Tom Segev Opinion Israel's Skeptical Generation Raised by Uri Avnery Exposed His Myths
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The author Shlomo Zemach wrote in his diary a bit
of gossip he said he heard from Miriam Eshkol: When she moved into the
prime minister’s residence with her husband, Levi Eshkol, she discovered
there was a standing order to purchase the latest issue of Haolam Hazeh
for the home’s previous occupant, David Ben-Gurion, every Wednesday.
According to this
story, Ben-Gurion would read the “filthy weekly,” as he called it, from
cover to cover. There’s no telling if this anecdote is true. Uri Avnery,
who died this week, liked it; the story flattered him. He believed it was true.
Perhaps Ben-Gurion
read Avnery’s publication in order to know his enemy: He apparently also
read Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s “The Philosophy of
the Revolution.” In any event, it’s doubtful Ben-Gurion loathed anyone
more than he did Avnery. The hatred was mutual, and extremely personal.
Each saw in the other all that was dangerous and loathsome. They both
went too far. Ben-Gurion allowed the Shin Bet security service to
finance a competing weekly, and agency chief Isser Harel offered to
arrest Avnery and hold him without trial, on grounds that he was a
Soviet agent. Ben-Gurion told Harel he would agree as long as
then-opposition leader Menachem Begin gave his consent. Harel told
Begin, who hastened to inform Avnery.
I’ve wondered more
than once about the veracity of this story as well. But Avnery didn’t
make it up, apparently; Begin himself mentioned it in one of his Knesset
speeches. It doesn’t prove the story is true, but in contradiction to
the myth that Avnery cultivated, Haolam Hazeh was never in real danger.
In fact, it thrived during a good time for the Israeli media, whose
power grew as Ben-Gurion’s diminished.
I
belong to the generation of Israelis who read Haolam Hazeh almost
clandestinely, seeing it a daring act of defiance. The weekly’s scoops
and opinion pieces exposed us to alternative values and planted in us
critical thinking amidst waves of Zionist indoctrination and government
propaganda. The weekly sowed in us skepticism, perhaps the most
important component of freedom and therefore of democracy. Such was its
struggle to abolish military rule of Arab communities in Israel and a
series of other struggles. In that, Avnery was part of the advance guard
of a courageous, combative free press that showed the way to an entire
generation of journalists.
In 1984 Haolam Hazeh
was already far from important, but the coverage of the Bus 300 affair
reflected its influence on the journalists who succeeded it. For that,
Avnery should be remembered, together with the three great founders of
Israeli journalism: Ezriel Carlebach (Maariv), Gershom Schocken
(Haaretz) and Dov Yudkovsky (Yedioth Ahronoth).
I marveled at his
brilliant, precise writing, ever in short, rhythmic sentences. Almost 30
years before everyone started waxing nostalgic over “the new
journalism,” I discovered Avnery as a genius storyteller, forever going
beyond the story of an individual to make a wider social or political
point. When he couldn’t find a suitable word to express what he wanted
to say, he invented a new one. This sometimes happened with facts that
didn’t fit the idea he sought to advance. When he didn’t have a suitable
story he invented that too. It didn’t make him an ideal teacher, but as
Gershom Schocken once told me: “The fact that a story appears in Haolam
Hazeh doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not true.”
Comparing
Haolam Hazeh’s reports with the state documents that have been unsealed
for researchers over the years shows that the weekly’s readers did not
get an accurate picture either in the Kastner affair or in the Lavon
affair. The currently open archives don’t justify Avnery’s terrible
portrayal of Shimon Peres. The story about the abductions of Yemenite
children is also far from being proved.
Haolam Hazeh was
sensationalist and superficial, often unjustly malicious, on the verge
of pornographic, and it did one of the worst things a magazine can do:
It sucked up to its readers. Avnery sold us a sense that we represent
something good and daring by the very fact of buying the magazine. In
exchange, he ostensibly bestowed on us a secular, young, optimistic
Israeliness, self-confident to the point of arrogance. I believe his
popularity stemmed to a large degree also from his patriotism, perhaps
even from the militarism he fostered. He worshiped people like Ariel
Sharon and Rehavam Zeevi, seeing in them an ideal Israeliness. In the
Six Day War he called for conquering the Golan Heights and as a Knesset
member he voted for annexing Arab Jerusalem.
He never told us he
was grooming us to vote for a party he would found. But his journalistic
work was aimed almost from the start at a greater goal: Avnery dreamed
of becoming a national leader and creating history. He failed, mainly
because he was wrong, presumably. His idea of the “Semitic region” was
baseless. Avnery was one of the first to advocate for the two-state
solution, but the idea is far from realistic and Avnery remained one of
the last to still believe in it. Nor did he leave a significant mark in
the Knesset.
I
tend to assume that to a large extent I have him to thank for the
ability to apply skepticism even in my appraisal of him and my regret
that his voice of peace has been silenced. Perhaps support for a thesis
to explain Haolam Hazeh’s decline can also be found here: The skeptical
generation that Avnery raised eventually exposed his myths as well,
although they were no less decisive than those cultivated by Ben-Gurion,
and perhaps precisely because of that.
Tom Segev
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