43 Facts About Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery was a German-born Israeli writer, journalist, politician, and activist, who founded the Gush Shalom peace movement.

Uri Avnery was the owner and editor of the news magazine HaOlam HaZeh from 1950 until its closure in 1993.

Uri Avnery became known for crossing the lines during the Siege of Beirut to meet Yasser Arafat on 3 July 1982, the first time the Palestinian leader met with an Israeli.

Uri Avnery was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2001 and the Carl von Ossietzky Medal in 2008.

Uri Avnery was born in Beckum, near Munster in Westphalia, as Helmut Ostermann, the youngest of four children, to a well-established German Jewish family, his father being a private banker in the town.

Uri Avnery's grandfather, Josef Ostermann, was a teacher in Beckum's small Jewish community.

Uri Avnery grew up in Hanover, where his father later worked as a court-appointed receiver.

Uri Avnery counted among his companions Rudolf Augstein, the future proprietor of Der Spiegel.

Uri Avnery attended school in Nahalal and then in Tel Aviv, leaving after 7th grade, at age 14, in order to help his parents.

Uri Avnery started work as a clerk for a lawyer, a job he held for about five years.

Uri Avnery joined the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group, in 1938, in reaction to the execution of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by the British authorities.

However, unlike his comrade-in-arms Yitzhak Shamir who joined up at roughly the same time, Uri Avnery was judged too young to engage directly in actions such as killing Jews suspected of being informers for the British authorities, and bombing Arab markets.

Uri Avnery changed his surname to Avnery, a Hebraic rendering of Werner, to honour the memory of his only brother, who died serving in the British Army in Gondar on the East African front in 1941.

When Uri Avnery was 16 years old, the Second World War broke out; it sparked in him a lifelong interest in military strategy, which he started studying in order to better follow events at the time.

Uri Avnery 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.

Uri Avnery abandoned Zionism at an early age, while remaining a nationalist, which he regarded as a natural feeling for desiring to belong to a collectivity, legitimate for Jews as it was for Arabs.

In 1947 Uri Avnery founded his own small group, Eretz Yisrael HaTze'ira, which published the journal Ma'avak.

Uri Avnery wrote dispatches from the front line which were published in Haaretz and later as a book, In the Fields of Philistia.

Uri Avnery's experiences impressed him with the understanding that there was such a thing as the Palestinian people.

Uri Avnery was wounded twice, the second time, toward the end of the war, seriously; he spent the last months of his army service convalescing and was discharged in the summer of 1949.

Uri Avnery introduced a punchy, aggressive style of newspaper writing into Israeli journalism and, according to Greer Fay, virtually every journalist who trained under him moved on to become a star elsewhere.

In June 1957 Uri Avnery suggested that Israel aid Palestinians in overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan ; Israel would then form a federation with the new Palestinian Jordanian state.

The move was inspired by the passage in 1965 of a Law against Defamation in Israel, which Uri Avnery took personally as a legislative measure designed to muzzle his newspaper's reportage.

Uri Avnery was later involved in the Progressive List for Peace.

Uri Avnery wrote a book of his early period in parliament, entitled 1 against 119: Uri Avnery in the Knesset,.

Shortly after the group's founding, Uri Avnery was assaulted and stabbed several times.

Uri Avnery was tracked by an Israeli intelligence team which intended to kill Arafat, even if it meant killing Avnery at the same time once the latter had inadvertently led them to Arafat's hide-out.

Uri Avnery's visit with Arafat was among the reasons he became estranged from his mother, Hilda Ostermann, who disinherited him.

Uri Avnery did not learn Hebrew and knew nothing of politics other than what she gleaned from a German-language nationalist newsletter.

Uri Avnery later turned to left-wing peace activism and founded the Gush Shalom movement in 1993, and argued that every Israeli settlement was a "landmine on the road to peace".

Uri Avnery was a secularist and strongly opposed to the Orthodox influence in religious and political life.

Uri Avnery himself had once, in 1993, addressed in Gaza an audience of 500 bearded sheikhs, who listened as he spoke to them in Hebrew, and, applauding him, invited him to lunch.

Uri Avnery was a contributor to the news and opinion sites such as for CounterPunch.

Uri Avnery wrote: "I dissociate myself from the [Israeli] army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief".

On 4 August 2018, Uri Avnery suffered a stroke and was hospitalized in a critical condition in Tel Aviv.

Uri Avnery died at Ichilov Hospital on 20 August 2018 at the age of 94, less than a month short of his 95th birthday.

Uri Avnery's life with his Berlin-born companion Rachel lasted 58 years, five of them before they married.

Uri Avnery took care of him, and they lived together for 5 years; they were both averse to religion and, in Israel, civil marriages are not permitted, so they could not get married in a way they could accept.

Uri Avnery said her outstanding trait was empathy, something he illustrated by an anecdote of watching a film concerning an old woman in the Slovak Republic who does not understand a deportation order, and neighbours assist her in going to the assembly point for departure to the death camps.

Uri Avnery stood up, weeping, and came over and kissed her on the brow.

Uri Avnery earned the respect and friendship of Raed Salah during tent protests against Yitzhak Rabin's deportation of 415 Palestinians to Lebanon in December 1992.

Uri Avnery was a primary school teacher for 28 years.

Uri Avnery died in May 2011 of the long-term debilitating effects of a Hepatitis C infection contracted some two decades earlier.