Meir Vilner

Meir Vilner (1951)

Meir Vilner ( Hebrew מאיר וילנר), (born as Ber Kovner October 23, 1918 in Vilnius ; died June 5, 2003 in Tel Aviv ) was a communist Israeli politician and Jewish leader of the Communist Party of Israel ( Maki ), which consisted primarily of Arab Israelis . He was the youngest and longest-living of the 37 signatories to the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.

Life

Vilner was born in Vilnius, which was briefly still in Lithuania, which then became Polish. He began his political life as the leader of the socialist - Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair . But soon he became disaffected by the Zionist groups, in which he saw a tendency to dream of the Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel instead of changing the current situation of the Jews in their homelands. That is why he began to work for the banned Communist Workers' Party of Poland under the pseudonym Meir Vilner . He finished this work in 1938 when he fled Poland to join the League of Nations mandate for Palestine . Most of his family members died in the Holocaust .

Then Vilner studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem .

In Palestine, too, which was soon to become the State of Israel, Vilner was disillusioned with Zionist politics. He claimed that the anti-Semitism that was directed against the Jews in Vilnius would now affect the Arabs. He joined the Palestinian Communist Party, which accepted both Arab and Israeli members, but supported the UN's partition plan for Palestine . Vilner criticized both the British and Israeli governments, but justified signing the Israeli Declaration of Independence on the grounds that it would eliminate another British colony.

In 1949 he was elected to the Knesset as a member of the Rakah . He later switched to maki . He remained in the Knesset as a representative of the Maki until 1965, when he and Emil Habibi and Tawfik Toubi broke away from the Rakah after disagreements over the increasing anti-Israeli stance of the Soviet Union , with Vilner on the side of the Soviet Union . Before the 1977 Knesset elections, the Rakah became part of the Chadasch and Vilner remained a member of the Knesset until 1990.

Shortly after the 1967 Six Day War , which the Rakah rejected, a member of the right-wing Gahal party carried out a knife attack on Vilner, from which he recovered.

Personal

Vilner was married to Esther Vilenska, an Israeli communist politician. The two had two sons but were later divorced. Vilner's cousin Abba Kovner was a Hebrew writer, resistance fighter and partisan leader of the Fareinigte Partisaner Organisatzije .

Publications

• Greetings to the XI. Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. (in: Minutes of the XI. Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-320-00663-0 )

Web links

• Lawrence Joffe: Obituary: Meir Vilner. In: The Guardian . June 21, 2003 (English). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Meir Vilner . In: Encyclopædia Britannica ; Retrieved December 1, 2010