Uri Avnery's two wartime memoirs, now collected as 1948: A Soldier's Tale, were published in Hebrew in 1949 and 1950. In the first of them, In the Fields of the Philistines, the 25-year-old Avnery is an infantryman desperate for action; in the second, The Other Side of the Coin, he criticises his own 'silly, rotten country' for its conduct in the 1948 war. Avnery, now 85, has continued to condemn Israel's conduct in the wars it has been fighting ever since, and a selection of his polemics appears in Israel's Vicious Circle.

LRB 11 June 2009 | PDF Download