Meir Vilner

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Meir Vilner
מאיר וילנר
Meir Vilner in 1951
Faction represented in the Knesset
1949–1959	Communist Party
1961	Communist Party
1965–1977	Communist Party
1977–1990	Hadash
Personal details
Born	Bar Kovner 23 October 1918 Vilnius, Kingdom of Lithuania
Died	5 June 2003(2003-06-05) (aged 84) Tel Aviv, Israel

Meir Vilner (Hebrew: מאיר וילנר, born Ber Kovner; 23 October 1918 – 5 June 2003) was a Lithuanian-born Israeli communist politician and Jewish leader of the Communist Party of Israel (Maki), at one time a powerful force in the country. He was the youngest and last living signatory of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.^[1]

Born in Vilnius, during the short-lived Kingdom of Lithuania, Vilner's political life began as the leader of the Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard). However, he soon grew disenchanted by what he viewed as a tendency in Zionist groups to dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, rather than change their current situation. Thus, he started working for the banned Communist Party of Poland – now under the pseudonym Meir Vilner – until 1938, when he left Poland to go to British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. Most of his family who stayed behind was murdered in the Holocaust. In Palestine, Vilner studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

During the last years of the British mandate, Vilner became disenchanted with mainstream Zionist politicians, claiming that Jewish anti-Arab racism was comparable to the antisemitism he experienced in Vilnius. He joined the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), which accepted both Arabs and Jews as members, and initially opposed plans to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. In March 1946, Vilner testified to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, claiming that partition strengthen the dependency of both states on outside aid and widen the gulf between Arabs and Jews. However, he subsequently changed his mind and supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine after the Soviet Union's position on partition changed in the same year to one of support.^[2]

On May 14, 1948, Vilner participated in the proclamation ceremony of the State of Israel and co-signed the Israeli Declaration of Independence on behalf of the PCP. Along with other PCP members, Vilner stressed the necessity of upholding the declaration's promises to implement United Nations resolutions which called for a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and uphold civil and political rights for all Israeli citizens.^[3]

In 1949, he was elected to the Knesset as a member of Maki. He resigned from the Knesset in December 1959, six weeks after the 1959 elections, but was re-elected in 1961. However, he resigned again two months after the 1961 elections.

As the Jewish leader of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), 95% of whose members were Arabs, he rejected Zionism, publicized the Israeli nuclear weapons program in 1963, and opposed the imposition of martial rule on Israeli Arabs (imposed in 1949, it was lifted in 1966).^[4]

In 1965 Vilner and several other Maki members broke away from the party to form the new party Rakah following disagreements about the Soviet Union's increasingly anti-Israel stance (Vilner was on the USSR's side), and was elected to the Knesset on the new party's list in the 1965 elections.

On 5 June 1967, Vilner was the sole Jewish deputy (joined only by fellow Communist Party of Israel deputy Tawfik Toubi) to speak out in the Knesset against the Six-Day War. Calling that day the darkest in Israel's history, Vilner demanded an immediate halt to the Israeli invasion of Arab-occupied lands. Vilner stressed that there was no other way to solve the conflict between Israel and its neighbors but mutual recognition of the national rights of Israelis and Arabs, including the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and independent statehood. On 15 October, he was badly wounded by a member of the right-wing party Gahal.^[5][6]

Rakah became part of Hadash before the 1977 elections, and Vilner remained an MK until 1990 when he resigned as part of a seat rotation agreement, making him the third longest serving after Tawfik Toubi and Shimon Peres.

Vilner's Soviet loyalist line was highly appreciated by the USSR; in 1978 he was awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples.^[7] He did not accept perestroika and regarded the fall of communism in the USSR as a coup.

He was married to Esther Vilenska, another Israeli communist politician but divorced later, after having two sons together. His cousin Abba Kovner was a well-known Israeli poet and partisan resistance leader during the Holocaust.^[8][9]

On June 5, 2003, Meir Vilner died, he was the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence. A street in the city of Shafaram is named after him.

• Meir Vilner on the Knesset website