Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery was born in 1923 in Beckum

Avnery was born Helmut Ostermann in Beckum, Germany, the youngest of 4 children in a German Jewish family. His father was a banker, and he grew up in Hanover. The family moved to Mandatory Palestine in November 1933.

He went to school in Nahalal and Tel Aviv but left at 14 to help his family and began working as a law clerk. As a teenager he joined the Irgun, and he later left it over its methods. His brother Werner was killed in World War II, and he took the name Avnery in his memory.

In the 1948 war he fought in the Givati Brigade and the Samson's Foxes unit and was wounded twice. His front line reports were published as a book, In the Fields of Philistia.

In 1950 he bought the weekly HaOlam HaZeh and edited it as an anti-establishment magazine until 1993. In 1965 he founded a party named after the magazine and entered the Knesset, and he served again from 1979 to 1981 for Sheli.

He met Yasser Arafat in Beirut on 3 July 1982, the first time the Palestinian leader met an Israeli. In 1993 he founded Gush Shalom, and in 2001 he received the Right Livelihood Award. He died on 20 August 2018.