Uri Avnery Quotes

Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.

On the eve of war the Jews were far better prepared, militarily and politically, than the Arabs, in Palestine or beyond. Their leaders had a high level of confidence that they would prevail if it came to a fight, as they assumed it would.13 The Haganah had a centralized command. It could field 35,000 men, including the 2,500-strong Palmah. The ‘dissidents’ of the Irgun and Stern Gang accounted for a few thousand more, in total making up an extraordinarily large percentage of the adult Jewish population. Approximately 27,000 Jews had enlisted with British forces during the war. In addition, the institutions of the Yishuv exercised national discipline. ‘The Jewish Agency … is really a state within a state with its own budget, secret cabinet, army, and above all, intelligence service’, observed Richard Crossman, the British Labour MP who had visited Palestine as a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. ‘It is the most efficient, dynamic, toughest organisation I have ever seen.’14 If it came to war, he predicted, the Haganah would trounce the Arabs. Crossman’s was an astute assessment (and at odds with the view of the British military).15 Still, his confidence was not widely shared. ‘We knew that 635,000 Jews were facing hundreds of millions of Arabs: “the few against the many”’, Uri Avnery, a young German-born Jew, wrote shortly afterwards. ‘We knew: if we surrender, we die.’16 Volunteering was the norm among Jewish youth: Tikva Honig-Parnass, a seventeen-year-old Hebrew University student, enlisted in the Haganah in November 1947. ‘It was well-known on campus who was a member’, she recalled.

Uri Avneri, the veteran journalist and former member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), then suggested that what Pardo meant was that the rift is between European Ashkenazi Jews and Oriental Mizrahi Jews. He wrote: What makes this rift so potentially dangerous, and explains Pardo’s dire warning, is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Orientals are ‘rightist’, nationalist and at least mildly religious, while the majority of the Ashkenazim are ‘leftist’, more peace-oriented and secular. Since the Ashkenazim are also in general socially and economically better situated than the Orientals, the rift is profound… A lot of Israelis have begun to talk of ‘two Jewish societies’ in Israel, some even talk about ‘two Jewish peoples’ within the Israeli Jewish nation. What holds them together? The conflict, of course. The occupation. The perpetual state of war… It is not that the Israeli–Arab conflict has been forced on Israel. Rather, it’s the other way around: Israel keeps up the conflict, because it needs the conflict for its very existence.

Uri Avneri, the veteran journalist and former member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), then suggested that what Pardo meant was that the rift is between European Ashkenazi Jews and Oriental Mizrahi Jews. He wrote: """ What makes this rift so potentially dangerous, and explains Pardo’s dire warning, is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Orientals are ‘rightist’, nationalist and at least mildly religious, while the majority of the Ashkenazim are ‘leftist’, more peace-oriented and secular. Since the Ashkenazim are also in general socially and economically better situated than the Orientals, the rift is profound… A lot of Israelis have begun to talk of ‘two Jewish societies’ in Israel, some even talk about ‘two Jewish peoples’ within the Israeli Jewish nation. What holds them together? The conflict, of course. The occupation. The perpetual state of war… It is not that the Israeli–Arab conflict has been forced on Israel. Rather, it’s the other way around: Israel keeps up the conflict, because it needs the conflict for its very existence.