Meron Benvenisti

Meron Benvenisti (Hebrew: מירון בנבנשתי; 21 April 1934 – 20 September 2020) was an Israeli political scientist who was deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek from 1971 to 1978, during which he administered Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and served as Jerusalem's chief planning officer. He supported a binational Israeli–Palestinian state.

Benvenisti was born in 1934 in Jerusalem, his father was David Benvenisti, a Greek Jew originally from Thessaloniki and recipient of the Israel Prize, while his mother Leah (née Friedman) was Lithuanian Jewish. He was the brother of Refael (Rafi) Benvenisti, and father of Eyal Benvenisti. He graduated from the Leyada and served his compulsory military service in a Nahal unit near the Israeli–Lebanese border at Kibbutz Gesher HaZiv.

In the early 1950s, following his discharge, Benvenisti moved to the nearby Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra and served as a youth movement leader. He enrolled at the Hebrew University after his return to Jerusalem in 1955, studying both economics and medieval history. He later published books and maps on the period of the Crusaders in the Holy Land. During his years as a student, he headed the Hebrew University student union and the National Union of Israeli Students. He later obtained a doctorate from Harvard University's Kennedy School for his work on conflict management in Jerusalem and in Belfast.

In 1984, Benvenisti founded the West Bank Database Project, documenting social, economic, and political developments in the West Bank. Since 1992 he devoted his time to teaching as visiting lecturer (at Ben-Gurion University in 1994–1998 and Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in 1982–2009), research and writing on Jerusalem, the Northern Ireland conflict, Israeli–Palestinian relations, the Palestinian vanished landscape and bi-nationalism. He was a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. and a visiting fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA) and a recipient of research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace. Between 1991 and 2009, he wrote a column for the newspaper Haaretz.

Benvenisti was a critic of Israel's policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and was an advocate of the idea of a binational state. In 2004, he warned that plans to build a separation wall were actually plans for "bantustans" that would effectively imprison millions of Palestinians and exacerbate the conflict, rather than resolve it as many hoped. He said that "the day will come when believers in this illusion will realise that 'separation' is a means to oppress and dominate, and then they will mobilise to dismantle the apartheid apparatus."

In 2012, Benvenisti opined that claims that Israel is an apartheid state were "wrongheaded, simplistic and dangerous", but also said that the situation in Israel proper is "no less grave". He argued that Israel had become a "Herrenvolk democracy" (master race democracy) in which Israel behaves "like a full-blooded democracy" but has a group of serfs (the Arabs) for whom democracy is suspended, creating a situation of "extreme inequality". In the same interview, he stated that "The separation fence: that is truly apartheid. Separation is apartheid." According to Benvenisti, the only solution is to incorporate Palestinians into the state on conditions of equality.

His experience led him in later years to be disillusioned with Zionism, stating in an interview with Ari Shavit:

I went to Kibbutz Hanikra in the 1950s and experienced the transcendent feeling of working in the banana groves without noticing that in order to plant the banana trees, I was uprooting olive trees, thousands of years old, of a Palestinian village. During that whole period ... I did not understand the meaning of what I was doing. But when I started to deal with the Arabs of East Jerusalem, I began to understand. I saw that the problem is not only the individual rights of the Palestinians but also their collective rights.