Uri Avnery, the activist who died on Monday aged 94, was one of the first Israelis to call for a two-state solution — and, in a bid to make it happen, became one of the first Israelis to meet Yasser Arafat.
He liked to be flippant. “I said if he would marry an Israeli girl it would solve the whole problem,” he commented after his Beirut meeting with Arafat, which took place in the thick of the First Lebanon War.
But his aim in meeting Arafat and other Palestinian leaders was very earnest — he was convinced it could bring peace.
His big idea became mainstream, but he positioned himself as a figure on the fringes.
The German-born journalist, whose family fled to British Mandate Palestine in 1933, left one of his first jobs at the left-wing Haaretz in 1950 to buy the HaOlam HaZeh magazine and to turn it in to a subversive anti-establishment newspaper.
His decade as a Knesset member was with a small leftist party. And the activist organisation he set up in 1993, Gush Shalom, is far from the Israeli mainstream, with a record of promoting anti-settlement boycotts and its support for the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Mr Avnery did not mellow with age and in one of his last columns declared Israel’s new Nation-State Law to be “semi-fascist.”
In his view, America’s new peace plan is “just another prescription for eternal war.” Ahed Tamimi, the teenager who recently served prison time in Israel for four assaults against soldiers, is “the Palestinian Jean d’Arc.”
And he was full of criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
“My heart is with the people of Gaza,” he wrote in June, after dozens of Palestinians were killed on the border. “I desire to ask their forgiveness, in my name and in the name of Israel, my country.”
Mr Avnery challenged people on the Israeli left who view Zionist history fondly and blame most of today’s problems on post-1967 policies. His own brief service in the Irgun pre-state military meant that he “used to be a terrorist.”
And he was quoted four years ago saying: “Zionism was a movement which could only realise its goals by expelling the Arabs living in the country. That is what it did and is still doing.” Zionism, he ventured, was a movement that set up Israel and now that the country exists needed to be disposed of, just as scaffolding is dismantled once a building is completed.
His positions won him applause from some but enraged many Israelis, especially as he crossed what many consider red lines.
He insisted, for example, that there is “one thing Hezbollah definitely is not: it is not a terrorist organisation.”
Mr Avnery started meeting PLO leaders in the 1970s, but first called for a two-state solution more than two decades earlier.
“Right after the 1948 war, in early 1949, a tiny group of young people in the country, including a Muslim Arab, a Druze Arab and myself devised a plan for the solution: the so-called two-state solution,” he recalled.
“We found no takers. Everybody was against it: the government of Israel, the Arab states, the USA, the Soviet Union until 1969, Europe, the Muslim world.”
He reflected that he witnessed a “miracle” in the sense that today there is “almost a world consensus” in favour of the two-state solution — though he died frustrated that it has not been fulfilled.
