Bild på författaren.

Uri Avnery (1923–2018)

Författare till 1948: A Soldier's Tale - The Bloody Road to Jerusalem

19 verk 121 medlemmar 5 recensioner

Om författaren

Uri Avnery was born Helmut Ostermann in Beckum, Germany on September 10, 1923. With the rise of Nazism, he immigrated to British-mandate Palestine with his family in 1933. He became a journalist, politician, and peace activist who exposed national scandals and conferred with Yasir Arafat. In the visa mer early 1950s, Avnery and Shalom Cohen bought the weekly newsmagazine HaOlam Hazeh and turned it into an independent publication at a time when party newspapers were the norm. Avnery sold the publication in 1989. He was elected to the Knesset in 1965 and served for 10 years. He wrote several books including In the Fields of Philistia 1948: A Battle Log and Optimistic. He wrote regular opinion pieces for the liberal newspaper Haaretz up until he was hospitalized after suffering a stroke. His last column was published on August 7, 2018. He died on August 20, 2018 at the age of 94. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre

Inkluderar namnen: Uri Avnery, אורי אבנרי

Särskiljningsinformation:

(yid) VIAF:109031278

(ger) VIAF:54175595 (viafIncluded)

(mao) VIAF:PND:118835033

Verk av Uri Avnery

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Vedertaget namn
Avnery, Uri
Andra namn
Ostermann, Helmut
Födelsedag
1923-09-10
Avled
2018-08-20
Kön
male
Nationalitet
Germany (birth)
Israel
Födelseort
Beckum, Westfalen, Deutschland
Dödsort
Tel Aviv, Israel
Bostadsorter
Tel Aviv, Israel
Yrken
Member of Knesset
journalist
Organisationer
Gush Shalom peace movement
Priser och utmärkelser
Sokolov Award (2004)
Särskiljningsnotis
VIAF:54175595 (viafIncluded)

Medlemmar

Recensioner

"War is a sandwich - a thin slice of danger between two thick slices of boredom."

Uri Avneri is now 90 years old. He has lived a very interesting and full life, and is well known in Israel as a leftist, a 'peacenik' or an 'agitator', or more cruelly among those more bigoted circles (of which there's no shortage in Israel) as an 'Arab lover'. To some he is a beacon of rational optimism and wisdom, a passionate proponent of a secular Middle East consisting of nations working together towards a prosperous and peaceful future, where taxpayers' money is spent on improving the lives of its citizens, rather than on anachronistic tanks and unaffordable jet fighters; while to others he is at best a naive romantic, a perpetual thorn in the backside of those sensible and wiser types charged with the heavy responsibility of keeping the State of Israel safe from harm, and its people free from the risk of terror.

He has lived a truly remarkable life. Born in Weimar Republic Germany, his family left in late '33, when he was ten, for a new life in Palestine. As a young man Avneri witnessed the 1948 re-birth of Israel from the most intimate observation post - he served in a front-line infantry unit which saw the awful and bloody nitty-gritty of battle in some of the most significant and decisive engagements of that strange war. A war between Jew and Arab which began in earnest in late 1947 (after the UN voted for partition into two states) while the occupying British mandate forces were in chaotic withdrawal. An undeclared civil war between Jewish and Arab paramilitary undergrounds ensued while the British inconsistently feigned neutrality. By May '48 the British withdrawal was complete and they exited clumsily stage-left into the Mediterranean with the setting sun of their empire. David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel's independence and the armies of several surrounding Arab states joined the ad-hoc forces of their Palestinian cousins in taking the fight to Israel.

Avneri's engrossing book is a recent publication which joins together in one volume for the first time the two separate titles which were published in the immediate aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. The first book - "In the Fields of the Philistines" (ITFOTP) is a compendium of the regular column which Avneri dispatched from the front to the evening edition of 'Ha'aretz' newspaper. They are exhillirating, to the point, and obviously very dramatic. I was reminded at times of the writing of Isaac Babel in "Red Cavalry" such is the immediacy and adrenalin-fizzed freshness of his dispatches. He has inserted commentary which links the chapters, explaining the context and those developments away from the front which the simple squaddie is typically oblivious to.

Avneri was in the 'Burma Road' convoys that kept the lifeline to the besieged Jerusalem open (see Amos Oz's remarkable "Tale of Love and Darkness" for a young boy's perspective to that particular trauma of this war between neighbours). He was sent in futile wave after futile wave against the Arab Legion stronghold at Latrun's old Ottoman/British police fortress, while the Egyptian forces squeezed them from the flanks.

Later -
"...While we are marching through the dunes toward the south, the rumble of our artillery meets our ears. One shell after another explodes in the Egyptian camp. Our hearts leap. That is our revenge for Latrun..."

Perhaps most horrifically of all, he was one of the courageous few that withheld the brutal Egyptian assault against the paper-thin defences at Kibbutz Negba on the southern front. At times it was literally a few dozen fighters with rifles, the odd machine-gun, and a jeep or two, which kept the might of the British equipped tank regiments and mechanised infantry of the Egyptian Army from breaking through to an unchecked onslaught on Tel Aviv.

"...The defenders of Negba - the men who lived in stifling bunkers and threw back assault after assault of tanks and infantry, who were bombarded twenty-four hours a day by artillery and aircraft, soldiers and 'civilians'...behind the cover of destroyed houses and burning barracks..."

Along with his celebrated unit 'Samson's Foxes', he was at every major battle of the central and southern fronts until he was made a casualty late in '48 by a serious shrapnel injury to his stomach after a year of fighting. Despite the fact that it pulls no punches, and is often quite graphic in the description of the harshest of battlefield conditions, as well as the blunt reportage from the seemingly disconnected home front and the smart-pressed uniforms of those who 'organise' themselves 'key roles' at HQ in the rear, ITFOTP was an instant success and bestseller with the jubilant post-war Israeli public.

Avneri was asked to publish more writing. But as he explains in the modern introduction, the first book was written in the heat of the battlefront, often from the back of a jeep, or in the ruin of an abandoned Arab village - brief snapshots of a young man exhilarated to be alive and to be surviving... The second book - "The Other Side of the Coin" (TOSOTC) - was written in very different circumstances. Avneri tells how he wrote it in a burst of energy over a two or three week period as he convalesced towards the war's end. It is straight form the heart, filled with passion, honesty of feeling, and a lot of raw emotion from the perspective of one who has lived through the horrors of war, and been right to the edge of losing his life, and witnessing many others who did. Most of the local publishers wouldn't touch it. When it was eventually published (by a different publisher to the first book), it was a big flop. The reviews were bad and the public turned on him. The Israelis of the early 1950s weren't ready to read first-hand impressions of the horrors of war, or of any compassion for the enemy, or about the terrible and brazen waste of life.

Some accused Avneri of betraying his nation, and of propagating Arab myths of Jewish violence. TOSOTC is indeed full of some very jarring experiences as Avneri weaves a series of flashback episodes into his convalescence at the casualty ward. For what seems an almost intolerable length of time, he must share his room with an unnamed dying soldier who is refused the soothing water he craves by the nurses with their orders. Weaved through the 140-odd pages of TOSOTC this poor soul's suffering punctuates Avneri's escapes to the recent past: memories from the battlefield, home leave, nostalgia for lost comrades, and even his teenage pre-WWII years in the right-wing nationalist underground 'Irgun' movement. It feels like he's in that stifling room for weeks and weeks and weeks. Only at the book's end is there a revelation that confirms for the reader that this has all happened in the space of a mere eight days.

The episodes that Avneri recalls are very memorable, and written with a tenderness that almost jars with the often grisly subject matter, but somehow doesn't. One episode tells how the unit's radio operator - an immigrant from Egypt - reaches out to a nearby enemy radioman he's listening in on. Their 'conversation' consists mainly of a series of mutual cursing and exchanged insults of the most depraved nature. This fast becomes a daily 10 O'clock morning ritual for the two signallers:

"...His highest ambition is to formulate the ultimate, final curse. The one that will shake Ibrahim and shock him so much that he won't be able to find an answer and will have to admit defeat. But Ibrahim also has talent - and time. Every morning he has a newly prepared list..."

"...And amid all these insults Jamus and Ibrahim are telling each other about their lives. If they ever happened to meet, they would surely recognize each other."

After five days Jamus has a day's leave. Under a smokescreen of filthy barbs Ibrahim makes a personal request: His sister in Jaffa.

"He hasn't heard anything from her since the war started... When he Jamus returns the next day, his face is grim."

Avneri asks Jamus what he learnt

" - 'I went everywhere. There are new immigrants living in the house. The Arabs can remember seeing her in the town after Jaffa was already taken. They think she is dead.'"

Jamus can't face another exchange with Ibrahim - whose unit is now surrounded - despite the Egyptian's calls and hope for news of his sister.

"On the third day Ibrahim's voice sounds like a distant echo. The batteries of his radio are nearly dead. For a few moments we hear his weakening calls, until they get mixed up with the atmospherics and fade away beneath them. There are no spare batteries. The invisible bridge between the fronts has collapsed..."

In the years following the war Uri Avneri pursued a career of campaigning journalism, fighting on with his pen and typewriter against the bigotry of ultra-nationalism which still permeates the region. He would go on to enter the Knesset as an opposition MP in a tiny leftist party. By the late 1970s, as the era of Menachem Begin and the new Likud government's expansion of the settlement project within the occupied territories entered full swing, he was one of the early spokesmen of the Peace block. In 1982, during Israel's seige of Beirut at the height of the war in Lebanon, he even manages to become the first Israeli to meet with Yasser Arafat. To this day he is a vocal opponent of Israeli oppression of her Palestinian neighbours, and still campaigns for peace and reconciliation.

I've deducted half a star for the lack of adequate maps in this edition. Why do publishers doubt the significance of the reader comprehending fully the landscape and distances concerned in a memoir such as this? Especially a military memoir that concerns a relatively small area geographically, though one where the frontlines are constantly shifting and very tightly inter-woven. Shame, as it spoils what is otherwise an extremely valuable and important, as well as very moving account from a first-hand witness to one of the 20th century's defining events.

Overall this is a very powerful and important piece of writing. The imagery and sense of feeling that Avneri gets down on paper will remain vivid in my mind for a very long time.
… (mer)
½
9 rösta
Flaggad
Polaris- | Nov 2, 2013 |
השקפתו של אבנרי על הסכסוך
 
Flaggad
amoskovacs | Feb 17, 2013 |
ספר חשוב שהשפיע רבות על תפישת העולם שלי
 
Flaggad
amoskovacs | Dec 1, 2012 |
L'autore, noto uomo politico israeliano, teorizzava un'audace soluzione politica alla crisi del Medio Oriente, in contrasto con l'ala conservatrice del parlamento di Israele.
 
Flaggad
BiblioLorenzoLodi | 1 annan recension | Jun 14, 2012 |

Listor

Statistik

Verk
19
Medlemmar
121
Popularitet
#164,307
Betyg
½ 3.6
Recensioner
5
ISBN
23
Språk
4

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