Zeev Sternhell, leading voice of Israeli left, dies at 85
Source: Reuters
WORLD NEWS JUNE 21, 2020 / 10:48 AM / UPDATED 2 HOURS AGO
Zeev Sternhell, leading voice of Israeli left, dies at 85
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Zeev Sternhell, a leading Israeli expert in the study of fascism and a prominent voice in a fading Israeli left-wing which he lamented was too weak to overcome ultra-nationalism, died on Sunday. He was 85.
Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and a political science professor at Jerusalems Hebrew University, which announced his death, long opposed Israeli settlement-building on occupied land Palestinians seek for a state.
He cautioned that Israeli democracy was being put at risk by pro-settlement government policies towards the Palestinians.
The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people, Sternhell wrote in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper in 2018.
In 2008, the year he won the prestigious Israel Prize, Sternhell was slightly wounded by a pipe bomb planted at his Jerusalem home by an ultra-nationalist.
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