz and Meretz from 1974 to 2006 . With Menachem Begin's election victory in 1977, he became one of the most important voices of the left opposition. In 1982 he was the first Zionist Knesset member to speak out against the Lebanon war , which initially exposed him to numerous hostilities, but ultimately strengthened his support when the war proved to be a fiasco . From 1992 to 1996 Sarid was Minister for the Environment and from 1999 to 2000 Minister for Education, Culture and Sport. He suggested that poems by Palestinian authors should be included in Israeli schoolbooks and that the genocide of the Armenians should be officially commemorated in Israel . He was one of Yitzhak Rabin's confidants and was involved in the preparatory work for the agreement with the Palestinians . From 1996 to 2003, Sarid led the left-wing secular Meretz party.

Sarid lived in Tel Aviv . In his weekly Haaretz columns, he expressed his criticism of the Israeli government, especially its occupation policy. He was one of the leaders of the civil rights and peace movement Shalom Achshaw . Der Spiegel wrote in the obituary: "With a powerful voice, with a sharp mind and often biting criticism, he held up the mirror to his country, fought against corruption, racism and the policy of occupation. He suffered from Israel's course and mourned publicly to the end in his Haaretz columns." Ari Shavit described him as resigned in his 2013 book .

He died in December 2015 at the age of 75 as a result of a heart attack . He was buried on December 6th in the cemetery of Kibbutz Givat Hashlosha in Drom HaScharon .

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid tribute to him in an obituary: "Although we disagreed on many points, I admired him for adhering to his convictions, for his extensive knowledge and for his perfect use of Hebrew."

Jossi Sarid was married to Dorit and had three children. Yishai Sarid , a lawyer and writer born in 1965, is his son.

Web links

Commons : Jossi Sarid  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ofer Aderet: Yossi Sarid, Former Knesset Member and Minister, Dies at 75 , in: Haaretz , December 5, 2015 (en)
2. ↑ Israel Network.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Ari Shavit : My promised land - triumph and tragedy of Israel . 1st edition. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-570-10226-8 , pp. 337–344 (first edition 2013 by Spiegel & Grau, New York).
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Hans-Christian Rößler: Jossi Sarid died . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 7, 2015, p. 4.
5. ↑ obituary in the mirror 51/2015, p. 141
6. ↑ [1]