Professor Uzzi Ornan has been pitted in a tenacious struggle with the Ministry of the Interior and the Israeli establishment in general for more than six decades. A linguist by training, Ornan is a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language and a researcher of natural languages at the Hebrew University. Born in Jerusalem, he was banished during the British mandate to Eritrea due to his membership in the Irgun. He returned upon the establishment of Israel. A nonagenarian, he is neither disheartened nor ready to let up in his struggle for a secular identity for the state of Israel.
“I’m an atheist through and through. … The idea of the chosen people is utter nonsense. I don’t have a pope somewhere,” Ornan said in a series of talks in 1994 published under the title We are Canaanites. Established in 1939, Canaanism was an ideological movement, one of whose founders was Ornan. Its members wanted to cut themselves off from Jewish tradition in a bid to create a secular affinity among the peoples living in mandate Palestine.
