Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist, historian and former government official whose pessimism about resolving the conflict with Palestinians did not stop him from advocating measures to ease it, died on Nov. 30 in Jerusalem. He was 90.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Hebrew University, also in Jerusalem, where he taught, and by his daughter and only immediate survivor, Maayan Avineri-Rebhun. Mr. Avineri was what Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, called a public intellectual: a scholar of Marx, Hegel and Zionism who brought his academic eminence to bear in a column he wrote for the newspaper Haaretz; who was often quoted by journalists; and who played a role in peace negotiations with King Hussein of Jordan when Mr. Avineri was director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, a position he held from 1975 to 1977. He was regarded as “quite dovish,” Mr. Rabinovich said in a phone interview. Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, noted that Mr. Avineri was “one of the first prominent Israelis to call for negotiations with the P.L.O.” However, he added, Mr. Avineri would later become “a powerful critic of the Palestinian national movement” under the impact of intifada and suicide bombings. Mr. Avineri immigrated with his parents from Poland in the 1930s, and Zionism was in his bones. “He was someone who had deep empathy for the other side, but not at the expense of defending Israel,” Mr. Halevi said. In his writings in Haaretz and elsewhere, Mr. Avineri was consistently skeptical about Israel’s prospects for achieving peace with its enemies. He was convinced of Palestinian and Arab hatred for Israel and Zionism, whose 19th-century roots he chronicled in 1981 in an admired book, “The Making of Modern Zionism.”
The Hamas attack in Israel on Oct. 7 only buttressed this view. Immediately afterward, speaking to The New York Times, he noted what he said was Hamas’s view that in Israel “every civilian is a soldier.” “This was not rhetoric,” he said, “but identifying the vulnerability of the Israeli communities inside Israel.” This was consistent with views that he had long expressed and that led some critics to question the position of some Israeli liberals. In 2015, Mr. Avineri wrote in Haaretz that “there is no choice but to admit there is no chance for any mutually accepted agreement in the foreseeable future.” This “pessimistic prognosis,” he added, “called for “alternatives not in order to ‘solve’ the conflict, but to mitigate its severity and perhaps move both sides eventually to an agreed solution.”
He thought that the realpolitik approach was better,” said Avner de-Shalit, a former student of Mar. Avineri’s and later a colleague in Hebrew University’s political science department. “He thought you had to have your eyes open all the time.”
In other columns, Mr. Avineri called for “concrete steps that will achieve less than peace”; hailed the “historical roots” of Israel’s democracy while doubting Arab states’ capacity to achieve democracy themselves; and expressed reservations about economic cooperation between Israel and Palestinian territories. This tension, between a desire for peace and a skepticism that proposals to further it would lead to anything, permeated his journalism. It is what led the historian Tony Judt to write in The New York Review of Books that Mr. Avineri and other Israeli liberals “have largely lost their way” and to chide him for fo(Example 2 of 67)