Israel Shahak

Israel Shahak, chemist, writer and human-rights activist: born Warsaw 28 April 1933; died Jerusalem 2 July 2001.

Israel Shahak, chemist, writer and human-rights activist: born Warsaw 28 April 1933; died Jerusalem 2 July 2001.

Israel Shahak was one of Israel's most distinctive and controversial citizens. A leading academic, a writer and a lifelong campaigner in the cause of human rights, he had something of the character of an Old Testament prophet. Once denounced by ignorant fanatics – in Britain as well as in Israel – he eventually won the respect of all but the most blinkered nationalists.

Born in 1933 into a cultured Jewish family in Warsaw, Israel Shahak was a boy of 10 when he was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Released in 1945, he emigrated soon afterwards to Palestine, where three years later he became a citizen of the newly formed state of Israel. He served in the Israeli army, then worked as an assistant to the head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission and later as a very popular professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In short, a model career for a Jewish citizen of Israel.

But that résumé leaves out of account the most important part of his life's work, the part which should earn him a place in the history of his adopted country and in the wider struggle for the protection and development of human rights throughout the world.

Shahak was for many years the Chairman and moving spirit of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights; but this title conveys only an echo of the single-mindedness with which he devoted himself, while carrying out with marked success his academic duties, to the pursuit of humanitarian values in a society where they were in constant danger.

From its earliest beginning, and much more so after the conquests of 1967, the Israel in which he lived and worked was a state in which one people ruled over another, which in Shahak's eyes denied it the right to call itself a true democracy. He set himself the task, first of standing up for the rights of the disenfranchised minority, the Palestinians, and then of publicising in the world outside Israel the unjust and often illegal measures taken by the Jewish authorities in Israel to control its non-Jewish inhabitants.

Predictably, this earned him the ill-will of the Israeli government and the violent hostility of a large section of the population. There was a time, in the 1970s and 1980s when he encountered death threats as well as public vilification, but he met these with contempt and a sense of assurance which was fortified by the admiration of his students at the university, many of whom disliked his political orientation but were won over by his excellence as a teacher, and perhaps also, although they might not have said so, by his obvious sincerity and by the courage with which he persisted in his criticisms of the authorities.

Of his courage I had proof the first time I heard his name. I had written an article which exposed the destruction by the Israeli army of the Palestinian village of Imwas (Emmaus) in 1967. The press attaché from the Israeli embassy in London wrote a letter saying that I must have made up the story which was untrue. At a time when Israel and the Israeli army were much admired in the West (how long ago it seems!) his letter must have seemed convincing, had not two more letters appeared, the first of which came from an Israeli soldier who had actually witnessed the destruction of Imwas, while the other contradicted the press attaché and confirmed my story. It was signed: Israel Shahak.

In 1967 such an intervention by an Israeli citizen was virtually without precedent. Whether or not they agreed with what their government was doing, Israelis did not criticise it abroad; but for the next quarter of a century Shahak did what he could to inform the Western media about the human-rights violations which accompanied the prolonged occupation of much of Palestine; and after the disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 the same searchlight was trained on the torture chambers at Khiam and the other brutalities of the Israeli occupation, by the indefatigable professor of organic chemistry in Jerusalem.

Shahak's life-style was austere in the extreme. Unmarried and latterly in poor health, he lived alone in a bare apartment, surrounded by books – he was deeply versed in Jewish history and philosophy and had written a number of books of his own including, since his retirement in 1991, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (1994) and Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (with Norton Mezvinsky, 1998).

He allowed himself only one luxury. Once a year he would travel abroad, not to indulge himself in expensive living in Paris or New York, but to go to the opera, of which he was a highly knowledgeable enthusiast. For the rest he worked, selflessly and with a fierce determination never to yield an inch to those who, as he saw it, were dragging his country down into a state of moral degradation from which it would be difficult to rescue it.

Encouraged by his example, others in Israel have rallied to a cause which he was almost alone in championing in public 30 and 40 years ago. But, as he said shortly before his death earlier this month, liberal opinion in Israel has gained strength in the last 20 years – but so has the extreme right, whose policies are dominant today. The way the conflict between them goes will determine Israel's character – and perhaps its chance of finding peace – in the near future. In deciding the outcome, Israel Shahak's influence and his example will play an important part.

Michael Adams