Meron Benvenisti

Meron Benvenisti (; 21 April 193420 September 2020) was an Israeli political scientist who was deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek from 1971 to 1978, during which he administered Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and served as Jerusalem's chief planning officer. He supported a binational Israeli–Palestinian state.

Early life Benvenisti was born in 1934 in Jerusalem, his father was David Benvenisti, a Greek Jew originally from Thessaloniki and recipient of the Israel Prize, while his mother Leah (née Friedman) was Lithuanian Jewish. He was the brother of Refael (Rafi) Benvenisti, and father of Eyal Benvenisti. He graduated from the Leyada and served his compulsory military service in a Nahal unit near the Israeli–Lebanese border at Kibbutz Gesher HaZiv.

In the early 1950s, following his discharge, Benvenisti moved to the nearby Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra and served as a youth movement leader. He enrolled at the Hebrew University after his return to Jerusalem in 1955, studying both economics and medieval history. He later published books and maps on the period of the Crusaders in the Holy Land. Since 1992 he devoted his time to teaching as visiting lecturer (at Ben-Gurion University in 1994–1998 and Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in 1982–2009), research and writing on Jerusalem, the Northern Ireland conflict, Israeli–Palestinian relations, the Palestinian vanished landscape and bi-nationalism. He was a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. and a visiting fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA) and a recipient of research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace.

In 2012, Benvenisti opined that claims that Israel is an apartheid state were "wrongheaded, simplistic and dangerous", but also said that the situation in Israel proper was "no less grave". He argued that Israel had become a "Herrenvolk democracy" (master race democracy) in which Israel behaves "like a full-blooded democracy" but has a group of serfs (the Arabs) for whom democracy is suspended, creating a situation of "extreme inequality". In the same interview, he stated that "The separation fence: that is truly apartheid. Separation is apartheid." According to Benvenisti, the only solution is to incorporate Palestinians into the state on conditions of equality.

His experience led him in later years to be disillusioned with Zionism, stating in a 2012 interview with journalist Ari Shavit:

I went to Kibbutz Hanikra in the 1950s and experienced the transcendent feeling of working in the banana groves without noticing that in order to plant the banana trees, I was uprooting olive trees, thousands of years old, of a Palestinian village. During that whole period ... I did not understand the meaning of what I was doing. But when I started to deal with the Arabs of East Jerusalem, I began to understand. I saw that the problem is not only the individual rights of the Palestinians but also their collective rights.

Death On 20 September 2020, Benvenisti died of renal failure at the age of 86.

Publications Books (partial) Benvenisti, Meron (1976). The Crusaders in the Holy Land. Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press. OCLC 1004860416 Benvenisti, Meron (1976): Jerusalem, the Torn City, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Benvenisti, Meron (1984): West Bank Data Project: A Survey of Israel's Policies, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Benvenisti, Meron (1988): Conflicts and Contradictions, Villard, Benvenisti, Meron (1995): Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land. University of California Press Benvenisti, Meron (1996): City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem. University of California Press Benvenisti, Meron (2002): Sacred Landscape: Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. University of California Press. Benvenisti, Meron (2007): Sons of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections and Regrets from a Political Life. University of California Press Benvenisti, Meron (2012), The Dream of the White Sabra (Hebrew)

Articles (partial)

(about Sataf)

(about Ikrit)

(on the possible/probable de facto long-term political division between Gaza and the West Bank and its effects on both Israel and the Palestinians)