served in the Knesset, co-founded Gush Shalom, and was the first Israeli to have contact with the PLO. He has been advocating that Israel conduct negotiations with the PLO for a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine's aspirations for its own state ever since, but his efforts toward peace started during his youth.
In my attempt to edit the unique voice of Avnery my goal was to introduce a broader audience to one of the most prominent and thoughtful participants in the decades-long Israeli fight for a state and its concomitant occupation of Palestine-itself a unique world situation-with a selection that exemplifies his position, and to place both Avnery and the situation between Palestine and Israel in the larger Middle East context to which it belongs, as well as to place it in a global context. Avnery works to educate the public that Israel and Palestine are caught in a vicious circle, largely-though not entirelykept within the circle by Israeli policy and Israeli action. Moreover, he makes the point that the situation is one of the most critical in a region becoming more and more desperate, which is in itself part of a global order that seems to be spinning out of control. For the reader already familiar with Avnery, I have tried to choose work that represents both some of the best of his oeuvre and pieces that present an overall view of his almost lifelong mission of bringing peace with justice to Palestine and Israel, and with the hope that this project may play some part in the advancement of that goal. I share Avnery's views that a just peace must be achieved in the near future.
In order to appreciate the singular perspective of Avnery's views, it is necessary to read the brief autobiographical sketches and personal remembrances that he often uses as an introductory allegory to the political analysis that comprises his weekly column.
The reader learns about Avnery's parents, his own "angry young man" period during the late 1940s, his growing sensitivity to the "other": the indigenous Palestinians. Avnery tantalizes his readers with hints of secret, intense-life and death-meetings. His autobiographical books read almost like novels.
What really grips the reader, though, is that this is no fiction and that Avnery bluntly describes what he has witnessed, and actively participated in, over the past 70 years.
He joined the Zionist underground-Avnery says terrorist-organization in 1938, just shy of his 15th birthday, as an ardent nationalist. After three years he left the organization because of its anti-Arab political stance and its methodology. By 1946 he founded the Eretz Yisrael Hatzira, or Young Palestine, movement and edited its publication ba-Ma'avak (Struggle). His was among the first in a bevy of Israeli