What brings out Avnery's passion is politics, for which his appetite appears unlimited, and history, on which he craves to leave a mark. Avnery still writes a weekly column that is translated into several languages and distributed by e-mail to a potentially wider audience than Haolam Hazeh ever reached. Strewn with historical analogies and infused with polemical verve, the columns are witty, abrasive and a marvel for the sheer mental acuity they display. But few young Israelis, and even fewer people in positions of authority, read them. Gush Shalom, the organization Avnery founded in 1993, operates on a shoestring, with nothing approaching a mass following, especially lately. In June it rallied supporters for a protest on the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation. A mere 5,000 people showed up.

It's hardly the first time Avnery feared his message might be falling on deaf ears. Shortly after the 1967 war, when Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Avnery introduced a resolution in the Knesset calling for a Palestinian state to be created in the territories. One other person in the 120-member Knesset voted for it, which, for Avnery, qualified as a minor success (a book of his speeches was subsequently published under the title 1 Against 119). At the time, Avnery's identity, like Israeli politics generally, was not centrally defined by the Palestinian conflict, nor for that matter did he consider himself a leftist. Adam Keller, a Gush Shalom activist who met him in 1969, says that back then Avnery "very much objected to being called left wing. He said the whole left-right spectrum was part of the old establishment--we want to uproot the establishment and create something new. He also tried very hard to avoid being identified only with the Palestinian issue."

As the years wore on, however, and Israel's occupation grew more entrenched, Avnery's focus narrowed. Meanwhile, the establishment was toppled, not by Avnery but by right-wing supporters of a Greater Israel, the kind of people who adore the current front-runner in polls forecasting who will become the next prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a man almost universally reviled on the left.

Why, then, the unflagging optimism? "First of all, I'm an optimist by birth," Avnery said as we sat down in his living room. "I'm a genetic optimist--my father was an optimist, my grandfather was an optimist." Avnery added that age might lend him a sense of perspective others lack. "Look, when I and a small group of people put forward the idea of a two-state solution immediately after the war of 1948, it would have been a wild exaggeration to say there were 100 people who advocated this. Today, it is the worldwide consensus.

"When you look at the surface, the situation is bad," he went on, "but if you look a little bit deeper, in the minds of people, we've won the battle."

To those who've tracked the news from Israel lately, Avnery's self-assurance on this score might seem mildly delusional. Yet surveys indicate that roughly two-thirds of Israelis, and a comparable percentage of Palestinians, still support a two-state settlement of the conflict. Of course, this hardly means it will happen. Galia Golan, a political scientist and longtime veteran of Peace Now, believes that in Israel, "what's happened is not that people moved to the right but that they lost hope. People just aren't interested because they don't believe anything can happen. The government in Israel is weak. The Palestinians, of course, are split. Any way you look at it, it leaves you in a dead end." Hanging on the wall behind Golan's desk in Herzliya, where she teaches, is a poster of a Tel Aviv peace rally in 1995, at the height of the Oslo period. The crowd was estimated at a quarter-million. Golan was there and remembers the event well: it was the rally at which Yitzhak Rabin spoke for the last time, before a Jewish settler named Yigal Amir assassinated him to prevent the possibility of a withdrawal from the territories.

Avnery, who supported the Oslo agreement, believes it could have succeeded had Rabin lived. Some would argue that this gives too much weight to one person, a view of history common among Avnery's generation, which grew up in the shadow of Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Mao. "For Uri, politics is made first by individuals," said Warschawski. "What those of us on the left call class struggle, he is absolutely oblivious to."

Today, the debate about Oslo is almost moot: the question preoccupying Israeli peace advocates is not whether the agreement could have worked but what to do in light of the Hamas takeover of Gaza. The Israeli government is trying desperately to prop up Fatah in the West Bank. Avnery believes the strategy is bound to fail and that the government will eventually have to reach out to Hamas, something he's already done himself, meeting in person with several members of the party whom Israel has since imprisoned.

Many Israelis regard such activity as borderline traitorous. Avnery is familiar with the charge. In the 1970s, he helped launch the Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which began arranging secret meetings with the PLO, then considered beyond the pale. The venture contained a certain irony, since in the 1960s Avnery himself had dismissed the members of Fatah as "terrorists." A decade later he was dashing off letters to Arafat. After their dramatic 1982 encounter in Beirut, a PLO spokesman announced that the meeting had occurred. As he drove home to Israel, Avnery heard on the radio no fewer than four Israeli ministers denounce him for treason. All four, he says, later met with Arafat themselves.

History, Avnery believes, will likely repeat itself. It's a controversial view--even on the left, there are people who doubt a compromise can be reached with Hamas, which cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion approvingly in its founding charter and holds all of Palestine to be a sacred Islamic trust. Many Palestinian leaders have written off working with Hamas as well. Avnery, a staunch secularist, clearly finds Hamas's worldview off-putting but notes that some of its leaders have indicated willingness to stop fighting Israel if it withdraws to the 1967 lines. He also believes it is not Israel's job to choose the Palestinian representatives, particularly after it ruthlessly undermined Fatah when Arafat was alive.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.