This is a day of great sadness– yesterday I learned that the Israeli writer Yossi Gurvitz died at 53. When you lose a good friend, your mind is a mess, Yossi was in and out of my dreams last night — But Yossi worked in the news business and it feels urgent to give some impressions of this spectacular individual when the news is so fresh.
Yossi Gurvitz was an apikoros in the very best sense of the word. This is the Jewish term for a freethinker or an atheist. Educated in yeshivas, he broke out as a teen when he discovered Plutarch, reading real not biblical history, and wrapping it in brown paper covers so his teachers wouldn’t know. That independence led him in time to become “Israel’s first serious anti-occupation blogger” and, later on, to support BDS, and to point out the vicious ethnocentrism in the basement of Jewish religiosity that Israel was awakening– “and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16.”
Yossi was a gentle person who did not raise his voice and when he did speak had none of the guttural crudeness I associate with the Israeli accent. He had a natural refinement and reserve. I last saw him in November — I will post that interview in days to come — and these last months were troubled by the loss of his cat Willie, who ran away, and the rescue of his cat Charlie, both following a dispute over the custody of the pets with his former partner. When I saw him in Petah Tikvah on election day, Yossi cried openly as he described Willie’s medical necessities and his fears for Willie’s life. Yossi wore his heart on his sleeve.
Yossi was outcast politically, and accepted that. He said that feeling the pain of others makes us human, and all his political actions were animated by his witnessing Israeli abuses of Palestinians. He worked for human rights groups that documented those abuses, he ostracized himself by supporting BDS. “Put it in the Hague Archives,” he wrote to me last week, sending along a tweet by an Israeli officer approving religious settlers. He collided with Itamar Ben Gvir over and over inside the Israeli court system when Ben Gvir was still a radical agitator/lawyer.
Like yesterday, I remember Yossi in his fedora running from tear gas in Bil’in in 2013 and swearing– “The IDF is a terrorist force, there are no two ways about it.” He was a journalist who subscribed to principles of accuracy and candor. He left Meretz because anyone supporting Israeli government supported apartheid. He voted Balad.
He was a person of enormous learning. He studied Shakespeare and poetry and the Greeks. Lately he was writing fiction set in ancient times and I know that a couple of editors were excited by it. He wrote memoirs of his own radicalization. His last email to me a few days ago was the message, “We are incapable of learning,” with Wilfred Owen’s famous poem, the Parable of the Old Man and the Young, which imagines Abraham murdering Isaac, after all.
Yossi had such depth and sadness and compassion it is impossible to capture more than an eyedropper of it here. I know he suffered from depression. He often talked about wanting to leave Israel, and not being able to get a foreign passport — Can you find me a sponsor for a tour of the U.S., he would say to me… Ah, too late Yossi!
One theme in recent years which you will get to read in that last interview was his belief in the war of the Jews against the Jews– that a war over Zionism is inevitable, and he thought it would be a shooting war, Israeli Jews will turn on each other. An insight I often quoted from Yossi was when I asked him, What will happen if the U.S. sanctions Israel? And he said, “That is the Saigon helicopter moment” — referring to the U.S. leaving Vietnam. The stock market will crash, there will be mass emigration…
I constantly relied on his insights about rightwing Israeli political culture– Like when I saw him in November, and he told me about an Israeli commando unit murdering two barbers in Nablus days before– merely for raising an alarm over their raid. Behavior like Nazis in Warsaw.
And here is a point he made in the video below (from 2013) about Israeli society being supremacist like Nazi Germany, a “herrenvolk.” And why there will likely be a lot of blood before Israelis accept democracy.
At the moment Israelis have too much to lose. Most of them won’t speak of it, won’t acknowledge it, won’t see it, but they are a herrenvolk– a lord’s people if you will. They have privileges they’re not even aware of, and those privileges are part and parcel of the occupation. People find it hard to give up their privileges and particularly when our politicians manage to convince people… that they [Palestinians] want to destroy us. So any attempt to change the ruling system, to make it a one man one vote system, terrifies people. Because they equate the end of the Zionist regime with annihilation.
No wonder he was outcast. Readers, I will have more in coming days.
Goodbye Yossi, thank you and bless you, now you are in the company of loving spirits.
Very sorry for the loss of your friend, Phil, and those of us who did not know Yossi personally are deeply saddened as well. He made some very valuable contributions to Mondoweiss, both with his personal histories of evolution at the yeshiva and the army, etc., and his brilliant and compassionate analysis of unfolding events. He will be missed by many people who never had the good fortune to meet and know him.
“And here is a point he made in the video below (from 2013) about Israeli society being supremacist like Nazi Germany, a “herrenvolk.” And why there will likely be a lot of blood before Israelis accept democracy.”
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230214-fascism-is-already-there-in-israel-says-jewish-professor-of-the-holocaust/
Fascism is ‘already there’ in Israel, says Jewish professor of the Holocaust…Israel is hurtling towards fascism, Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman has said in an interview with Haaretz. Blatman is a professor at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. His fields of interest are the Holocaust, Nazism, fascism, genocide and East European Jewry during the Holocaust. He is currently involved in establishing the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2025….Alarmed by the rise of fascism in Israel, Blatman went on to say: “As a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it’s hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the government today. You don’t see that anywhere else – not in Hungary, not in Poland – ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists.”
A terrible loss!
He will be greatly missed.
I did not know Yossi Gurvitz personally, I only knew him through articles he had published online, and on this website. I was particularly touched by the above recorded video conversation. Yossi’s moral and intellectual insights were always cogent, brave, and focused on the thread that binds us all, our shared humanity. The clarity he brought to the fore endures. I am sorry for your loss.
It is so sad to lose someone as wise and inspiring as Yossi Gurvitz, especially in times like these when people like him are like gold dust. I am sorry for your loss, Phil. Although I have never met Yossi face-to-face – we may have been in the same demonstrations in Bil’in- he comes over as a fascinating person in your piece. Please tell us more about him and let us share in the valuable insights he must have gained throughout his life. His background is fascinating to me: educated in a yeshiva, but educating himself widely beyond that. Anyone who loves the Greek classics and supports BDS at the same time is a friend of mine. I would have loved to meet you, Yossi.