1948. A Soldier’s Tale: The Bloody Road to Jerusalem

Uri Avnery was born in Beckum, Germany. He moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1933, attending school in Nahalal and then in Tel Aviv; he left at age fourteen to work. Avnery joined Etzel and was wounded fighting in the War of Independence. His war reportage, published in 1949, sold an unprecedented thirty thousand copies in one year and, contrary to the author’s intention, became the gold standard of authentic—and heroic—war writing. From 1950 to 1990, Avnery turned the weekly Ha-’olam ha-zeh into the leading tabloid journal in Israel, and founded a party of the same name in 1965, becoming active on the Israeli Left both as a member of the Knesset and as a high-profile peace activist.