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.