Belts Gleaming

Charles Glass

1948: A Soldier’s Tale, the Bloody Road to Jerusalem by Uri Avnery, translated by Christopher Costello
Oneworld, 398 pp, £12.99, October 2008, ISBN 978 1 85168 629 2
Israel’s Vicious Circle by Uri Avnery, edited by Sara Powell
Pluto, 230 pp, £15.00, July 2008, ISBN 978 0 7453 2823 2

Uri Avnery’s two wartime memoirs, now collected as 1948: A Soldier’s Tale, were published in Hebrew in 1949 and 1950. In the first of them, In the Fields of the Philistines, the 25-year-old Avnery is an infantryman desperate for action; in the second, The Other Side of the Coin, he criticises his own ‘silly, rotten country’ for its conduct in the 1948 war. Avnery, now 85, has continued to condemn Israel’s conduct in the wars it has been fighting ever since, and a selection of his polemics appears in Israel’s Vicious Circle.

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Vol. 31 No. 11 · 11 June 2009 » Charles Glass » Belts Gleaming (print version)
Pages 15-16 | 3270 words

Letters

From Lionel Green

Charles Glass portrays Uri Avnery as a soldier who went into writing and activism, which is true enough, but Avnery’s life is more interesting than that – especially his clandestine activities (LRB, 11 June). In the late 1950s, while he was editing Haolam Hazeh, Avnery met the Egyptian-Jewish Marxist Henri Curiel, who was raising money for the Algerian FLN from his exile in Paris, and at Curiel’s suggestion set up the Israeli Committee for a Free Algeria. This was quite a radical idea, given Israel’s alliance with the French against Nasser, and its covert support for right-wing colons – and given the natural sympathies which the Algerians felt for the Palestinians. Still, the Algerians appreciated the committee’s support, and when they heard from Curiel that the founders included veterans of the Zionist underground, they asked whether the Israelis might send experts to Yugoslavia to train FLN members in the art of chemical sabotage. To his regret, Avnery could not find the qualified ‘ex-terrorists’, but his efforts to make common cause with the Arab left continued, and by the early 1970s he was travelling frequently to Europe for secret meetings with the PLO. Glass mentions his dealings with the PLO leaders Said Hammami and Issam Sartawi, but not his memorable account of these experiences. It was published in 1986 under the title My Friend, the Enemy, and is still worth reading.

Lionel Green
London E2