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.

In 1998 he founded the association Ani Israeli (I Am An Israeli) and was joined over the years by other politicians and intellectuals, including Uri Avneri, Shulamit Aloni and Adel Qaadan. A resident of the Arab city of Baqa al-Gharbiyye, Qaadan waged a successful legal battle after the residents of the Jewish town of Katzir rejected his family’s request to move there because they are Arabs.

Some 13 years ago, Ornan demanded that Israeli courts set a precedent by allowing him to register as “Israeli” rather than “Jew” under the category of “ethnic nationality,” thereby overriding the affiliation used by Israeli authorities, which is based on one’s religion. This week, on Oct. 2, the Supreme Court rejected Ornan's petition. “The existence of an Israeli ethnic nationality has not been proven,” a panel of judges, headed by Chief Justice Asher Grunis, determined.