Uri Avnery

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Uri Avnery (2006)

Uri Avnery ( Hebrew אורי אבנרי; * September 10, 1923 in Beckum as Helmut Ostermann ; † August 20, 2018 in Tel Aviv ) was an Israeli journalist , writer , politician and peace activist . He was represented in three legislative periods (1965–1974 and 1979–1981) as a member of parliament for various small left parties such as Meri in the Knesset .

In addition to his journalistic work , Avnery gained international fame, especially from 1993 onwards as one of the main founders and spokespersons of the Gush Shalom peace organization . For his commitment in this regard, he was awarded the Aachen Peace Prize in 1997 , and in 2001, together with his wife Rachel Avnery and the organization itself, the Right Livelihood Award (better known in German as the "Alternative Nobel Prize").

Life

Shortly after Avnery transferred to the Kaiserin-Auguste-Victoria-Gymnasium in Hanover , his family fled with him to Palestine from the Nazi dictatorship in 1933 . After several name changes, he adopted the Hebrew version of Uri Avnery at 19, after first Hebrewing the first name of his brother Werner zu Avner, who died in 1941 as a soldier in the British Army in World War II.

Uri Avnery (1948)

From 1938 to 1942 he was a member of the Irgun . Avnery claims to have joined the underground organization to fight for freedom against the British mandate, but left the organization in protest of its "anti-Arab and reactionary views and terrorist methods". In the War of Independence in 1948 Avnery soldier was the Israel Defense Forces . He served in the "Shu'alei Shimshon" unit of the Giv'ati Brigade and was seriously wounded. In 1949 he published his war diary, In the Fields of the Philistines, about what happened during the war.

From 1950 to 1990 Uri Avnery was the publisher and editor-in-chief of the news magazine haOlam haZeh ("This world" - in contrast to the hereafter, the "world to come").

In 1952, he proposed a preventive war against Egypt , as after the overthrow of King Faruq from the country he expected a war as soon as it felt strong enough. In 1957 he supported the idea of ​​overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan with the prospect of forming a federation with the foreseeable Palestinian successor state.

In 1965 and 1969 he was elected to the Knesset on the list of the haOlam haZeh party of the same name. In 1974 the new small party Meri , on whose list Avnery was a member, could not win enough votes for the Knesset. In 1975 he was seriously injured in an assassination attempt with a knife. In 1979 Avnery was re-elected as a member of the Knesset for the list of Mehaney Smol LeYisrael ( Left Camp of Israel or Scheli for short as the acronym of Shalom LeYisrael - Peace for Israel ). In 1981 Avnery did not run for parliamentary elections.

In 1993 Avnery and friends founded the Israeli peace initiative Gush Schalom .

Avnery campaigned for the separation of state and religion and against the Orthodox influence on religious and political life in Israel. He propagated an "Israel without Zionism " in order to free the state from what, in his opinion, were false assumptions of the past, which, in his view, had an aggravating effect on the peace process .

On September 13, 2003, he went to the beleaguered Palestinian presidential seat in Ramallah as a " human shield " . With him, 30 peace activists, including the Knesset members Issam Makhoul and Ahmad Tibi as well as the Meretz activist Latif Dori and the historian Teddy Katz , said they wanted to “thwart Prime Minister Sharon’s intentions ”. They did not rule out the Israeli government wanting to kill Arafat and wanted to prevent it.

In March 2006, in a radio interview with Kol Israel , Avnery compared the attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on the right-wing extremist Israeli politician Rechaw'am Ze'ewi with the targeted killing of militant Palestinians by the Israeli Armed Forces (IDF), but disapproved in the next sentence at the same time all such actions, whether from the Israeli or the Palestinian side. Only the comparison was sent, not the disapproval. On March 20, 2006, Baruch Marzel , chairman of the extreme right-wing splinter party Jewish National Front and its top candidate for the Knesset election that took place a few days later, suggested the "targeted killing" of Avnerys by the IDF on the Israeli television channel Kanal 10, since the Israeli left-wing activists are sometimes Israeli Would not damage interests any less than “foreign enemies of the country”. The German government condemned the call "in the strongest possible way". Rupert Neudeck and numerous others called for solidarity with Avnery. Marzel used the agitation little, his party clearly failed in the Knesset election with 0.79% of the two percent hurdle.

In 2009 Avnery saw parallels between the situation of the people in the Gaza Strip during the blockade of Gaza by the Israeli armed forces and the people of Leningrad during the siege of Leningrad by the Wehrmacht .

In 2010, Avnery was attacked after a peace rally in Tel Aviv where he criticized the Israeli military action against the Free Gaza convoy .

In the controversy surrounding the poem What Must Be Said , Avnery defended the author Günter Grass . It accused its critics of insisting that Israel should not be criticized in Germany and labeled this as anti-Semitic .

He criticized Israel's national state law of 2018 as "semi-fascist". In the last article that Uri Avnery wrote, it says at the end: "We are not temporary residents in this country and we are not ready at any moment to join our Jewish brothers and sisters in other countries of the world. We belong to this country and we will still live here for many future generations. Therefore we have to become peaceful neighbors in the region which I called “the Semitic region” 75 years ago. The new law of nations shows us, through its semi-fascist nature, how urgent this debate is. We have to decide who we are, what we want and where we belong. Otherwise, our state is doomed to be a permanent state of temporaryness. " (see below last article )

Avnery died after a stroke at the age of 94 on August 20, 2018 in Tel Aviv.

Controversy

Critics accused Avnery of justifying Arafat's policies with the action on September 13, 2003 and with many statements in interviews and press releases. When asked about the murder of so-called collaborators in the Palestinian Territories, Avnery replied in 2002:

“Of course there were collaborator murders. Collaborators are traitors. [...] Anyone who surrenders his comrades to an enemy garrison is, according to the rules of the game of military units, especially in the underground, a traitor and is killed. […] I was a terrorist when I was a young man. [...] We also killed our collaborators who handed our comrades over to the British colonial government. "

In 2002 Uri Avnery gave an interview to the new right-wing weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit (JF), in which he accused the Central Council of Jews in Germany that it “only seems to be a propaganda instrument of the Sharon government”. The taz told Avnery "that he was not aware of the JF's political orientation . He is used to giving interviews to all the newspapers. ”Two years later, in the context of an interview by Junge Freiheit with Egon Bahr , the taz pointed out that the JF promoted “ authors outside the democratic spectrum ”with Avnery and other interlocutors who I like to cite them as key witnesses for pluralism of opinion.

Awards

Publications

  • 1945: Terrorism, the childhood disease of the Hebrew Revolution. Brochure, Hebrew.
  • 1947: War or Peace in the Semitic Area. Brochure, Hebrew.
  • 1949: In the fields of the Philistines. War diary, Hebrew, Spanish, Yiddish, bestseller, 12 editions.
  • 1950: the other side of the coin. War Memories, Hebrew (boycotted for describing atrocities). In 2005, both books from 1949 and 1950 were published in a joint German edition for the first time: In the Fields of the Philistines. My memories from the Israeli War of Independence. Diederichs, Munich, ISBN 9783720525749 .
  • 1961: The swastika. Analysis of the rise of National Socialism in Germany. On the occasion of the Eichmann trial, in Hebrew.
  • 1968: Israel without Zionists. History of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Plea for an Arab-Israeli community of states. (English, Hebrew, German, French, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Spanish) German edition: Bertelsmann, Spiegel series, 239 pages.
  • 1969: 1 against 119. Uri Avnery's speeches in the Knesset, edited by Amnon Zichroni, in Hebrew.
  • 1988: My friend, the enemy. Personal testimony about contacts with the PLO, English, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, German edition: Dietz Verlag. Preface by Bruno Kreisky , 416 pages, ISBN 3-8012-0130-9
  • 1991: Lenin no longer lives here , political travelogue about the former Soviet Union, GDR, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, with photos by Rachel Avnery, in Hebrew.
  • 1991: We wear the Nessos robe , Israel after the Gulf War, German, 126 pages, Dietz Verlag, Bonn, ISBN 3-8012-3040-6
  • 1995: Two peoples, two states , German; Conversations with Uri Avnery; Preface by Rudolf Augstein , Palmyra Verlag, Heidelberg, 193 pp., ISBN 3-930378-06-X
  • 1996: The Jerusalem Question , 1996, German; Uri Avnery and Azmi Bischara in conversation with 11 Israeli and Palestinian personalities, Palmyra Verlag, 311 pages, ISBN 3-930378-07-8
  • 2001: Liberation struggle in Palestine , with Faisal Husseini and Helga Baumgarten , Promedia Verlag, 240 p., ISBN 978-3-85371-178-1
  • 2003: A Life for Peace. Plain texts about Israel and Palestine. Paperback, Palmyra Verlag, 298 pages, ISBN 3-930378-50-7
  • 2006: From Gaza to Beirut. Israeli diary , Kitab Verlag, Klagenfurt, Vienna 2006, ISBN 978-3-902005-95-3
  • 2013: Israel in the Arab Spring. Reflections on the current political situation in the Orient. Essays from February 2012 to Translated from English by Ingrid von Heiseler, Kitab, Klagenfurt / Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-902878-19-9
  • 2014: The storm is raging around us: Weekly Articles Part I: 12/29/12 to 12/21/13 Translated from the English by Ingrid von Heiseler. e-book. Available as pdf: https://d-nb.info/1103498819/34
  • 2015: The Watch on the Jordan: Weekly Articles Part II: 12/28/13 to 12/27/14 Translated from the English by Ingrid von Heiseler. e-book. Available as pdf: https://d-nb.info/1103499513/34
  • 2016: Israel and Palestine on the way to a two-state solution? Considerations for a necessary solution to the crisis. Article 2015 . From the English by Ingrid von Heiseler, Klagenfurt / Vienna: Kitab ISBN 978-3-902878-70-0
  • 2017: Yes, it is possible: Article 2016 . From the English by Ingrid von Heiseler. e-book. Available as pdf: https://d-nb.info/1136275924/34
  • 2017: And don't you commit your life. Texts on the person: by and about Uri Avnery . From the English by Ingrid von Heiseler. [Wolfsburg:] Metagrapho. ISBN 978-1-973199-60-1
  • 2018: a new beginning. Article 2017 . From the English by Ingrid von Heiseler. Wolfsburg: Metagrapho ISBN 978-1-976821-93-6
  • 2018: Last articles. January to August 2018. Translated from the English by Ingrid von Heiseler. Wolfsburg: Metagrapho ISBN 978-1-719986-78-6

literature

  • Roland Kaufhold : Uri Avnery: A portrait. In: Uri Avnery (2003): A life for peace. Palmyra Verlag, Heidelberg, pp. 258-287
  • Roland Kaufhold: A Westphalian defiant head. The left-wing Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has turned 90 , in: Jüdische Zeitung 10/2013, p. 9
  • Jewish State or Israel: Plea for a “Semitic Union” (original title: Israel without Zionists , edited by Abraham Melzer , German by Annemarie Kandier and Abraham Melzer) Melzer, Neu-Isenburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-9813189-0-6 .

Movie

  • Personal description : Uri Avnery - An anti-Zionist in Zion , December 2, 1973, ZDF , 30 min., Georg Stefan Troller
  • My friend - the enemy. The story of Uri Avnery. 45 min., Director: Jürgen Hobrecht , Polis Film, 1994, in coproduction with NDR
  • Uri Avnery - Warrior For Peace. Documentary, Israel, 75 min., Director: Yair Lev

Web links

Commons : Uri Avnery  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Awards

swell

  1. ↑ Susanne Knaul: Uri Avnery: "We didn't want a Jewish state". In: Die Presse on September 9, 2013, accessed on March 6, 2018
  2. ^ A contentious friend of peace in the NZZ of August 21, 2018
  3. ↑ Uri Avnery - Biographical Notes ( Memento of September 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ a b Nadav Shragai: Marzel urges IDF to assassinate Uri Avnery Haaretz , March 21, 2006
  5. ↑ Representation of Gush Schalom . Archived from the original on August 29, 2006. Retrieved October 22, 2013.
  6. ↑ Avneri compares Gaza with Leningrad , Wiener Zeitung of January 12, 2009
  7. ↑ Mazal Mualem: Veteran peace activist: Israel trying to get people to overthrow Hamas Gaza Ha'aretz, June 7, 2010
  8. ^ No criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic Süddeutsche Zeitung from April 10, 2012
  9. ↑ Israel: Uri Avnery has died . In: ZEIT ONLINE . ( zeit.de [accessed on August 21, 2018]).
  10. ↑ Uri Avnery is dead. Spiegel online , August 20, 2018, accessed on August 20, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Thomas Schmidinger asks Uri Avnery about his criticism of Israel . In: concrete , issue 6, June 2002, p. 3
  12. ^ Propaganda for Sharon The Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery criticizes the Central Council of Jews. Interview in "Junge Freiheit" , taz , May 30, 2002, accessed on July 29, 2019.
  13. ↑ In Freiheit mit Veronika , In: taz , November 8, 2004, page 6, accessed on July 29, 2019.
  14. ↑ commons: File: Carl-von-Ossietzky-Medaille 2008-12-07.JPG
  15. ↑ Uri Avnery: In the fields of the Philistines. Review notes at Perlentaucher.de , accessed on November 28, 2018
  16. ↑ Previous productions at Polis Film
personal data
SURNAME Avnery, Uri
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ostermann, Helmut (maiden name); אורי אבנרי (Hebrew)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli journalist, writer and peace activist
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Beckum , Germany
DATE OF DEATH 20th August 2018
Place of death Tel Aviv