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Uri Avnery (1923-2018) was an Israeli writer, journalist and peace activist. He was editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine "HaOlam HaZeh" and founded the Gush Shalom peace movement. [Listener: Anat Saragusti; date recorded: 2017]
TRANSCRIPT: At my first term in the Knesset. I had promised during the election campaign… one of our slogans was: 'I promise to be present at all sessions of the Knesset Assembly from start to finish'. This was unheard of because one of the things that irritates people is the empty Knesset Assembly, even now. Normal attendance in the Knesset is three, four, five people, and me. And I kept that promise. Work started in the Knesset and we decided that I would speak at every session on every subject. And it was easy for us. Firstly, it helped me a lot that I was a newspaper editor because as a newspaper editor you deal with every subject. When you are a newspaper editor, every subject in the world passes through your hands. A journalist is, after all, a person who knows a little bit about everything. Contrary to an academic who knows a lot about one thing and nothing else at all. So this was good training. Being a newspaper editor was fairly good training for being a member of the Knesset. And I am a curious person. Truly, every topic interests me, almost every subject. And I had accumulated a lot of new ideas in my mind during the period of "HaOlam HaZeh". We decided not only to talk about every subject, but also to innovate, to bring forward issues not normally discussed in the Knesset about everyday. The Archive of the Knesset made a catalogue of all my speeches and this amounted to 635 speeches, ten times more than anyone else, even to this day. Besides, I was an expert at heckling. Heckling can be a joke. Meir Pa'il, a few terms later, would liven up Knesset life by making 'jokes' all the time during his heckles – I did not. I used heckling as a substitute for speeches, and I specialized in encapsulating an entire concept in a sentence or two. And that was what I did. I think during the Sixth Knesset I made 200 speeches, about 250 speeches let's say. But I heckled thousands of times. I drove them crazy. And I had an advantage. Why were all the members of Knesset jealous, why did they envy me? Not only because I was a single faction. Being a single faction is paradise. You have no discipline, you do not have to share the speaking time with other members of Knesset, you are not bound by the decisions, you can do what you want. Once, I remember, Yitzhak Navon, who was then a member of the Knesset on behalf of Rafi, Ben-Gurion's party, caught me and told me: 'Uri, you do not know how happy you should be, you do not have meetings of your faction'.
