Uri Avnery's Columns
"Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for 50 generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times 'by the sword' to get them to abandon their faith." Column by Uri Avnery.
Column by Uri Avnery.
"At the head of the critics are marching--surprise, surprise--the media. The entire horde of interviewers and commentators, correspondents and presstitutes, who (with very few exceptions) enthused about the war, who deceived, misled, falsified, ignored, duped and lied for the fatherland, who stifled all criticism and branded as traitors all who opposed the war--they are now running ahead of the lynch mob." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Every day on their TV screens tens of millions of Arabs and hundred of millions of Muslims see the atrocious pictures of crushed babies, the sights of the horrible destruction. These are deeply imprinted in the consciousness of the masses and will leave behind them an accumulation of anger and hatred that is far more dangerous than an arsenal of missiles. In these 25 days, thousands of new suicide bombers have been created." Column by Uri Avnery.
"As has been said before: It is much easier to start a war than to finish one. The cabinet believes that it controls the war, but in reality it is the war that controls them. They have mounted a tiger, and can't be sure of getting off without being torn to pieces." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Only one thing is already certain on the 11th day of the war: Nothing good will come of it. Whatever happens--Hizbullah will emerge strengthened." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The
real aim is to change the regime in
"The army has a solution--the same solution it has for each and every problem: apply massive force. If only we conquer, pulverize, kill and destroy more and more, the moment will come when the Palestinian people will not be able to stand the suffering and will demand that the underground fighters release the captured soldier. Unconditionally." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The pretext for the operation--the release of the captured soldier--will only harden the attitude of the Palestinians. No issue is more important for them than the release of Palestinian prisoners--a matter that directly concerns 10,000 Palestinian extended families, in every town, quarter and village. These families are prepared to suffer anything to secure their release." Column by Uri Avnery.
Uri Avnery reviews two new movies.
This column by Uri Avnery has a lot of interesting info in it.
Uri Avnery on Ariel Sharon.
"In
Column by Uri Avnery.
"The world (and especially Israel) is full of politicians, generals, journalists, academics, intelligence agents and suchlike who have been invariably wrong about everything they have forecast....Yet strangely enough, they remain in demand, their mistakes forgiven and forgotten, even if they had catastrophic results, as often happens in the case of generals and politicians." Column by Uri Avnery.
"...peace has won a great victory in the Likud arena." Column by Uri Avnery.
"As
far as
"Most of the doctors interviewed by Haaretz testified that the symptoms point towards poisoning, and, in fact, are incompatible with any other cause." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Now
the Likud is in a state of rebellion. The situation borders on the absurd: The
ruling party threatens to oust its own Prime Minister, even at the risk of
losing power. The Knesset Members, who won their lofty position only thanks to
"I don't know whether the Guinness Book of Records awards a title for champions of impertinence, cheek, impudence--in short, good old Jewish chutzpah. If so, you should win it hands down." Column by Uri Avnery.
"If I am angry, profoundly sad and frustrated today, it is because of the price we all have paid for this monstrous 'enterprise.' The thousands killed because of it, Israelis and Palestinians. The hundreds of billions of Shekels poured down the drain. The moral decline of our state, the creeping brutalization, the postponement of peace for dozens of years." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The current Arik's Horror Show is designed to promote this vision, which he conceives as his life's work. The settlers, who curse him and threaten his life, are only playing the role which he has allotted them. Right from the beginning of his career, he has been convinced that God (or fate) has chosen him for this historic task." Column by Uri Avnery.
"It
is an irony of fate (or a triumph of folly) that Hamas was created, in fact,
with the help of
"Recast as civilians, the former chiefs of the army, the Mossad and the Security Service show themselves as very ordinary people, most of them mediocre, some rather less. Occasionally there was one of serious caliber, but not a few were plain stupid, and perhaps disturbed. It is quite frightening to think that such people led the state and were responsible for matters of life and death." Column by Uri Avnery.
"...the representatives of the settlers negotiate the compensation they will be paid for their 'uprooting.' It starts at $400,000 and may reach several million for a family." Column by Uri Avnery.
"If I had been asked, I would have devoted a special room to enlargements of the faces of the Germans -- soldiers, policemen, ordinary citizens -- who are clearly recognizable in the photos of the annihilation in all its stages, shouting, mistreating, laughing, doing their job, which happened to be murder." Column by Uri Avnery.
" The
'benign occupation' has
long since turned into a brutal and ugly regime of oppression. The
prophecy of Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz, that the occupation would
corrupt us through and through and turn us into a people of exploiters
and secret-service-men, has come awfully true. Nothing has remained of
the 'beautiful Eretz
"How can one demonstrate for Arabs, especially on Holocaust Day? Well, it's a good question. And there is a good answer. The answer expresses one of the lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, a lesson that should be raised like a banner on Holocaust Day: That decent persons must come to the aid of a persecuted minority. That loyalty to your country does not justify agreement with the occupation of another country and the oppression of another people. That you must not accept an ideology telling you that you belong to a master nation, to a superior race, to a chosen people--and that other people are inferior and subhuman." Column by Uri Avnery.
"'This is not an evacuation, this is a transfer!' they now shout without any shame, using the accepted code word for ethnic cleansing. 'Transfer'? But their own aim from the very beginning was to transfer the Palestinians! 'Uprooting'? But they wanted to uproot the Palestinians, and they worked untiringly to achieve this. For many of them, that is even seen as a religious commandment." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Sharon
has only
contempt for the Goyim and thinks that cheating them is a national duty, but he
knows where
"The idea that the teachings of this particular political philosopher are the guiding star of the mightiest leader in the world, the commander of the biggest military machine in history, is rather frightening." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Nobody
is talking now of the 'Eastern' wall. It
is no secret that
"But if Ya’alon is succeeded by Halutz, it will confirm the pessimistic dictum that for every bad man removed, there is an even worse one to succeed him." Column by Uri Avnery.
'Sharm-al-Sheikh, We Have Come Back Again...'
Uri Avnery on the recent Israeli-Palestinian conference.
"It is important to keep this in mind, since it disproves the big lie that hovers over the whole debate: that the KKL land was bought with the money of the Jewish people. The greater part of the present KKL land was not bought at all, but conquered in war and transferred to the KKL." Column by Uri Avnery. Note: I don't agree with the last sentence.
"Now, both sides are exhausted....The costs of the occupation amount to tens of billions, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have sunk beneath the poverty line, the social services are collapsing, foreign investment has not recovered, the level of tourism is pitiful. And, more importantly: during the intifada, 4,010 Palestinians and 1,050 Israelis have lost their lives." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Nobody can deny the near-miracle that has happened: the clean transition from the Arafat era to the era of his successors, and the fair elections held under strict international supervision. And, most importantly, democracy was not imposed from the outside, at the whim of a foreign president, but grew from below. And not under normal conditions, but under a brutal occupation." Column by Uri Avnery.
A monologue by Ariel Sharon, courtesy of Uri Avnery.
"In Arab civilization, gestures are more important than words. Not laying a wreath was an insult to the father of the Palestinian nation. After all, compared to Arafat, what is Blair but a political dwarf?" Column by Uri Avnery.
"Sharon boasted that for all practical purposes the army has already vanquished terrorism. That was said a few days after the Palestinians, in a commando action that elicited some silent admiration even from the army, succeeded in destroying an entire army outpost on the “Philadelphi Axis” by detonating a huge amount of explosives in a tunnel dug beneath it and storming the remains." Column by Uri Avnery.
Column by Uri Avnery.
"Bush’s
patent medicine is called 'democracy.' Democracy will heal all the diseases of
the
"The demonization of the Palestinian national leader, which has been the centerpiece of Israeli propaganda for decades, continues even after his death. It seems that 37 years as occupiers have bestialized our society and left it bereft even of common decency. Ministers and fishmongers, TV icons and university professors, 'leftists' and outright fascists tried to outdo each other in utter vulgarity." Column by Uri Avnery.
"They talk about it at cabinet meetings and in the Knesset, on TV talk-shows, in editorials and the news pages. The Chief-of-Staff has publicly warned that the army may fall apart. One of the ministers says that the very existence of the State of Israel is in danger. Another minister prophesies a bloodbath like the Spanish civil war." Column by Uri Avnery.
"History shows that brute military power is a blunt instrument that cannot solve complex problems. A leader who puts his sole trust in it will discover that it is a broken reed which wounds the hand that grasps it." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The
mistreatment of the Palestinian people by
"What
would happen for example, if the
"A religion with a universal message became a tribal cult. A religion of ethics became a religion of holy places. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a Jew of the old kind, defined the religion of the settlers as a pagan, idolatory cult." Column by Uri Avnery.
"People of this kind can be found all over the world. In other countries, they are called fascists (but, because of the Holocaust, we do not like to use this term in our country). What unites them is a primitive, atavistic morality that says that 'we' are a superior race, God’s chosen people, a master race etc., while 'they' are inferior races, untermenschen. We may do to them whatever we please, with a clear conscience; they are not allowed to do to us anything at all." Column by Uri Avnery.
"By
the way, the
"What
is the difference between an American pilot who drops a bomb on a
"President Bush’s famous Road Map is dead. (I can hear him exclaiming: 'Road Map? What Road Map? The only Map I need is of the road to the White House!')" Column by Uri Avnery.
The Oligarchs, or How the Virgin Became a Whore
"But the most intriguing part of the series recounts the way they took control of the political apparatus. After a period of fighting each other, they decided that it would be more profitable for them to cooperate in order to take over the state." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The strategy of Sharon and his generals is simple and brutal: to destroy the Palestinian Authority, turn life in the occupied territories into hell, disintegrate Palestinian society and drive the survivors from the country, not in one dramatic sweep (as in 1948) but in a slow, continuous, creeping process." Column by Uri Avnery.
Uri Avnery responds to Ariel Sharon's call for French Jews to come and live in Israel.
"It
is easy to create this confusion when one does not differentiate between 'Jewish'
and 'Israeli.' Everything becomes
mixed up: anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, criticism of
"It is easy to imagine the officers and settlers bent over the map and planning the path – as though through an empty space, with nothing there except settlements, army bases and roads. They argue about topography, tactical considerations and strategic objectives. Palestinians? What Palestinians?" Column by Uri Avnery.
"Suddenly a row of border-policemen appeared on top of the hill overlooking the road. Before we realized what was happening, a salvo of teargas grenades – one, two, three . . . dozens – were shot at us. In a few moments, we were enveloped by a dense cloud of gas that covered all escape routes." Column by Uri Avnery.
"...the
international community has confirmed that the Palestinian people has no right
to take part in the determination of its own fate. Everything will be decided by
the Government of Israel alone, with the backing of the
"This is only one example of what is happening now all over the West Bank, turning it into a crazy quilt of walled-in enclaves, 'connected' by bridges, tunnels or special roads, which can be cut off at any moment at the whim of the Israeli government or of a local army officer – and, all around them, roads-for-Israelis-only, expanding settlements and military installations." Column by Uri Avnery.
"From the start, the 'Disengagement Plan' was an exercise in deceit. But the world is eager to be deceived." Column by Uri Avnery.
"There are moments in the life of a human being, when his most hidden quality is exposed, free from interests and calculations." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The immense might of the Israeli army, assembled from all over the country, has attacked a small Palestinian township on the margin of the destitute Gaza Strip. Palestinians, both fighters and civilians, are being killed by the dozen, and homes are being destroyed wholesale. The sight of the fleeing population brings back memories of 1948. All this--for what?" Column by Uri Avnery.
"All
the moral arguments attempting to justify his war against
The Golem Turns on His Creator
"Like
a bulldozer without brakes,
"The Palestinians will look into the magic mirror of the past and they will see a people that lived idyllically on their land until the appearance of cruel foreigners who condemned them to a life of humiliation and misery, oppression and exile, with no redemption in sight." Column by Uri Avnery.
"At
the beginning, my first thought was that he was a Mossad agent. Everything
pointed in that direction. How else can one explain a simple technician’s
success in smuggling a camera into the most secret and best guarded installation
in
Sharon's Skin and Bush's Spots
"Question: Is the 'Unilateral Disengagement' plan, which was so dramatically endorsed this week by President Bush, a bluff? Answer: Yes and No." Column by Uri Avnery.
Bitter Rice 2, or the March of Folly
"Now
the Americans are caught in a trap of their own making. Even if they wanted to
leave
"Jesus preached love, and the new Testament pictures him as an immensely attractive person, righteous, merciful and tolerant. How terrible that so many atrocities in history were perpetrated by persons and institutions claiming to act in his name." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The
martyrdom of Sheikh Yassin pushes even further away the chance of
"After
the terrorist onslaught, the Spanish asked themselves: Why did they do it? What
caused this murderous attack on us? The logical answer was: The Prime
Minister’s policy has brought this on us. The conclusion: Let’s find another
one. In
"In the eyes of most Israelis, they are simply terrorists, murderers and criminals, whose sole aim in life is to 'spill Jewish blood.' They do not see the human beings and do not ask where they came from and what got them to do what they are doing. Therefore, they do not understand the source of their strength and tenacity." Column by Uri Avnery.
'O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum....'
"This is a well-established Israeli ritual: One takes a trivial matter, declares it to be the center of national life, decorates it and dances around it, all in order to escape from the real national problems that are so exasperating and frightening." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The
struggle against the Wall has many aspects. It is not only a struggle to
liberate the inhabitants of the
"In the meantime, the Americans are being asked to give some billions for the payment of compensation to the settlers. Since the Americans paid billions for installing the settlers in the first place, it is only right that they should pay a few more billions to move them out again." Column by Uri Avnery.
"And since the intelligence chiefs are appointed by the political leaders, no wonder that their concepts almost always suit the concepts of the leaders." Column by Uri Avnery.
"This is a typical Israeli method: when we do, after much commotion, evacuate some territories, we always keep one little piece, so that the conflict goes on. But in the end we leave." Column by Uri Avnery.
"There is only one nation of victims. If somebody else wants to claim this crown of thorns for himself, we will bash in his head." Column by Uri Avnery.
Sharon's Speech: The Decoded Version
"
"If it is possible at all to evoke pity for a man like Saddam, who is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands, the Americans have achieved this. By showing him off as a drugged tramp, they created the opposite effect from what they wanted....The public humiliation of an Arab leader, whatever one may think about him, evokes the deepest feelings of insult and fury among tens of millions of Arabs. These feelings will strive to express themselves violently." Column by Uri Avnery.
"In this sense, all of Ya’alon’s aims have been achieved. It would be difficult to imagine a more terrible situation, barring actual massacres. According to plan, the Palestinians should have broken a long time ago." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Like a cancer in the body that gradually extends its malign influence, every settlement slowly destroys its surroundings in an ever-widening circle." Column by Uri Avnery.
"During the last 20 years, I have followed the work of foreign correspondents--neutral, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli--and almost all of them trust the Palestinians more than official Israeli spokespersons." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The pilots are bought up from an early age to believe that we are always right, and that our opponents are vile murderers. That the army commanders never make a mistake. That an order is an order, and theirs is not to reason why....That problems have to be solved inside the Force. That one does not question the authority of the political leadership." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Doesn’t
'First of All--The Wall Must Fall!'
"And so the Wall stands between children and their school, between students and their university, between patients and their doctor, between parents and their children, between villages and their wells, between peasants and their fields. Like a big armored bulldozer that crashes into a village and crushes and destroys everything in its path without faltering, the Wall cuts thousands of the thin threads that constitute the fabric of people’s daily lives, as if they weren’t there." Column by Uri Avnery.
Uri Avnery on the end of the hudna in Palestine.
"On the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli newspapers are full of revelations about it. Among them is the disclosure that I saved the life of Moshe Dayan. That surprised me, as it would have surprised Dayan, if he were still living. But it appears to be true." Column by Uri Avnery.
An interesting column about Yasser Arafat by Uri Avnery.
"The intelligence services do indeed look for facts, but mostly for the facts that suit their political bosses. They submit reports to governments, but woe betide the service chief whose report does not suit their agenda. In short, there is hardly an intelligence report that is not trimmed to suit the powers that be, that does not twist the facts or is not an outright lie." Column by Uri Avnery.
"This is how it goes: early in the morning, hundreds of soldiers surround the land. Behind them come the tanks and bulldozers, and the action starts. When despair drives the inhabitants to resist, the soldiers hit them with sticks, throw tear gas grenades, shoot rubber-coated metal bullets and, if the resistance is stronger, live ammunition, too. Old people are thrown on the ground, women dragged along, young people handcuffed and pushed against the wall. After a few minutes, it’s all over. Well, they’ll say, that’s done to Arabs. They don’t do this to Jews. Wrong. They certainly do this to Jews. Depends who the Jews are." Column by Uri Avnery.
"...the Knesset, which has reached an unprecedented low. It now openly includes representatives of the underworld, a murderer who has asked for (and received) a pardon, and some small politicians who look as if they had been picked at random from the street." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Baghdad was ransacked as in the days of the Mongols....Priceless cultural treasures from the cradle of human civilization were destroyed or plundered – one of the worst cultural disasters in the history of mankind." Column by Uri Avnery.
"This is also a divine mission. The missionaries always come with the army, and sometimes even precede it. The cross and the canon, religion and oppression, the church and the plunder of resources go very well together." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The
small group that initiated this war – an alliance of Christian fundamentalists
and Jewish neo-conservatives – has won big, and from now on it will control
"For some months now, Bush is almost always seen on a background of soldiers. The stage designer sees to it that the soldiers are all around the President, so that from any photo angle the admiring faces shine behind him." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The
problem of the Brits and the Americans is that they are possessed by an
unquenchable thirst for reconstructing.
"No Arab – be he Sunni or Shiite – can look upon the Americans as liberators, because, for two years now, they have seen every day on their TV screens what the Israeli army, with Bush’s wholehearted support, is doing to the Arab Palestinian people. The righteous Americans, who tend to be insensitive to the feelings of other peoples, cannot even imagine the intensity of the fury and hatred of the Arab masses." Column by Uri Avnery.
"That
is what happened to the
"In
no previous war did
"But
"[Sharon]
strives for an aim that seems to him vastly more important: to fulfill
the aim of Zionism as he understands it: to create a Jewish state that will
comprise (at least) all the land between the
"This war, then, goes much beyond the Iraqi problem. It is not a war against Saddam’s microbes. It is, quite simply, a war for world dominion, economic, political, military and cultural. Bush is ready to spill a lot of blood to achieve this." Column by Uri Avnery.
"I do not belong to those who can speak about war with equanimity. I have seen war, I know its face. I see the thousands who will be killed, the tens of thousands who will be wounded and maimed, the hundreds of thousands who will become refugees, the ruined families, the sea of tears and human suffering. I join the millions all over the world who say NO." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The connection between Israeli generals and Jewish millionaires from abroad is an arresting subject by itself. It is a two-way deal: the generals receive generous support from the millionaires, the millionaires acquire dignity. Generally, these are millionaires who thirst for recognition and believe that they are not accorded the honor due to them by the 'goyish' society in their homelands. They mention at every opportunity “my friend, the general,” have their photos taken with him at state events, entertain him at their home and are guests at his." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Joerg
Haider does not propose to cancel the Austrian citizenship of people who
disagree with his obnoxious views, nor does Jean-Marie Le-Pen propose to
expel from the National Assembly every deputy who is not of pure French
blood.
For
54 years, the State of Israel
has prided itself of being 'the only democracy in the
"...the soldiers are nice boys, the sons of all of us, only yesterday they were schoolboys. But when one takes these nice boys and puts them in uniforms, pushes them through the military machine and puts them into a situation of occupation, something happens to them. Many try to keep their human face in impossible circumstances, many others become order-fulfilling robots. And always, in every company, there are some disturbed people who flourish in this situation and do repulsive things, knowing that their officers will turn a blind eye or wink approvingly." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Perhaps
the small olive on the hill is mightier than a one-ton bomb."
Column by Uri Avnery.
"All of them looked happy, and with reason: They had just finished a hard day’s work at olive picking. They had been together under the trees. They were together when the settlers opened fire." Column by Uri Avnery.
Uri Avnery on the recent IDF attack on Rafah.
"In reality, this is not a 'Jewish democratic state' but a 'Jewish demographic state.' Demography overcomes democracy in all fields of action." Column by Uri Avnery.
"When Barghouti was brought in, the public inside started a riot, waving placards and pictures and shouting 'Murderer!' 'Terrorist!' 'Kill him!' It looked like the circus in ancient Rome or a lynch mob. People seeing this on TV had no way of knowing that this was a show planned and organized well in advance by the Sharon government." Column by Uri Avnery.
"All over the world, new Jewish groups that follow this way are multiplying. They break yet another myth: the duty of Jews everywhere to subordinate themselves to the edicts of our government." Column by Uri Avnery.
"The murder of Arafat is the murder of all chances for peace. That is a crime against the Israeli people. It will condemn us to making war for decades, perhaps for generations to come, perhaps forever. The moral, social and economic decline that we are experiencing now everywhere in Israel will drag Israel down to new depths and to the emigration of many." Column by Uri Avnery.
"What frightens Sharon so much? It seems that the Gush Shalom activity causes many soldiers to think, for the first time, about the possibility that certain actions are not only immoral and sabotage all chances for peace, but also violate Israeli and international law and might constitute war crimes." Column by Uri Avnery.
"But within a few years Israel could find itself surrounded by a new Middle East--and not the one Shimon Peres is driveling on about. A region full of hatred, dreaming of revenge, driven by religious and nationalist fanaticism. And in the end, the Americans will go home." Column by Uri Avnery.
"Now we are witnessing the return of the dinosaurs. Human dinosaurs. People who control immense power structures and who have the brains of a bird." Column by new Root Striker Uri Avnery.