He has been called a “traitor”, ‘scum” and “mentally unstable” by his fellow Israelis. Uri Davis is the first person of Jewish origin to be elected to the Revolutionary Council of the Palestinian Fatah movement. He calls himself an "anti-Zionist”and has tapped into a deep well of Israeli resentment. There have even been calls for him to be deported.

Listen to Newsline correspondent David Poort interviewing Uri Davis.

Uri Davis was elected to the Revolutionary Council in 31st place from a field of 600 - testimony, he says, to the open and liberal nature of the Fatah movement, describing it as:

“A non-ethnic movement where membership depends on agreement with the political programme, regardless of linguistic background, confessional background, citizenship background or any other distinction”.

A lesson learned
Davis was born into a Jewish family, with a British father and a Czech mother. His mother’s family died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz – a familiar story in Israel. But while the vast majority of Jews believe this means they must guarantee their security from persecution, the lesson Davis learned was different.

“I was educated by my parents not to generalise. Any sentence beginning “all Jews, all Arabs, all Germans, all Britons” is a false sentence. My mother would not say that THE Germans killed her family, a specific group of Nazis killed her family”.

Spiritual Zionist
He is 66 now, but that warning from his parents still informs Davis’ life and work. He is careful how he describes himself and with his definition of what he calls his own “anti-Zionism”. What he opposes is the “political Zionism” of Israel’s founders, something that amounts, he says, to a land grab based on ethnic cleansing. The philosophy he believes in is the “spiritual Zionism” of a number of Jewish thinkers who believed Palestine should become a spiritual centre that would support the Jewish diaspora.

Justice, not vengeance
Davis spent many years away from Israel, returning after the signing of the Oslo accords in the mid 1990’s and has struggled, since then, to persuade others of the importance of the lesson he learnt from his parents about the dangers of generalising.

“The difficulty for people like myself, human rights defenders working at the Hebrew-Arab interface, is to convince the mainstream of the Hebrew society in Israel that the mainstream of the Palestinian – Arab society both inside and outside Israel, is not seeking vengeance, it is seeking justice”.