Isabel Kershner

Billed as the world’s biggest singing competition with a global television audience of 200 million, Eurovision was lifted this year by a guest appearance by Madonna and enough glitz, plumes of fire and special effects to invigorate even the blandest Europop.

But the winner, Duncan Laurence, 24, opted for a more minimalist approach surprisingly devoid of gimmicks. He sang his moody solo, “Arcade,” about a broken heart, while accompanying himself on the piano.

Behind the scenes of this year’s Eurovision, the ever-present political tensions in host country Israel played out. Israel was chosen for having won last year’s contest, but an international pro-Palestinian campaign urged artists and the public to boycott the five-day event.

The boycott campaign claimed a degree of victory, citing growing awareness of its cause. But no contestants or countries dropped out of the competition, which Israelis said served as an unrivaled showcase for their country.

Tel Aviv took on a carnival atmosphere with tens of thousands of Israelis packing an open-air Eurovision village on the beachfront to watch free concerts and live broadcasts of the competition on giant screens.

Israel left little to chance in its effort to rebrand itself as a hip, gay-friendly tourist destination as opposed to a fraught Holy Land wracked by conflict.

The secret weapon was Madonna, a devout student of kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, and her appearance was shrouded in mystery. She signed a contract with the organizers two days before the final after months of rumors. And she performed her 30-year-old classic “Like a Prayer,” and the world onstage premiere of “Future,” with U.S. rapper Quavo.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel had urged Madonna to boycott the event, accusing her of “artwashing Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinians for a million dollars.”

Instead, her guest appearance, sponsored by Sylvan Adams, a Canadian-Israeli tycoon and philanthropist, delivered a public relations boost to both Eurovision and Israel. In part, Adams said, the idea was to increase the visibility of Eurovision in less engaged parts of the world, particularly North America.

In an on-camera chat with one of the Israeli presenters of the show, Madonna addressed the criticism by declaring, “Never underestimate the power of music to bring people together.” On stage, two of her dancers briefly flashed Israeli and Palestinian flags stuck on their backs, flouting Eurovision rules.

Many critics said Madonna, appearing at around 1 a.m. Israeli time, sang out of tune.

Some Eurovision artists have catapulted to international fame, including ABBA, the Swedish quartet that won in 1974 with “Waterloo,” and Celine Dion, the French Canadian chanteuse who won the contest for Switzerland in 1988. For the most part, though, contestants have faded into relative obscurity outside their home countries.

This year’s finalists included the operatic. Australia’s entrant, Kate Miller-Heidke, a classically trained soprano, sang an ethereal number, “Zero Gravity,” as she and her dancers appeared to float in a starry night sky.

Countries outside Europe can compete in Eurovision through membership in or by invitation from the organizer, the European Broadcasting Union. The first Eurovision, held in Switzerland in 1956 with seven countries competing, tried to promote unity on the postwar continent.

This year, in a jarring contrast to Eurovision’s vibe of love and harmony, Iceland’s dystopian, bondage-themed, techno-punk band Hatari practically growled its way through “Hate Will Prevail.” In the official English translation of the lyrics, the song goes: “Hate will prevail/And Europe’s heart impale.”

Unsmiling Hatari members also unfurled a scarf that read “Palestine” in the colors of the Palestinian flag on screen during the voting. The home crowd booed.

At the other end of the spectrum, Serhat, a Turkish entertainer (and dentist) representing San Marino, a tiny, mountainous republic rarely heard of outside Eurovision, performed “Say Na Na Na,” a self-aware bit of digestible Europop. The audience in the 7,500-seat auditorium was more than a fifth the size of San Marino’s population of 35,000.

Israel’s contestant, Kobi Marimi, went straight to the final, a privilege afforded to the host country, although his ballad was panned by Israeli critics. He came in 23rd out of the 26 finalists.

Marimi, 27, largely unknown in Israel until he won the reality show that made him the country’s pick for Eurovision, had previously said he thought Israelis were missing the point by focusing too much on the outcome.

“You can only win in Eurovision. You cannot lose in Eurovision,” he told reporters.

The results combine the rankings of professional judges from each competing country — who often vote in regional or linguistic cliques — and those of viewers who vote via phone, text or Eurovision app.

Israel, a non-European member of the broadcasting union, has won four times since the 1970s — including last year in Lisbon with “Toy,” sung by Netta Barzilai, a flamboyant singer who stands for women’s empowerment.

This competition, Israel’s third time as host, was accompanied by unusually intense background noise as the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement campaigned against Israel’s role.

Omar Barghouti, founder of the movement, said that holding Eurovision in Israel was “a political decision and a very immoral one at that.”

The movement’s goals range from opposing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to supporting a right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, an aim that Israel’s advocates say means the dismantling of the country as a Jewish state.

There were mass petitions against participating. Two international DJs dropped out of a Tel Aviv beach party. Scores of LGBTQ groups boycotted the event and held parties that screened alternative concerts with Palestinian artists.

The boycotters took credit for a lower-than-expected turnout of Eurovision tourists. About 10,000 people came from abroad, according to Israeli officials, including 1,500 journalists and bloggers and 1,500 members of the delegations. Last year’s contest in Lisbon, Portugal, drew an estimated 90,000 tourists.

But Eurovision fans said the cost of traveling to Israel — rather than taking a bus or train on the European continent — kept many away. A deadly bout of fighting with Gaza a week beforehand may also have tamped down tourism.

Barghouti said the campaign had managed to raise awareness about Palestinian rights among millions of people whom the movement would not normally reach.

Brushing off the lower number of visitors, Israelis said that Eurovision was mainly a television event in any case and that clips showing the contestants dancing in beautiful spots around the country promoted Israel.

William Lee Adams, the founder of Wiwibloggs, a leading independent Eurovision site, said he had been in tenser situations, with more visible security, like at the competition in Ukraine two years ago.

“At Eurovision in Kiev in 2017, there were men in the press center with large guns,” he said. “Here we have an ice coffee machine.”

The Netherlands wins eurovision without usual gimmicks

TEL AVIV, Israel — With a powerful but low-key ballad, the Netherlands won the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, an unapologetically kitschy event with 41 participating countries held this year in Tel Aviv.

His death was announced by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, the philanthropic organization he founded, which grew to become one of Israel’s largest nonprofit organizations. No cause was given.

A Zionist and social activist, Eckstein was often described as a “bridge builder,” an epithet that became the title of an authorized biography published in 2015. He also caused concern among Jews who were wary of the motives of evangelicals, the main source of the contributions.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel paid tribute to Eckstein after his death, saying he had “worked tirelessly to benefit the citizens of Israel and to strengthen the bond between Christian communities and the state of Israel.”

Eckstein was ordained at Yeshiva University in New York and began fostering Jewish-Christian relations as a staff member of the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago in the late 1970s. Identifying evangelicals as an untapped well of support for Israel and other Jewish causes, but finding the Jewish establishment reluctant to engage with them, he struck out on his own and founded the Fellowship in 1983.

The mass immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union to Israel in the 1990s presented an opportunity. Eckstein began his On Wings of Eagles project, raising money through television infomercials and striking a chord with evangelicals who hailed the arrival of Jewish exiles as part of biblical prophecy.

The Fellowship has since focused on assisting immigration to Israel and providing welfare and support for vulnerable populations, such as the poor, elderly Holocaust survivors, Ethiopian-Israelis and Druse.

Eckstein became an Israeli citizen in 2002, and the center of his group’s operations shifted to Jerusalem.

The organization has helped build and upgrade thousands of bomb shelters, provided MRI machines to hospitals, donated fire engines, and given surveillance drones to communities along the Gaza border and in the occupied West Bank to improve security. It has pledged support to Jews caught in the Venezuelan crisis and has teamed up with the Chabad Hasidic movement in Morocco to distribute food packages to needy Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan.

The Fellowship now raises more than $140 million per year, mostly from small donations from Christians. It has offices in Jerusalem, Chicago, Toronto and Seoul, South Korea, and is building a multimillion-dollar center in Jerusalem that will serve as its new headquarters and a base for Christians visitors. The organization said it had raised about $1.6 billion since its founding in 1983.

Yechiel Zvi Eckstein was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1951, to Simon L. and Belle (Hirschman) Eckstein. His father was a Canadian rabbi and psychologist who was serving in Winthrop at the time. The family moved to Ottawa in 1952, and his father went on to become chief rabbi there.

Yechiel Eckstein had three daughters from his first marriage, to Bonnie Siegman, which ended in divorce. He remarried, and survivors include his wife, Joelle Medina; his mother; his daughters, Tamar, Talia and Yael; and eight grandchildren. Yael Eckstein has been the Fellowship’s global executive vice president and is expected to continue her father’s work.

Yechiel Eckstein had built up what he and others described as an empire. From the beginning, though, he had to walk a religious and cultural tightrope. In a profile of Eckstein in The New York Times Magazine in 2005, his biographer, Zev Chafets, described how a pastor in Muster, Indiana, had once introduced Eckstein to his congregation as an ex-rabbi who had become a born-again Christian.

A mortified Eckstein tried to dispel that notion without insulting his hosts, telling them that he was an Orthodox Jewish rabbi who believed in “a Messiah.”

Of Eckstein and his hundreds of thousands of evangelical donors, Chafets wrote, “No Jew since Jesus has commanded this kind of gentile following.”

Not everyone approved of his success. Rabbis and Israelis on the right remain divided over the principle of accepting money from evangelicals who many Jews believe want ultimately to convert them to Christianity, or to cast them as part of an end-of-days scenario.

Many evangelical Christians believe that God holds Israel in special favor, and some see the country’s existence as an element of prophecies about the apocalypse. At the same time — paradoxically for Israeli supporters — many evangelicals hold that only those who accept Jesus can be saved.

A majority of American Jews, meanwhile, are liberal Democrats whose values are often at odds with the strongly Republican evangelicals.

In recent years, the growing alliance between Netanyahu, President Donald Trump and evangelical Christians has signaled broader acceptance of such relations while also exposing the fault lines.

Eckstein credited Trump’s conservative Christian base with a critical role in his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, overturning decades of U.S. policy.

But at the embassy dedication ceremony in May, the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist pastor, delivered an opening prayer that referred to the Second Coming — a remark that many Jews, including Eckstein, found inappropriate.

Still, soon after the embassy move, Eckstein said he was involved in “changing the 2,000-year history where Christians were our biggest enemies, to the point that they are today, I would say, our greatest friends.”

He was also criticized over the years for the size of his salary and for publicity campaigns that some Israelis said had exaggerated poverty levels.

After serving on the international board of governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental organization dealing, among other things, with immigration to Israel, Eckstein broke with the agency and started his own operation to attract Jews from Ukraine.

Isaac Herzog, a former minister of social welfare and now chairman of the Jewish Agency, recalled visiting a new soup kitchen with Eckstein in 2009. “I saw how much he cared,” Herzog said. “How he spoke to people. He was very devoted to the projects.”

Days before his death, Eckstein attended a fundraising event for the Hadassah Medical Center, which runs two hospitals in Jerusalem. He praised the hospitals as havens of cooperation between Arabs and Jews, Christians and Muslims, then picked up his guitar and sang a popular Hebrew anthem to Jerusalem. The audience sang along.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/obituaries/rabbi-yechiel-eckstein-dead.html" id="7dd11a02-d709-32f7-affe-3197cd064d90">The New York Times</a>.

JERUSALEM — Yechiel Eckstein, an Israeli-American rabbi whose organization has raised more than $1.5 billion for Israel by promoting closer ties with evangelical Christians abroad, died Wednesday at his home in Jerusalem. He was 67.

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, a Promoter of Israeli-Evangelical Ties, Dies at 67

<h1>JERUSALEM — Moshe Arens, the Israeli politician and statesman who was one of the last of his country’s founding generation of right-wing, liberal Zionists, and who held top posts but never achieved his greatest aspirations, died on Monday at his home in Savyon, Israel. He was 93.</h1>

His son-in-law, Dr. Itzhak Fried, said Arens had died in his sleep.

A former member of the Irgun militia and a young leader of the revisionist Betar Youth Movement, Arens remained until his last days a beacon of Israel’s ideological right. After helping to found the Herut (Freedom) party, he reached the top echelons of its outgrowth, the Likud, and was seen by many as the natural heir of the conservative Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.

Arens served three times as defense minister and also as foreign minister and as Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

Widely considered an outstanding defense minister, Arens was respected by the military and helped shape Israel’s defense doctrine. A champion of Israeli self-reliance, he fostered Israel’s aerospace program and became the godfather of one of the country’s most ambitious, though ill-fated, projects — to build a state-of-the-art fighter plane, the Lavi.

“There was no greater patriot than him,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in tribute. He had grown up in the same revisionist movement, and his political career was nurtured and then promoted by Arens.

Though Arens was one of the longest-surviving members of Israel’s founding generation, his grandest political and national goals remained unfulfilled. An aeronautical engineer by training who lacked charisma and the common touch, he never made it to the premiership, while the Lavi was grounded under intense pressure from the Pentagon.

Arens, also known by his nickname, Misha, served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and left for Israel in 1948 to join the fight for independence. He pursued a career in engineering before winning a seat in the Knesset, or parliament, on the Likud ticket in 1973.

A somewhat dour academic and a paragon of politeness and correctitude, Arens seemed increasingly out of place in the hurly-burly of the Likud. But his ideological credentials and acumen continued to propel him up the ranks of the party, which swept into power on a popular tide in 1977 and has since then dominated Israeli politics for many years.

Arens veered right of Begin, his mentor, voting against the Camp David Accords with Egypt in 1978 because he believed that a total withdrawal from Sinai was too heavy a price. His hawkishness helped earn him an appointment as ambassador to the United States in 1982, a time when Israel was drawing headlines and international criticism for invading Lebanon to flush out the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Yet Arens proved adept at making Israel’s case in the United States and came to be valued by Reagan administration officials as an Israeli government insider, according to journalist Wolf Blitzer in his 1985 book “Between Washington and Jerusalem.”

Arens returned home in 1983 to take up the post of defense minister, replacing Ariel Sharon, a decorated general who had been forced to resign after a tribunal found him indirectly but personally responsible for the massacre by Israeli-allied Lebanese Phalange militiamen at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps near Beirut.

The Israeli army was spread thin in Lebanon, and Arens set about consolidating the forces there.

“He basically undid what Sharon did,” said Ehud Yaari, co-author of the 1984 book “Israel’s Lebanon War.”

Arens won support for his work in Lebanon but was ultimately unable to parlay that into what he had hoped would be his legacy: the Lavi. He lobbied for the project from its inception in 1980. The U.S. government at first gave a green light for the transfer of technology, and Congress approved an allocation of $250 million a year through U.S. military aid.

But the Americans later withdrew their support, largely because of the ballooning cost, and the project was canceled in 1987, its proponents in Israel having been defeated in the Cabinet by a single vote.

The demise of the project released into the market hundreds of engineers with cutting-edge knowledge and experience, giving Israel’s then-burgeoning high-tech industry an infusion of talent.

After the defeat of his beloved project, Arens remained in government as a minister without portfolio, as foreign minister and then again as defense minister until 1992, when Likud was voted out of power. He returned briefly in 1999 to challenge his own protégé, Netanyahu, for the party leadership, but lost and served briefly in Netanyahu’s Cabinet before leaving politics for good.

“Misha was one of the most important ministers of defense the State of Israel ever had,” said President Reuven Rivlin, another scion of the revisionist Herut movement. “He was not a commander or a general, but a devoted man of learning who toiled day and night for the security of Israel and its citizens.”

Moshe Arens was born in Kovno, now Kaunas, Lithuania, on Dec. 27, 1925, and moved with his family to the United States at 13. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in World War II before leaving to fight in Israel’s 1948 war of independence with Begin’s right-wing underground militia, the Irgun.

After going back to the United States for graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology and working in the U.S. aviation industry, Arens returned to Israel in 1957. He worked as an associate professor of aeronautical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, and as vice president for engineering at the state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries. He married Muriel Eisenberg and had four children, Yigal, Ranan, Aliza and Rut. They and his wife survive him, as do 10 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

Arens once told Blitzer that “Israel exists in the Middle East, not in the Middle West of the United States,” and that he was of the view that it was up to the Arabs to prove they wanted peace with Israel, not the other way around.

Even so, he was a strong advocate for equal civil rights for Israel’s Arab citizens, and he supported making practical arrangements with the Palestinians, approaching that issue with a regard for basic human rights. He backed the Shamir Plan, first proposed in 1989, to hold Palestinian elections in the occupied territories to be followed by talks and limited autonomy. But the initiative failed to get off the ground.

Arens later denounced the interim Oslo Accords, which were reached with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s, and strongly oppose Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Eschewing the current Palestinian leadership as a true partner for peace, he advised patience. “I say proceed slowly,” he said in an interview in 2016. “Everyone wants to know what’s the end game. I don’t know what it will be.”

Still, he continued to be a voice of moral clarity, writing regular columns in the liberal Haaretz newspaper into his 90s, and he did not shy away from criticizing the Netanyahu government. In 2016, when Netanyahu appointed an ultranationalist rival, Avigdor Lieberman, as defense minister, Arens described the move as a “murky” political deal. (Lieberman resigned late last year.)

More recently, Arens rejected the passage of a contentious nation-state law that enshrined national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people,” made Jewish building a priority and downgraded Arabic from an official language alongside Hebrew to one with a special status. Arens said the legislation, which was heavily promoted by Netanyahu, was “needless,” “damaging to Israel” and gratuitously insulting to the country’s Arab citizens when, he said, Israel’s Jewishness was not in question.

Arens devoted his later years to writing. In his 2011 book, “Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto,” he brought to light the previously unrecognized role of the Betar fighters in the 1943 ghetto uprising during World War II.

His political memoir, “In Defense of Israel,” published last February, conveys a sense of satisfaction with his life’s work.

“I look back in wonder at Israel’s sixty-nine-year history,” he wrote in the epilogue. “In a few decades it has developed into a country well able to defend itself with a dynamic economy growing at a rapid rate, while simultaneously fulfilling its declared mission and absorbing millions of Jews in need of a haven.”

Recounting Israel’s victories in wars of survival and defense against waves of terror, he concluded, “It is Israel’s military prowess and economic vitality that has paved the way to progress toward peace with its Arab neighbors. Arab nations have come to realize that, like it or not, Israel is here to stay.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="fcc83f92-fdee-47e8-bbc1-9b9c7fe5458f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/obituaries/moshe-arens-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Moshe Arens, Israeli statesman and ex-defense minister, dies at 93

His son-in-law, Dr. Itzhak Fried, said Arens had died in his sleep.

Widely considered an outstanding civilian defense minister, Arens was respected by the military and helped shape Israel’s defense doctrine. A champion of Israeli self-reliance, he fostered Israel’s aerospace program and became the godfather of one of the country’s most ambitious, though ill-fated, projects — to build an indigenous state-of-the-art fighter plane, the Lavi.

“There was no greater patriot than him,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who grew up in the same revisionist movement and whose political career was nurtured and then promoted by Arens. “Moshe Arens’ great contribution to our people and our country will forever be remembered.”

Arens, also known by his nickname, Misha, served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and left for Israel in 1948 to join the fight for independence. He then pursued a career in engineering before winning a seat in the Knesset, or Parliament, on the Likud ticket in 1973.

A somewhat dour academic and a paragon of politeness and correctitude, Arens seemed increasingly out of place in the hurly-burly of the Likud. But his ideological credentials and acumen continued to propel him up the ranks of the party, which swept into power on a popular tide in 1977 and has dominated Israeli politics for many years since.

Yet Arens proved adept at making Israel’s case to audiences in the United States and came to be valued by Reagan administration officials as an Israeli government insider, according to journalist Wolf Blitzer in his 1985 book “Between Washington and Jerusalem.”

Arens returned home in 1983 to take up the position of defense minister, replacing Ariel Sharon, a decorated general who was forced to resign after a tribunal found him indirectly but personally responsible for the massacre by Israeli-allied Lebanese Phalange militiamen at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps near Beirut.

The Israeli army was spread thin in Lebanon. Arens set about consolidating the forces there.

Arens won support for his work in Lebanon, but was ultimately unable to parlay that into what he had hoped would be his legacy: the Lavi. He lobbied for the project intensively from its inception in 1980. The U.S. government initially gave a green light for the transfer of necessary technology, and Congress approved an allocation of $250 million a year through U.S. military aid.

But the Americans later withdrew their support, largely because of the ballooning cost, and the project was canceled in 1987, its proponents in Israel defeated in the Cabinet by a single vote.

The demise of the project released into the market hundreds of engineers with cutting-edge knowledge and experience, providing a crucial boost to Israel’s then-burgeoning high-tech industry.

Moshe Arens was born in Kovno, now Kaunas, Lithuania, on Dec. 27, 1925, and moved with his family to the United States at 13. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in World War II before leaving to fight in Israel’s 1948 war of independence with Begin’s right-wing underground militia, the Irgun.

After going back to the United States for graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology and a stint in the U.S. aviation industry, Arens returned to Israel in 1957 for good. He worked as an associate professor of aeronautical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, and as vice president for engineering at the state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries. He married Muriel Eisenberg and had four children, Yigal, Ranan, Aliza and Rut. They and his wife survive him, as do 10 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

Arens once told Blitzer that “Israel exists in the Middle East, not in the Middle West of the United States” and that he was of the view that it was up to the Arabs to prove they wanted peace with Israel, not the other way around.

Nevertheless, he was a strong advocate for equal civil rights for Israel’s Arab citizens. He also supported making practical arrangements with the Palestinians and approached the issue with a regard for basic human rights. Arens backed the Shamir Plan, first proposed in 1989, to hold Palestinian elections in the occupied territories to be followed by talks and limited autonomy. The initiative failed to get off the ground.

Arens went on to denounce the interim Oslo Accords, which were reached with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s, and strongly oppose Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Eschewing the current Palestinian leadership as a true partner for peace, Arens advised patience, cautioning in a 2016 interview, “I say proceed slowly. Everyone wants to know what’s the end game. I don’t know what it will be.”

Still, he continued to be a voice of moral clarity, writing regular columns in the liberal Haaretz newspaper into his 90s, and he did not shy away from criticizing the Netanyahu government.

He decried Netanyahu’s appointment of an ultranationalist rival, Avigdor Lieberman, as defense minister in 2016, describing it as a result of a “murky” political deal. (Lieberman resigned late last year.)

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/obituaries/moshe-arens-dead.html" id="55e2c310-bdd2-3553-a1e2-68a50862d06a">The New York Times</a>.

JERUSALEM — Moshe Arens, the Israeli politician and statesman who was one of the last of his country’s founding generation of right-wing, liberal Zionists, and who held top posts but never achieved his greatest aspirations, died on Monday at his home in Savyon, Israel. He was 93.

Moshe Arens, Israeli Statesman and Ex-Defense Minister, Dies at 93

Dr. Itzhak Fried, Arens’ son-in-law, said Arens had died at home in his sleep.

Widely considered an outstanding civilian defense minister, Arens was respected by the military and helped shape Israel’s defense doctrine as an army outsider involved in the core debate. A champion of Israeli self-reliance, he fostered Israel’s aerospace program and became the godfather of one of the country’s most ambitious projects — to build an indigenous state-of-the-art fighter plane, the Lavi.

“There was no greater patriot than him,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who grew up in the same revisionist movement and whose political career was nurtured and then diligently promoted by Arens. “Moshe Arens’ great contribution to our people and our country will forever be remembered.”

Nevertheless, he supported making practical arrangements with the Palestinians and approached the issue with a regard for basic human rights. Arens backed the Shamir Plan, first proposed in 1989, to hold Palestinian elections in the occupied territories to be followed by talks and limited autonomy. The initiative failed to get off the ground.

JERUSALEM — Moshe Arens, the Israeli politician and statesman who served three times as defense minister, and also as foreign minister and Israel’s ambassador to the United States, died Monday in Savyon, Israel. He was 93.

A former member of the Irgun militia and a young leader of the revisionist Betar Youth Movement, Arens remained until his last days a beacon of Israel’s ideological right. After helping found the Herut (Freedom) party, he reached the top echelons of its outgrowth, the Likud, and was seen by many as the natural heir of the conservative Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.

“There was no greater patriot than him,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who grew up in the same revisionist movement and whose political career was first nurtured and then diligently promoted by Arens. “Moshe Arens’ great contribution to our people and our country will forever be remembered.”

The demise of the project released hundreds of engineers with cutting-edge knowledge and experience into the market and has been credited with providing a crucial boost to Israel’s then-burgeoning high-tech industry.

After the defeat of his beloved project, Arens remained in government serving as a minister without portfolio, as foreign minister and then again as defense minister until 1992, when Likud was voted out of power. He returned briefly in 1999 to challenge his own protégé, Netanyahu, for the party leadership, but lost and served briefly in Netanyahu’s Cabinet before leaving politics for good.

After going back to the United States for graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology and a stint in the U.S. aviation industry, Arens returned to Israel in 1957 for good. He worked as an associate professor of aeronautical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, and as vice president for engineering at the state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries. He married and had four children. He is survived by his wife, the former Muriel Eisenberg; his four children, Yigal, Ranan, Aliza and Rut; 10 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

Arens once told Blitzer that “Israel exists in the Middle East, not in the Middle West of the United States” and that he was of the view that it was up to the Arabs to prove they wanted peace with Israel, not the other way around. Nevertheless, he supported the need for practical arrangements with the Palestinians and approached the issue with a sense of decency and regard for basic human rights. Arens backed the Shamir Plan, first proposed in 1989, to hold Palestinian elections in the occupied territories to be followed by talks and limited autonomy. The initiative failed to get off the ground.

Arens went on to denounce the interim Oslo Accords reached with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s and strongly opposed Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Eschewing the current Palestinian leadership as a true partner for peace, Arens advised patience, cautioning in a 2016 interview, “I say proceed slowly. Everyone wants to know what’s the end game. I don’t know what it will be.”

Still, he continued to raise a sharp voice of moral clarity, writing regular columns in the liberal Haaretz newspaper into his 90s, and did not shy away from criticizing the Netanyahu government.

He decried Netanyahu’s appointment of an ultranationalist rival, Avigdor Lieberman, as defense minister in 2016, describing it as the result of a “murky” political deal. (Lieberman resigned late last year.)

More recently, he rejected the passage of a contentious nation-state law enshrining national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people,” prioritizing Jewish building and downgrading Arabic from an official language alongside Hebrew to one with a special status. Arens denounced the legislation, which was heavily promoted by Netanyahu, as “needless,” “damaging to Israel” and gratuitously insulting to the country’s Arab citizens when, he said, Israel’s Jewishness was not in question.

Arens devoted his later years to writing. In his 2011 book, “Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto,” he brought to light the previously unrecognized role of the Betar fighters in the 1943 ghetto uprising.

His death was announced by his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger, who wrote on Twitter that he had died after a short battle with cancer, “in his sleep, peacefully.” She did not say where he died.

In recent years Oz had been living in Tel Aviv.

One of Israel’s most prolific writers and respected intellectuals, Oz began storytelling in his early 20s. He published more than a dozen novels, including “My Michael” and “Black Box,” as well as collections of short fiction, works of nonfiction and many essays. His work was translated into more than 35 languages.

His acclaimed memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” was first published in Hebrew in 2002 and became an international best-seller. A movie based on the book, directed by and starring Natalie Portman, was released in 2016.

Among a generation of native Israeli writers that included A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, Oz wrote richly in modern Hebrew. The revival of that ancient language was extolled by the founders of the state as a crucial element in forging a new Israeli identity.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Oz as “one of the greatest authors” Israel has produced and said that he “deftly and emotionally expressed important aspects of the Israeli experience.”

His own soul was scored by early tragedy after his mother died by suicide when he was 12. Much of his writing revolved around intimate portraits of Israeli life laced with a sense of loss and melancholy.

“Without a wound,” he once said, “there is no author.”

Though a passionate voice for peace, Oz was not a pacifist and had no illusions about the hostile neighborhood in which Israel exists. He served in the military, fought in two wars as a reserve soldier in a tank unit and said it was sometimes necessary to use force in order to fight aggression, in the tradition of pragmatic Labor Zionism.

Soon after the 1967 Middle East war, in which Israel conquered the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Oz began advocating for withdrawal and a two-state solution, meaning the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, long before the idea became mainstream. While many Israelis blame the Palestinians for the impasse in the peace process, dismissing the Palestinian leadership’s willingness or ability to reach a deal, Oz held Israeli leadership accountable.

He was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem on May 4, 1939, and his early years were spent in an atmosphere that was both scholarly and militant. His father, Yehuda Arieh Klausner, a librarian, and his mother, Fania Mussman, had immigrated from Eastern Europe. They met in Jerusalem. Though polyglots themselves, they insisted that their son speak only Hebrew.

He completed his secondary education in Hulda and worked in the rolling farmland between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The hardy, pioneering characters of the Socialist kibbutz movement would later inhabit some of his novels.

In Hulda, he met Nily Zuckerman. They married in 1960. She and their three children, Fania, Galia and Daniel, survive him, as do several grandchildren.

Oz won some of the literary world’s highest honors, including the Goethe Prize and the French Knight’s Cross of the Légion D’Honneur.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/obituaries/amos-oz-dead.html" id="cd2dcfb9-88da-3b71-a217-3962f58b0107">The New York Times</a>.

JERUSALEM — Amos Oz, the renowned Israeli author whose work captured the characters and landscapes of his young nation, and who matured into a leading moral voice and an insistent advocate for peace with the Palestinians, died Friday. He was 79.

Amos Oz, Israeli Author and Peace Advocate, Dies at 79

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Brazil on Friday, described Oz as “one of the greatest authors” Israel has produced and said that he “deftly and emotionally expressed important aspects of the Israeli experience.”

Alluding to Oz’s piercingly eloquent left-wing advocacy, Netanyahu, a conservative, added, “Even though we had differences of opinion in many fields, I greatly appreciate his contributions to the Hebrew language and the renewal of Hebrew literature.”

Oz came into the world nine years before the state of Israel was established, in what was then Palestine under British rule, and his life spanned the country’s history. He weathered its upheavals and pried into its divisions like an angry, secular prophet.

Soon after the 1967 Middle East war, in which Israel conquered the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Oz began advocating for withdrawal and a two-state solution, meaning the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, long before the idea became mainstream.

In the late 1970s he helped found Peace Now, a left-wing group that formed during the negotiations for a peace treaty with Egypt.

With the weakening of the Israeli left in the wake of the violence of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which broke out in 2000, and the national shift toward the right, Oz’s voice seemed to become increasingly anachronistic. Critics on the far right called him a traitor.

Oz said there was nothing new in that. In a 2014 interview with the newspaper Yediot Ahronot on the occasion of the publication of his novel “The Gospel According to Judas,” published in English as "Judas" in 2016, Oz said that he was first branded a traitor as a child when he was seen associating with a British sergeant, and that he had been called a traitor since 1967.

“Sometimes — not always, but sometimes,” he said, “the title, traitor, can be worn as a badge of honor.” He suggested he was in good company, citing others who had been so branded, including Winston Churchill, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin.

Nor was he immune to criticism from the far left. In a review of Oz’s last book, “Dear Zealot,” in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, Avraham Burg, a former politician who posits that the two-state solution is dead and calls for a single, binational Jewish-Palestinian state, wrote, “Oz, as a fanatic supporter of the two-state solution, tramples everything on the way to his expired solution.”

“Dear Zealot,” a slim volume published in 2017, is made up of three essays on the theme of fanaticism, which Oz termed the worst scourge of the 21st century. He described the book as loaded “with the conclusions of a whole life.”

Oz’s concern about zealotry in Israel and beyond was already pronounced nearly two decades ago. Days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, he wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times, “Being the victims of Arab and Muslim fundamentalism often blinds us so that we tend to ignore the rise of chauvinistic and religious extremism not only in the domain of Islam but also in various parts of the Christian world, and indeed among the Jewish people.”

While many Israelis blame the Palestinians for the impasse in the peace process, dismissing the Palestinian leadership’s willingness or ability to reach a deal, Oz held Israeli leadership accountable. And he rejected any notion of a one-state solution, saying he was not ready to live as a minority in what would inevitably become an Arab country.

In addition, Oz wanted the character of Israel to be defined by humanistic Jewish culture, not only by Jewish religion and nationality.

He was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem on May 4, 1939, and his early years were spent in an atmosphere that was both scholarly and militant. His father, Yehuda Arieh Klausner, a librarian, and his mother, Fania Mussman, had immigrated from Eastern Europe. They met in Jerusalem. Though polyglots themselves, they insisted their son speak only Hebrew.

Amos spent his childhood in the city in a suffocating, book-crammed apartment with a steady diet of what he called “blood and fire,” referring to his parents’ belief in the necessity of strength and power to establish and maintain the Jewish state. As a young teenager, 2 1/2 years after his mother’s suicide, he rebelled and moved to Kibbutz Hulda, swapping his urban home for fresh air and a communal life. It was there that he changed his surname to Oz, Hebrew for courage.

He said he “decided to become everything his father was not.”

After Oz completed mandatory military service in 1961, the kibbutz assembly sent him to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a BA in philosophy and literature.

Returning to Hulda after graduation, he settled into a routine of writing and farming. He also did guard and dining-room duty and taught in the kibbutz high school.

He fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars and spent a year as a visiting fellow at Oxford University.

After returning to Israel, the family moved from lush Hulda to the southern desert town of Arad, where the dry air was considered beneficial for their son, Daniel, who suffered from asthma. They made Arad their home for decades.

There, Oz described a daily routine of rising at 5 a.m., drinking coffee and going for a walk to breathe the desert air before settling down to write in his small basement study.

In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, he said he marked the separation between his political and literary writing by using pens with two colors of ink, one blue and the other black, that sat on his desk.

“I never mix them up,” he said of the pens. “One is to tell the government to go to hell. The other is to tell stories.”

Oz also became a professor in the department of Hebrew literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba.

He won some of the literary world’s highest honors, including the Goethe Prize and the French Knight’s Cross of the Légion D’Honneur. He was perennially considered a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature.

In awarding him the prestigious Israel Prize in 1998, the judges wrote, “For some 35 years, in his writing he has accompanied the realities of Israeli life and expressed them uniquely as he touches upon the pain and ebullience of the Israeli soul.”

Politics often infused his literary efforts, and he sometimes used literature to explicate politics.

Torn by the 100-year conflict with the Palestinians, Oz told The New York Times in 2013: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash of right and right. Tragedies are resolved in one of two ways: The Shakespearean way or the Anton Chekhov way. In a tragedy by Shakespeare, the stage at the end is littered with dead bodies. In a tragedy by Chekhov, everyone is unhappy, bitter, disillusioned and melancholy, but they are alive. My colleagues in the peace movement and I are working for a Chekhovian, not a Shakespearean conclusion.”

Two years later, as an act of protest against the government, he said he would no longer participate in Foreign Ministry events at embassies overseas.

Still, the strong feelings he professed for Israel never faded.

“I love Israel even when I cannot stand it,” he wrote in his last book. “Should I be fated to collapse in the street one day, I want to collapse in a street in Israel. Not in London, nor Paris, nor Berlin, nor New York. Here strangers will come and pick me up (and when I’m back on my feet, there will certainly be quite a few who would be pleased to see me fall).”

His death, from cancer, was announced by one of his daughters, Fania Oz-Salzberger, who wrote on Twitter that he had died “after a speedy deterioration, in his sleep.”

One of Israel’s most prolific writers, he published more than a dozen novels, including “My Michael” and “Black Box,” as well as collections of short fiction, works of nonfiction and many essays, and his writing was translated into more than 35 languages.

Born Amos Klausner on May 4, 1939, into a staunchly right-wing Zionist family, he spent his early years in Jerusalem, then part of Palestine under British rule. His mother died by suicide when he was 12.

At 14 he moved to Kibbutz Hulda, swapping the suffocating, book-crammed apartment of his childhood for fresh air and a communal life. There he changed his surname to Oz, Hebrew for courage.

The hardy, pioneering characters of the Socialist kibbutz movement later inhabited some of his novels.

His acclaimed memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” was first published in Hebrew in 2002 and became an international best-seller.

He is survived by his wife, Nily Zuckerman and their three children, Fania, Galia and Daniel.

JERUSALEM — Amos Oz, the renowned author whose work captured the characters and landscapes of the young state of Israel and who matured into a leading moral voice and an advocate for peace with the Palestinians, died Friday. He was 79.

Isabel Kershner

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