Yossi revolutionized activist-journalism in Israel, paving a path that many of us would soon walk, and continued after almost everybody else had moved on. An early member of the +972 collective, his contribution to the project was essential — not only because of his articles, which were as popular as they were controversial, but for demonstrating to us all what could be achieved beyond the confines of mainstream Israeli newsrooms.
Yossi’s roots were as far from the left as one could imagine. He was born to a national-religious family and educated at Nehalim Yeshiva, an Orthodox boarding school headed by Yosef Ba-Gad, who would go on to become one of the most right-wing Knesset members of the 1990s. Yossi hated religious studies, and even more so the racism and nationalism he encountered at school, including among the rabbis. Gradually, he began to lose his faith. “I started devouring philosophy books,” he would later write:
With each and every one of them — Nietzsche, alas, was a major influence, but I also read loads of Greek history, and if there is any good antidote to Judaism, this is it — I felt my religious beliefs vanish away. By the time I started grade 11, I was Orthodox in name only. Earlier, I rejected Jewish law as racist; now I could no longer believe in a deity which was managing the world and interested in our lives … The last two years were awful. I could never keep my mouth shut, and as a result got into fights — physical ones — with other students. My rabbi didn’t know what to do with me.
He decided not to continue his religious studies, but rather enlist in the Israeli army. “The military — normally a very oppressive organ — allowed me to complete my coming out,” he wrote of his political radicalization.
Was it the “coming out” in front of his entire community, the intellectual and physical confrontations he endured, that made him such a fearless writer? In real life, Yossi was shy and gentle, but the words he put down on the page were explosive and controversial, even within his own camp. One position that got him in trouble again and again was his insistence that settlers were responsible for some of the violence they occasionally encountered at the hands of Palestinians. He insisted on viewing Palestinian violence in its proper context (a taboo even for many who oppose the occupation), and rejected Israelis’ abuse of the word “terror,” which gradually came to encompass any form of Palestinian resistance, or even existence.
In a 2010 review of a book of soldiers’ testimonies put out by anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence, he wrote:
I have recently finished reading Pity the Nation, by Robert Fisk, which deals with the wars in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the great Israeli invasion of June 1982 and what followed it. The book deserves its own post, time permitting, but I want to pay attention to one specific point Fisk hammers time and again: the poisonous use of the term “terrorist.” Its usage automatically strips away the humanity of the other side’s militants, and facilitates turning not just them but the people around them and their family members to people whose life are for the taking. Thomas Friedman wrote something similar in his “From Beirut to Jerusalem”: The Israeli soldiers overlooking the Sabra and Shatila camps during the massacre did not hear people being murdered, he wrote, because as far as they were concerned there were no people there, just terrorists.
Though committed to understanding and explaining oppression, Yossi was an old-school liberal who had little tolerance for racism, although he occasionally faced criticism from Mizrahi activists who accused him of making racist and colorblind remarks about Jewish working class communities, who often vote for the right. At the same time, his feminist politics continually earned him hateful comments from the Israeli right on social media, including after his death.