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 Machover under 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, although the group began to receive attention in the Israeli press after the 1967 war and the emergence of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

Orr left Israel in 1964 and settled in London, where he continued to be politically active. He was on the editorial board of ISRACA(Israeli Revolutionary Action Committee Abroad), an anti-Zionist publication "devoted to a critique of the ideologial, cultural and psychological aspects of Poliical Zionism"

In London, Orr became acquainted with several prominent left-wing intellectuals, such as the Austrian poet Erich Fried and Trinidadian Marxist and cricketing authority CLR James, with whom he enjoyed a close friendship.

1968 saw the publication of The Other Israel: the radical case against Zionism, a collection of articles by Orr, Machover and Haim Hanegbi. In the same year he joined the London-based group “Solidarity”, a libertarian socialist organisation and befriended its mentor Cornelius Castoriadis. From this time on, Orr became a libertarian socialist (not ideologically bound to the theories of Marx and Lenin), prompting a cooling in his relationship with Machover.

In 1984 Ithaca Press published Orr's The Un-Jewish State: the Politics of Jewish Identity in Israel, in which he argued that political Zionism had failed to preserve Jewish identity. In 1994, Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises was published, a collection of Orr's essays which also dealt with the issues arising from the clash between the state's secular and Jewish identities. By this time, Orr had moved back to Israel (in 1990).

Direct Democracy

Following his conversion to Libertarian Socialism in the late 1960s, Orr became increasingly active in the promotion of radical Direct Democracy, which rejects the notion of representative democracy and calls for the decision-making process to be placed in the hands of every single citizen. Orr's ideas are grounded in the events of May 1968 in France. In the wake of the wildcat general strike, which at its peak saw 10 million workers on strike, thousands of self-management committees sprang up throughout the country. Drawing heavily on the contemporary reports of the Observer journalists Patrick Searle and Maureen McConville, Orr asserts the desire of the strikers was not to reform the political system but to replace it entirely with a system of democratic self-governance, in which all workers had a say in the decision making process. Orr maintains that while in 1968 the technology did not exist that would allow all citizens to participate in decision making, it does so today. Orr has argued that political corruption is an inherent feature of representative democracy and electoral systems and that only a system of "politics without politicians" can eliminate corruption. Orr has written and distributed two major works on Direct Democracy, "Politics without Politicians", an outline of the central tenets of Direct Democracy and "Big Business, Big Government or Direct Democracy: Who Should Shape Society?", which asserts the history of the 20th century was characterised by the conflict between state and private control of the economy.