Another Shameless Plug For Uri Avnery

Published on June 22, 2004 By O G San In International

The external url is Avnery's thoughts on the mantra "we have no-one to negotiate with". A fine read.

Also I found this Link. It's a collection of his recent articles. It includes the story of how he inadvertantly saved Moshe Dayan's life in 1973:

"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.

The facts are revealed by Amir Porat, the former communication officer and personal confidant of Shmuel Gonen (universally known as ¡°Gorodish¡±), who was in charge of Southern Command during the war. Later, when the public was looking for a scapegoat for the terrible initial defeat, the main blame was put on Gorodish. He was dismissed from his command and nobody was prepared to listen to his side of the story. All the media boycotted him.

This man, who practically overnight had fallen from the height of glory (as one of the heroes of the 1967 Six Day War) to the depths of ignominy, was in despair. He blamed Dayan for the injustice done to him. In the end he made an appointment with him, planning to shoot him and then himself.

At the very last moment, one day before the fateful meeting, Haolam Hazeh correspondent Rino Tzror arranged a meeting between us. At the time I was editor-in-chief this newsmagazine, the only medium in the country that was truly independent of the establishment. We had a reputation for supporting the underdog and challenging the powers that be. I talked with him at length. During the whole conversation he toyed with his pistol.

Gorodish was very far from my political views, he was a right-wing person, an out-and-out militarist, but I became convinced that the official inquiry into the war had indeed done him a shocking injustice. Therefore I promised to help him get his side of the story across. He saw that the whole world was not closed to him. Having someone listening to his side of the story and promising to publish it relieved his despair and made him give up the idea of killing Dayan and committing suicide. I published a large article under the headline ¡°The Israeli Dreyfus.¡±

This affair has its ironic side. In the whole of Israel , no one was more opposed to Dayan than I. More than anyone else (except Ben-Gurion and his sidekick, Shimon Peres) Dayan laid down in the 1950s the anti-Arab tracks on which Israel is moving to this very day. In the pages of Haolam Hazeh, I attacked him relentlessly, writing hundreds of articles against him, exposing his illegal traffic in stolen archeological finds and his private peccadilloes that endangered the security of the state. And in the end, it appears that I saved his life."

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