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Meron Benvenisti

The Israeli writer, historian and political scientist Meron Benvenisti, who has died aged 86 after a long illness, focused on his country’s existential – and still unresolved – conflict with the Palestinians. The phrase “thought-provoking” could have been invented for him.

Benvenisti was a son of Israel’s elite but spent much of his life as a Cassandra – a prophet whose warnings were not believed. He was a physically large man with a loud voice and personality to match. He will be most remembered for his argument, from the mid-1980s, that Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, which began in the wake of Israel’s victory in 1967, was irreversible.

The importance of this controversial assessment was to challenge the conventional wisdom, held by Israelis, Palestinians and foreigners, that there was a workable two-state solution to the world’s most intractable conflict. It brought anger – and abuse – because his prolific newspaper articles, interviews and insightful books ensured a wide audience.

For “dovish” Israelis in particular, Benvenisti’s trenchant analysis undermined hopes for what they saw as a just outcome: recognition that the Zionist project was historically legitimate, alongside the creation of a sovereign and viable state for the Palestinians.

“The only way to live here will be to create an equality of respect between us and the Palestinians,” he insisted in an interview in the liberal daily Haaretz in 2012. “To recognise the fact that there are two national communities here who love this land and whose obligation is to channel the unavoidable conflict between them into a process of dialogue for life together.”

Many of those who had dismissed his arguments in the past came to conclude reluctantly in recent years that he was right. But even close friends complained that he did not offer a practical strategy to achieve one state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs between the “river and the sea”. He countered that he was offering a diagnosis, not a prognosis.

Born in Jerusalem, Meron was the son of David, a geographer who migrated to Ottoman Palestine from his native Salonika in 1913, and his wife, Leah (nee Friedman), born in Lithuania, a nurse. By the time the British Mandate ended with Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 he was 14 – old enough to experience what happened in his own Jewish neighbourhood of Rehavia - close to where, but in a different world, the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said also grew up.

After completing his compulsory military service Benvenisti became a member of Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra, near the Lebanese border. He said later that he had not realised at the time that the banana groves in which he worked had replaced uprooted Palestinian olive trees. He studied medieval history and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he chaired the students’ union and became an expert on the Crusader period. In 1960 he was appointed head of the tourism ministry’s economy and development department.

In 1965 he began working for Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, which was then still divided between Israel and Jordan. From 1971 to 1978 he served as deputy mayor and was responsible for the eastern side of the city, to which Israeli law was applied and was considered internationally to have been illegally annexed.

It was an eye-opening job. “When I started to deal with the Arabs of East Jerusalem, I began to understand,” he explained later. “I saw that the problem is not only the individual rights of the Palestinians but also their collective rights.”

The significance of the 1967 victory became clearer over time. It “created the conditions necessary for the transformation of the cult of the homeland into a fundamentalist-religious-chauvinist mythology,” he observed. “In the name of ‘love for Eretz-Yisrael’ (the Land of Israel) fanatics set out to complete the journey into the past by nationalising newly occupied territory, which necessitated the dispossession of anyone who did not belong to the Jewish collectivity.”

In 1984 he founded the West Bank Data Project to monitor settlement activity. At the time there were around 70,000 settlers. Now there are more than 600,000. In parallel he conducted his own research, being awarded a PhD from Harvard University in conflict management. He also acquired a lifelong interest in Northern Ireland, seeing parallels between its Troubles and his own bitterly contested homeland. Benvenisti was surprised by the Oslo accords of 1993 between the PLO and Israel, and admitted to being blinded by his own views and insensitive to the degree to which both sides were simply exhausted.

From 1991 to 2009 he wrote a column in Haaretz and contributed to other newspapers, including the Guardian. He published many books, among them Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, which interweaves the personal and the political. In it he defined the Zionist enterprise bluntly as a “supplanting settler society” but also warned that using labels is a way of shutting down debate. He was wary of Holocaust-deniers and antisemites who tried to recruit his dissident views to serve their anti-Israel goals.

In a personal memoir entitled Son of the Cypresses (2007) , he wrote that “it has not been easy for me to bid farewell to my father’s dream of a Jewish nation-state”. In 2012 he published his autobiography in Hebrew.

Benvenisti married Dalia Vilkis in 1954 and they had a son, Eyal. In 1966 they divorced, and the following year he married Shoshana Lahav, with whom he had a son, Yuval, and a daughter, Sharon. He is survived by Shoshana, his children, and a brother, Rafael.

• Meron Benvenisti, historian and political scientist, born 21 April 1934; died 20 September 2020