Mr. Benvenisti ran Teddy Kollek’s 1st campaign to develop into mayor of Jerusalem in 1965. Just after the 1967 6-Day War, in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem, he was offered accountability for that spot and the Previous City was elected to the City Council in 1969 and was deputy mayor, in charge of the Palestinian neighborhoods, from 1971 to 1978. Just after campaigning unsuccessfully for the Knesset, he grew to become a columnist for Haaretz, creating for it from 1991 to 2009.
Mr. Benvenisti 1st witnessed the affect of Zionism on the Palestinian population when, as a boy, he joined his father on excursions to rename current villages in accordance to a Hebrew map of Israel’s ancestral homeland.
In his 2012 interview with Haaretz, timed to the release of his autobiography, “The Dream of the White Sabra,” he recalled planting banana trees on a kibbutz in the 1950s not realizing that he was “uprooting olive trees, 1000’s of many years previous, of a Palestinian village.” And he remembered, as a Jerusalem city official, seeing Arab properties demolished to accommodate the significant plaza of the Western Wall — “the bulldozers and the clouds of dust that rose into the air and the previous lady who was buried beneath one particular of the homes.”
Mr. Benvenisti stated that after Israel had planted some 120 settlements on the West Financial institution starting in the early 2000s beneath Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the chance of a Jewish state was no longer viable. “The notion of a ‘Jewish-democratic state’ is an oxymoron,” he stated, “and the two-state alternative is no alternative.”
“The only way to dwell right here will be to generate an equality of respect in between us and the Palestinians,” he stated. “To acknowledge the truth that there are two nationwide communities right here which enjoy this land and whose obligation is to channel the unavoidable conflict in between them into a method of dialogue for lifestyle with each other.”
Characterizing himself as a “voice of doom” in contrast with Mayor Kollek’s idealism, he wrote in The New York Instances Magazine in 1988 that he would continue to be in the city in which he grew up. “I knew all along that I could not escape Jerusalem: her contrasts, conflicts and contradictions are my personal inner landscape,” he wrote.
And he knew, he went on, that he would some day discover eternal rest in the Mount of Olives cemetery, “on the slope of the Valley of Final Judgment — just beneath Dominus Flevit, the place Jesus, in accordance to Luke, ‘beheld the city and wept above it saying, if thou hadst identified, even thou, at least in this thy day, the matters which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes.’”