Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli voice for peace with the Palestinians, has died aged 94 after suffering a stroke earlier this month, a spokeswoman for Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital says.
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Avnery, who left Germany as a child during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, fought in the 1948 war that marked Israel's founding and went on to become a fierce advocate for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
He was the first Israeli to publicly meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1974 - a meeting decried by the Israeli right.
Avnery told dpa 10 years ago that he wanted to change the "genetic code of the Zionist movement" and "consciousness of the people from its depths."
"The basis for any imaginable peace is to transform the West Bank with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip into a Palestinian state," he said in a separate interview five years ago.
The peace activist served as a lawmaker in the Knesset from 1965 to 1974 and again from 1979 to 1981 and as editor-in-chief of the countercurrent Haolam Hazeh weekly news magazine. He won Israel's top journalism award, the Sokolov Prize, in 2003.
Avnery's views earned him praise internationally while being slammed by many on the Israeli right as a traitor to the Zionist movement
Tzipi Livni, a centre-left politician and former foreign minister called Avnery "groundbreaking."
"He stood up for his positions despite the attacks and planted the ideas of peace and moderation in the heart of Israel, even when they were not in the lexicon," Livni said on Monday on Twitter.
Australian Associated Press
