The welfare of the Palestinians was not among Avnery's foremost concerns as a youth, to say the least. In 1938, at 14, he cut his teeth in the world of politics by joining the Irgun, the right-wing Jewish paramilitary group that sought to establish the Jewish state by planting bombs in crowded Arab markets and attacking the British colonial regime. The Irgun saw itself as the armed wing of a liberation movement; the British (and its Palestinian enemies) saw it as a terrorist organization. "I have never forgotten this lesson," Avnery would write decades later. "A terrorist is a freedom fighter in his own eyes; a freedom fighter is a terrorist in the eyes of his enemy." Mainstream Jewish leaders likewise viewed the Irgun with suspicion, which may be precisely what attracted Avnery to the group--here was his first chance to defy the Zionist establishment, an impulse some attribute to his background. "The true Israelis were the pioneers who came to Palestine from the Ukraine, Poland, Russia," said Michel Warschawski, a longtime acquaintance of Avnery's and a member of the radical Trotskyist group Matzpen. "Uri was too German, too educated, too civilized. And I would say all his life he's had almost a schizophrenia between, on the one hand, being very proud of his German characteristics and, on the other, feeling he is not a real sabra."

The experience of taking part in a nationalist struggle against an imperial power would eventually lead Avnery to view Palestinian rebels as a mirror image of his younger self. Meanwhile, proud Jewish patriot that he was, Avnery served in a commando unit during the 1948 war, an experience he chronicled in a book, In the Fields of the Philistines, that became a surprise bestseller, earning its author his first taste of fame. The book was embraced by readers yearning for tales of glory after a brutal war, but Avnery, who was seriously wounded in the fighting, intended it as a cautionary tale about the sacrifices endured by ordinary soldiers, with whom he strongly identified. When he realized this was not how it was received, he penned a sequel describing a less heroic side of the war, including atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians, which fared less well--the Israeli government blocked its publication. It was his first taste of infamy.

Shortly thereafter, Avnery and some friends purchased a moribund family magazine and launched Haolam Hazeh, which did little to endear him to those who might have begun to question his loyalty. A cross between I.F. Stone's Weekly and Paris Match, the magazine featured an entertaining and incendiary mix of hard-hitting exposés, radical commentary, salacious gossip items and (gracing the back cover) photos of half-naked women, a format Avnery shrewdly recognized would boost circulation. Since most Israeli newspapers of that time functioned as servile (and largely colorless) mouthpieces for the various political parties they represented, Haolam Hazeh amounted to the journalistic equivalent of a Molotov cocktail hurled at the Israeli elite and was treated as such. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion referred to it derisively as that "certain paper." Ministers feared appearing in its pages, not least because the magazine's popularity gave its publisher an influential platform for a bracingly unorthodox political agenda. Haolam Hazeh attacked the Israeli religious establishment. It called for an end to martial law in Arab villages inside Israel (which wasn't lifted until 1966). It introduced readers to a phrase that had never before appeared in an Israeli paper: "the Palestinian people." And it published in-depth accounts of incidents such as the 1953 massacre in Qibya, a village in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, where sixty-nine civilians were killed in a brutal retaliatory raid carried out by Unit 101, whose commander was a young reserve major named Ariel Sharon. It was after this that Avnery was beaten up by goons.

It is hard to appreciate how "unbelievably subversive" all this was in the Israel of the 1950s and '60s, says Tom Segev, who remembers the thrill of stealing off to a kiosk as a teenager to buy Haolam Hazeh. Though it indulged in its share of sensationalism, the paper also pioneered a new style of Israeli journalism--bold headlines, short punchy sentences--and glamorized a new culture centered on the shops and cafes sprouting up in Tel Aviv, where Avnery made his home and where, today, his vision has clearly triumphed. The sushi bars, the discos, the trendy neighborhoods lined with bistros, tattoo parlors and art galleries: all this would have shocked Israel's austere, kibbutz-reared socialist founders. Avnery "celebrated it before it existed," says Segev. "He invented it." With his long hair, dramatic beard and maverick opinions, he also became a minor celebrity: the freewheeling iconoclast who rode around town in a gleaming Mustang convertible and relished stirring up controversy.

These days, Avnery is more of a celebrity in Europe--where he has collected a shelf full of humanitarian prizes over the past decade, including the 2001 Right Livelihood Award (often dubbed the alternative Nobel Peace Prize)--than in his own country, where he has grown increasingly isolated. This is to some extent a product of personality. Though he has often longed to spearhead a movement, Avnery is by nature a loner, a "one-man show," as one activist put it, whom even his admirers describe as cold. When I visited him during the summer at his home in Tel Aviv, a tidy apartment decorated with Persian rugs, paintings, fresh flowers and, in one corner, a bust of Avnery himself, he offered me a glass of water and a stiff handshake. His blue eyes radiated seriousness but little trace of warmth. There was no sign of his wife, Rachel, a photographer who has been at his side for more than fifty years. Perhaps I should have expected as much: in a 2002 documentary about Avnery by filmmaker Yair Lev, Rachel let slip that Uri has never told her that he loves her.

"I don't like saying silly things," he explained stonily, as she shot him a wounded glare. He then turned on a handheld radio to tune out the conversation.

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