Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar announced Wednesday that this year’s Israel Prize for philosophy will be awarded to Professor Avishai Margalit, one of the first leaders of the left-wing Peace Now.
Sa'ar noted that Prof. Margalit is “one of the most important philosophers in Israel” and is widely respected throughout the world. Margalit wrote that “philosophy begins at home,” and many of his works have focused on integrity, justice and self-respect.
Shortly after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he was a founding member of the Moked Party, which Professor Margalit recently recalled “was the party of the left intelligentsia, but the numbers were very much in doubt.”
He also wrote, “The party advocated a two-state solution: Israel and Palestine. Those were the Golda Meir days. The mere mention of a Palestinian state was a heresy that guaranteed its adherents a place in the frozen lake of Dante’s ninth circle. The ice has melted since then. The idea of two states has become an Israeli consensus, something that many Israelis say in public, but not enough Israelis believe in private.”
Professor Margalit also participated in the founding of the Israel Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace before becoming one of the first members of Peace Now in 1978. He later served on the board of the anti-nationalist and left-wing B’Tselem group as well as the Organization of Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
He grew up in Jerusalem and served in the airborne Nahal. In 1960, he started his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, majoring in philosophy and economics, and later learned at Oxford University for his doctorate.
Three of his books were published by Harvard University Press. One of them, co-authored with his then-doctoral student Professor of Philosophy Moshe Halbertal, states that idolatry is not just an error but also is a sinful error because it makes the idolaters miss their life's purposes. He was visiting professor in Oxford, among other famous universities. His next book is being published by Princeton University Press.
His works also express the idea that achieving a society that exists without humiliation of its citizens is a more realistic ideal than that of a society based primarily on justice.