I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering. But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral “power of attorney”, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel.
Uri Avery, speaking after the IDF’s massacre at Sabra and Shatila
Uri was a Zionist poster child - his immediate family fled to (then mandatory Palestine) after the Nazis took power; every other relative who stayed in Germany was murdered in the Holocaust. During his youth in 1938 he joined the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, in reaction to the first execution of a Jew for the attempted bombing of an Arab bus. He remained a member in the group until partway through most of WWII, when he leaned into nationalism publishing far-right news articles and opinion pieces.
The turning point for Uri was his time in the IDF during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the ethnic cleansing and displacement that occurred, percolating through decades of his life until during the 1982 Lebanon War he became the first Israeli to meet Yasser Arafat for an interview.