User:Stillmans39/Akiva Orr

Akiva or 'Aki' Orr is an Israeli writer and political activist. He is an outspoken critic of Zionism who has campaigned for a joint Israeli-Palestinian state in Israel for over 30 years. He is now a leading advocate of radical Direct Democracy.

Early Life

Orr was born in Berlin in 1931. His parents left Germany when he was 3 and moved to Palestine. Orr grew up in Tel Aviv and attended the First Municipal School of Tel Aviv. Orr was a keen swimmer and was the Maccabi 200m breast stroke champion in 1946 and 1947. In 1948 Orr was drafted into the Haganah, the Jewish paramiltary organisation which was to develop into the Israeli Defence Forces later that year following the creation of the State of Israel. Orr joined the Navy, which did not have a role in the 1948 War of Independence.

Political Career

Orr served in the Israeli navy until 1950, and then joined the merchant navy. He participated in the Israeli Seaman Strike of 1951 which lasted 40 days. It was during this time that Orr became politicised (before this he had been politically apathetic) as a result of a beating incurred at the hands of the Israeli police. In the same year he joined the Israeli Communist party. Orr remained in the merchant navy until 1955, when he moved to Jerusalem to study mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University. There, he served as secretary of the Union of Communist Science Students at the university. Following his graduation in 1958, Orr started teaching mathematics and physics at the AIU Technical College.

In 1957, Orr published his first major work. Written with Moshe Machoverunder the pseudonym, A Israeli, Shalom, Shalom ve'ein Shalom (Template:Lang-he; Peace, Peace, and there is no Peace) set out to demonstrate how Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had colluded with Britain and France in a colonial war against Egypt and disprove his claims that the 1956 Suez War had been a war fought to save Israel from annihilation.

In 1962, Orr left the Israeli Communist Party and alongside Machover, Oded Pilavsky and Meir Smorodinsky formed The Socialist Organization in Israel, better known as Matzpen. Its founders rejected what they saw as the Israeli Communist Party's unquestioning loyalty to the Soviet Union. Matzpen viewed the Zionist project in Israel as a colonising project, although they were careful to distinguish it from the European colonialism of the 19th and 20th century, arguing that the Zionists had come to Palestine to expropriate the indiginous population rather than to exploit it economically.

Mazpen remained on the fringes of Israeli politics throughout its existence, never gaining more than a few dozen members