Israeli writer and peace activist AB Yehoshua has died. Yehoshua, who has written widely in novels and essays about the establishment of Israel and its wars, died on Tuesday morning in Tel Aviv at the age of 85. He suffered from cancer in recent years.
The author of 11 novels, three short-story collections and four plays, Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem 1936 to a family from Thessaloniki, Greece. He served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces in 1954 to 1957 and then earned a degree in literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He served as a reservist during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Beginning in 1972, Mr. Yehoshua taught comparative literature and Hebrew literature at the University of Haifa.
Yehoshua wrote hundreds of articles on Zionism, Jewish identity, politics and antisemitism. He was an activist in Israel’s peace movement, and called for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but in 2016 said that this was no longer possible.
He won the Israel Prize for Hebrew literature in 1995, and the National Jewish Book Award in 1990. He received honorary doctorates from Hebrew Union College (1990), Tel Aviv University (1998), Torino University (1999), Bar-Ilan University (2000), and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2012).