Mr. Benvenisti ran Teddy Kollek’s first marketing campaign to change into mayor of Jerusalem in 1965. After the 1967 Six-Day Conflict, wherein Israel occupied East Jerusalem, he was given accountability for that space and the Previous Metropolis; was elected to the Metropolis Council in 1969; and was deputy mayor, in command of the Palestinian neighborhoods, from 1971 to 1978. After campaigning unsuccessfully for the Knesset, he grew to become a columnist for Haaretz, writing for it from 1991 to 2009.
Mr. Benvenisti first witnessed the impression of Zionism on the Palestinian inhabitants when, as a boy, he joined his father on excursions to rename current villages based on a Hebrew map of Israel’s ancestral homeland.
In his 2012 interview with Haaretz, timed to the discharge of his autobiography, “The Dream of the White Sabra,” he recalled planting banana bushes on a kibbutz within the 1950s not understanding that he was “uprooting olive bushes, hundreds of years previous, of a Palestinian village.” And he remembered, as a Jerusalem metropolis official, seeing Arab properties demolished to accommodate the massive plaza of the Western Wall — “the bulldozers and the clouds of mud that rose into the air and the previous lady who was buried underneath one of many homes.”
Mr. Benvenisti mentioned that after Israel had planted some 120 settlements on the West Financial institution starting within the early 2000s underneath Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the opportunity of a Jewish state was now not viable. “The notion of a ‘Jewish-democratic state’ is an oxymoron,” he mentioned, “and the two-state answer is not any answer.”
“The one method to stay right here can be to create an equality of respect between us and the Palestinians,” he mentioned. “To acknowledge the truth that there are two nationwide communities right here which love this land and whose obligation is to channel the unavoidable battle between them right into a technique of dialogue for all times collectively.”
Characterizing himself as a “voice of doom” in contrast with Mayor Kollek’s idealism, he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1988 that he would stay within the metropolis wherein he grew up. “I knew all alongside that I couldn’t escape Jerusalem: her contrasts, conflicts and contradictions are my very own inner panorama,” he wrote.
And he knew, he went on, that he would some day discover everlasting relaxation within the Mount of Olives cemetery, “on the slope of the Valley of Final Judgment — slightly below Dominus Flevit, the place Jesus, based on Luke, ‘beheld town and wept over it saying, if thou hadst identified, even thou, not less than on this thy day, the issues which belong unto thy peace! However now they’re hid from thine eyes.’”
