Avineri, a native of Poland, was one of Israel’s premier political scientists as a Hebrew University professor and wrote extensively on the history of political philosophy, including Marx, Engels, Hegel, Zionism, colonialism and the Soviet Union. His Herzl biography emphasizes the failures of Jewish emancipation in Austria-Hungary over the Dreyfus Affair in leading Herzl to Zionism. His awards included the Israel Prize, the Solomon Bublick Award and the EMET Prize in Political Science. He was a visiting professor at Yale, Cornell and Oxford. As the director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1975 to 1977, Avineri was open to negotiations with the PLO.
