Avraham Burg: Difference between revisions

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Avraham "Avrum" Burg (Hebrew: אברהם בורג, born January 19, 1955) is an Israeli politician and former Speaker of the Knesset.

Burg was born and raised in Jerusalem in 1955. His father was Yosef Burg, a German-born politician and long-time government minister for the National Religious Party. His mother, Rivka (nee Slonim), was born in Hebron and survived the Arab massacre in 1929.^[1] In the Israel Defense Forces, Burg served as a lieutenant in the paratroopers brigade. He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a degree in the social sciences.

Burg is married to Yael and lives in Nataf, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Burg was an activist in left-wing organizations and the Peace Now movement. He was injured in the grenade attack on a Peace Now demonstration in Jerusalem in February 1983, which killed Emil Grunzweig.^[2] In 1985 he took a position as an advisor to Prime Minister Shimon Peres on diaspora issues, and in 1988 he was elected to the Knesset as a member of the Alignment.

He was re-elected in 1992, when the Alignment was merged into the Labor Party. In 1995 he was appointed chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization, and resigned from the Knesset. During his years at office the Zionist organization took on new functions and responsibilities such as the returning of Jewish property lost during the Holocaust.

In 1999 he returned to domestic politics, and was elected to the Knesset on Ehud Barak's One Israel list (an alliance of Labor, Meimad and Gesher. Burg was elected Speaker of the Knesset, a position he held until early 2003. In his capacity as speaker of the Knesset he served as interim President of Israel for 20 days, from 12 July until 1 August 2000 when the presidency was vacant following Ezer Weizman's resignation. Following Barak's defeat in the 2001 election for Prime Minister and his subsequent resignation, Burg ran for the Labor Party leadership, but lost. Nevertheless, he retained his seat in the Knesset in the 2003 elections.

In October of 2003 Burg caused a sensation when he published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian named 'The end of Zionism' calling for a quick withdrawal from the Palestinian Territories.^[3]

Also in 2003, Burg published an article in Yedioth Ahronoth in which he declared, "Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism."^[4]

In 2004 he resigned from the Knesset and public life. However, he has remained active on a small scale around the world, giving lectures at events sponsored by for example the Dutch Israel advocacy organization 'CIDI'. Three years after leaving Israeli politics is now a citizen of France and a successful businessman.

In an interview in Haaretz in June 2007, Burg called for the abolition of the Law of Return, and stated that "to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite."^[5] However, in a response to public criticism of the interview published two weeks later, he retracted from his original position stating that the alternative he offers is "a transition from a definition of Israel as a 'Jewish State' to its definition as "A State of the Jews'.^[6]

• Brit Am: A Covenant of the People, Proposed Policy Guidelines for the National Institutions of the Jewish People, June 1995, Jewish Agency for Israel
• Defeating Hitler (2007) (Hebrew)

• Avraham Burg on the Knesset website (in English)
• 'Leaving the Zionist ghetto' by Ari Shavit Haaretz interview, 24 June 2007