Meet Fatah’s Jew, Uri Davis

Advertisement

The U.K. Guardian profiles the Jew elected to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, Uri Davis:

Uri Davis is used to denunciations. A "traitor", "scum", "mentally unstable": those are just some of the condemnations that have been posted in the Israeli blogosphere in recent days. As the first person of Jewish origin to be elected to the Revolutionary Council of the Palestinian Fatah movement, an organisation once dominated by Yasser Arafat, Davis has tapped a deep reserve of Israeli resentment. Some have even called for him to be deported.

He has been here before, not least as the man who first proposed the critique of Israel as an "apartheid state" in the late 1980s. Davis’s involvement in the first UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. During a career of protest he has been described – inevitably – as a "self-hating Jew". He calls himself an "anti-Zionist". And his personal history is a fascinating testimony to the troubled history of the postwar Israeli left and forgotten trajectories in the story of Israel itself.

Full story here.

Recommended from JTA

Advertisement