Amos Elon

Amos Elon (; 4 July 1926 – 25 May 2009) was an Israeli journalist and author. He was a writer for the newspaper Haaretz for most of his career and contributed essays to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books. He also wrote books on Jewish history, the early Zionist movement and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Elon became known in Israel and abroad as an early and prominent critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In his obituary, the Los Angeles Times called Elon "one of the most distinguished and provocative Israeli authors of his time".

Biography Elon was born Heinrich Sternbach on 4 July 1926 in Vienna. In 1933, he immigrated with his family to Mandatory Palestine, where his father established an import-export business in Tel Aviv. He served three years in the Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary in Mandatory Palestine. He then studied law and history at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge, where he was a British Council scholar at Peterhouse.

Career Elon began writing for Haaretz in 1951, initially focusing on Israel's new immigrants and the disadvantaged sectors of Israeli society, which he called the "Second Israel". He then served as a roving correspondent for the paper in Europe, writing from West Germany, France, Poland, and Hungary. In 1956, he witnessed the Poznań protests in Poland and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Elon then spent six years as Haaretzs correspondent in Washington, D.C., where he befriended John F. Kennedy. Following this, he returned to covering Europe, reporting from Bonn and Paris, before coming back to Israel in 1965 to join Haaretz'''s editorial board. His travels in Germany as a reporter served as the basis for his first book, Journey Through a Haunted Land (1966), a portrait of Germany since the end of World War II. Elon took a leave of absence from Haaretz from 1971 to 1978, eventually retiring from the paper in 1986.

In his writing on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Elon was an early advocate for the creation of a Palestinian state and withdrawal from the territories occupied by Israel since 1967.

Elon was the author of one novel, Timetable (1980), and eight works of nonfiction, including books on Jewish history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and biographies of Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, and Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books, he was widely regarded as one of Israel's leading journalists and public intellectuals. although some criticized its lack of attention paid to lower-class German Jews.

In 2007–2008, Elon was a fellow at the Center for Law and Security at New York University School of Law. In a 2002 essay for The New York Review of Books, he heavily criticized Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying: "Imagine the effect on the peace process in Northern Ireland if the British government continued moving thousands of Protestants from Scotland into Ulster and settling them, at government expense, on land confiscated from Irish Catholics... With few exceptions, the settlements have not made Israel more 'secure', as was sometimes claimed; they have made Israel less secure." In a 2004 interview with journalist Ari Shavit, he stated that Zionism had "exhausted itself" and that he had come to consider the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as "perhaps the least successful attempt at colonialism that I can think of. This is the crappiest colonial regime that I can think of in the modern age."

Personal life In 1961, Elon married Beth Drexler, a New York-born literary agent, with whom he had one daughter, Danae, a documentary filmmaker based in Montreal, Quebec. In the 1990s, he began to spend much of his time in Italy. In 2004, he sold his home in Jerusalem and moved there permanently, citing disillusionment with developments in Israel since 1967.

Elon died of leukemia on 25 May 2009 in Borgo a Buggiano in Tuscany, aged 82. In 2005, his daughter Danae produced a biographical film about him, entitled Another Road Home.

Published works Fiction

Nonfiction