Shlomo Avineri At A Conference At Tel Aviv University In Ramat Aviv, Israel 1987 Editorial Image

Professor, columnist, and government official Shlomo Avineri at a session of the Jeane Kirkpatrick Forum at Tel Aviv University in Ramat Aviv, Israel, on December 21, 1987. His family emigrated from Poland to then British mandated Palestine. At the time this image was created, Avineri was 54. He was a political science professor at the Hebrew University and a political columnist with Ha'aretz, a prominent and respected Israeli newspaper and also held the position of Director-General of the Israel Foreign Ministry from 1975-1977. A political liberal, he was one of the first public intellectuals to advocate negotiations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He tempered his hope for a peaceful two state solution following the Intifadas, or uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza and after the collapse of the Oslo peace accords and repeated fighting with Hamas. He was what the late, colorful mayor of New York City, Ed Koch would call 'a liberal with sanity.' Avineri died in Jerusalem on December 1, 2023, at the age of 90.