Interview - Uri Avnery interviewed by Tikkun

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Uri Avnery's opinions are not to be taken lightly. The most outspoken leader of Israel's peace movement, Avnery has in his own life mirrored the country he helped establish. Born in Germany in 1923, Avnery began his political life as a member of the Irgun, then served as an IDF commando in the 1948 war. For forty years the editor and publisher of Israel's now defunct newsweekly, Ha Olam Hazeh, Avnery served three terms in Israel's Knesset. With his wife Rachel, in 1993 he helped found Gush Shalom, one of Israel's most influential peace organizations. We spoke to Avnery two weeks before the withdrawal had formally begun.

TIKKUN: Media accounts of the drama of withdrawal from Gaza make it seem as though we now have a struggle going on between the forces of good, represented by Sharon, and the forces of evil, represented by the settlers.

Uri Avnery: The present situation is the culmination of a process that started immediately after the Six Day War, when Israel had a historic choice between making peace immediately and trying to annex the land that we had conquered. I am not speaking from hindsight, because even during the war, after we had conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip, I sent an open letter to then–Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and asked him to immediately establish a Palestinian state in all of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and make peace with the Palestinian people. Eshkol was typical of activists in the Zionist establishment, which, from the very beginning of Zionism, has been focused on providing space for Jewish refugees from around the world by getting new land on which to build settlements. So even when that land was no longer needed for refugees, one might say that from the very beginning, it's been part of the genetic code of the Zionist movement to create new settlements on more land of Arab Israel.



I don't want to sound mystical, but I believe that there is such a thing as a genetic code of historic movements, by which I mean the basic ideas that created the movement get embedded in them, and it is very difficult to change, even when circumstances have changed. Israel Zangwill's statement that Zionists were trying to put together "A land without people for a people without land," symbolized the Zionist movement and shaped the consciousness of the early Zionists. And I think this is a basic Zionist conviction. Zionism probably would not have produced its incredible achievements without this impetus, which has been to gain more land, settle more land, and enlarge the Jewish homeland until it reaches at least the Jordan River. It is this impetus that underlies all that we have done in the last hundred years.

TIKKUN: At its inception, was the original desire to return to one's ancient homeland already a distortion, or was it a legitimate aspiration?

UA: I think the Jewish people always desired to have its entire homeland back, in the form it imagined it had taken in the ancient world. But Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century as a national movement and shaped itself pragmatically in the framework of existing possibilities, given the realities of global politics. Until 1948, the desire to get more land and put more settlements on the land was restricted by the possibilities of the time. So in pre-1948 Palestine, the Zionist movement acquired land by buying it. Therefore, when the state of Israel came into being in 1948, the Jewish community, the Yishuv, had only 4 percent of the land of what was then British Mandate Palestine.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=8712