Ralph Gideon-Yaakov Spiro (; 8 September 1935 – 28 January 2025) was an Israeli journalist and left-wing activist. A survivor of the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Berlin, he was a senior campaigner for human rights, prominently involved in public acts against the distribution of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Throughout his career, Spiro served several notable Israeli newspapers as a columnist and reporter and published an independent political blog.
Early life Spiro was born in Berlin at the time of Nuremberg Laws. His father, Dr. Samuel Spiro, was removed from his job as a physician along with all other Jewish doctors, and settled in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine in 1938. About half a year later, in March 1939, he was joined by his photographer wife, Grete Lina Spiro, and their two children, Gideon and his younger brother John Gabriel. The family lived in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Kiryat Shmuel, which is between Katamon and Rehavia. Gideon’s father was employed as the chief doctor of Youth Aliyah, and after the Holocaust he treated the children of refugees from Germany and the children in Displaced Persons’ camps in Cyprus, as well as the Children of Tehran (a group of Jewish refugee children who escaped from Poland to Palestine via Tehran). Gideon was a graduate of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and the network of informal relations between teachers and students that he observed at a summer work camp on a kibbutz made a profound impression on him. He asked his father for permission to spend his secondary school years on the kibbutz, and in 1951 he moved to Kibbutz Merhavia, where he was influenced as a youth by the principles of equality and social justice. Three years later he was conscripted into the IDF and volunteered to join the paratrooper corps, and took part in the reprisal actions of the 1950s and in the jump at the Mitla Pass in the Sinai War of 1956.
Career
In the early 1960s Spiro held various positions in the public service, and in 1962 he visited East Germany. His impressions from that trip were published in the Mapam party quarterly, Ba-Sha'ar. A year later he began to work as a Knesset correspondent for the daily business newspaper Sha'ar, and then he transferred to the Mapam daily Al HaMishmar as a business correspondent. In 1966 he received a grant from the Goethe Institute to study in West Germany, where he also worked as a political correspondent for Al HaMishmar. When the Six-Day War broke out he returned to Israel and participated in the occupation of East Jerusalem as a reservist. That experience caused him to decide never to return as a soldier to occupied territories inhabited by civilian populations. He returned for a short while to Europe on a journalistic assignment, and wrote from Czechoslovakia where he had travelled on a visa that he had received before the breaking of relations between the Eastern Bloc states and Israel.“be-Prague ‘im darcon yisra’eli” (In Prague with an Israeli passport), Maariv, 22 September 1967. He was then assigned to New York, where he served as a correspondent at the United Nations and the United States where he covered the discussions over Resolution 242, among other things. He was also part of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s entourage on a visit to the US and Canada and covered the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. The IDF’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 caused Spiro to question his Zionist outlook, and while in America he was impressed and influenced by the activities of the protest movement of American youth against the Vietnam War, including actions such as the burning of draft cards, the slogan “Hell no, we won’t go!” and the October 1967 “March on the Pentagon” at which tens of thousands of demonstrators surrounded the Pentagon, facing armed soldiers.
During those years Spiro was a member of a group that wanted to found a Hebrew magazine along the lines of and under the inspiration of Der Spiegel, where he was a guest journalist for a few months. Other members of that group included the well-known Israeli journalist and author Amos Oz and Nathan Yellin-Mor, a former leader of the right-wing armed organization Lehi, which fought against the British occupation, who was a member of Israel’s first Knesset and who subsequently moved to the Left politically.
In 1970 Spiro enrolled as a student in the political science department at the University of Haifa, where he fanned the flames of political activism and was one of the founders of a joint Jewish-Arab student organization. He was one of the founders of the Yesh bloc, a federation of left-wing student groups - encompassing kibbutzniks, Mizrahim and South Americans - who were joined by Arab students led by Adel Manna (later a prominent historian and the director of the Centre for the Study of Arab Society in Israel at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem) and Issam Makhoul (later a Member of the Knesset and the General Secretary of the Israeli Communist Party). Spiro was elected editor of the student newspaper, which he replaced with a new publication called Post-Mortem, which dealt with social, economic and political matters and which published several scoops and exposés about the university. The newspaper’s subversive character, Spiro’s regular columns in it and the fact that Arab students were invited to contribute to it on an equal basis upset the rector of the university, Benjamin Akzin, and subsequently the political establishment in Jerusalem as well, headed by Golda Meir. Spiro drafted the outlines of the Yesh platform, which included explicit opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sinai and the Golan Heights. He met with Günter Grass, Herbert Marcuse and others, and came into conflict with the administration of the university. In one of his columns he criticized Israel’s rejection of a peace proposal from Egyptian president Sadat and indirectly predicted the approaching war.“Homo Politicus,” Post Mortem, 15 December 1971. A few months later he published an article under the headline “Take from the Occupation and annexation budget, give to the education budget”,Post Mortem, 17 May 1972. which became a popular slogan that appears on manifestos of the Israeli Left to this very day. On the occasion of the national students’ strike of 1972 he coined the slogan “Transfer the billions from the Territories and corruption to education, housing and raising the living standard of the marginalized”. After the decisive victory won by his faction in the election for the presidency of the students’ union at the University of Haifa the party machines in the city, both Labor and Gahal (a coalition of the Liberal Party and the Herut Party, led by Herut’s Menachem Begin), were mobilized in a joint effort to bring down the group. During this period Spiro achieved renown in the press for urging Jews and Arabs to jointly resist the dominant agenda.“Rosh ha-memshala: ha-‘Aravim mitkavnim le-hisul Yisra’el” (Prime minister: the Arabs intend the elimination of Israel), Davar, 4 April 1972.“Golda Meir: they call themselves “Yesh” [lit. “there is”] ... but they should be called “Eyn” [lit. “there is not”], because there is not anything they have to say in favour of the State of Israel”, in an article by Shlomo Nakidmon, “Lishkat ha-‘avoda hehlita liftoah et sheruteyha le-‘Aravim Yisre’elim” (The labour office has decided to provide services to Israeli Arabs), Yedioth Ahronoth, 25 May 1973 (In Hebrew). He stressed in interviews that “I am a socialist Zionist”,“Ani Tziyoni sotzialist”, Darban, the weekly student and youth supplement of the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, edited by Ilan Kfir, 22 March 1972. and was given the right to publish articles of reply in the press.
At the end of those three years Spiro became the editor of T’chelet-Adom (Blue-Red), the organ of the movement that later became the radical Moked party of which he was one of the founders.“Hakinui ‘ish Matzpen’ ‘ala 17,500 lirot le-yarhon tnu’at Herut ‘Be-Eretz Yisra’el’’ (“The label ‘Matzpen member’ cost the Herut monthly Be-Eretz Yisra’el 17,500 pounds”), Haaretz, 25 December 1977. Among others were linguist Rubik Rosenthal (later a noted journalist at the mainstream daily Maariv), Niva Lanir (later a journalist at left-leaning daily Haaretz) and Menachem Brinker (Israel Prize laureate professor of philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) wrote for the publication. Anticipating the possibility that he might be forced to make his living outside Israel as a political refugee, Spiro registered in the post-BA Certificate Programme in Tourism and Hotel Management at Haifa University (in affiliation with Cornell University). Two years later he returned to Jerusalem, where he received a senior appointment as a manager of the Department for Guests and Tourists in the Ministry of Education, a position he held, at intervals, for ten years. Before that he also managed to stay for ten days as a correspondent for the left-wing weekly HaOlam HaZeh on board Abie Nathan’s “peace boat” on its way to Port Said on the second anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, with the objective of giving 100,000 flowers to the Egyptian people.“Lahanoq otam bi-frahim” (“Strangle them with flowers”), Haolam Hazeh, 24 September 1975. After the “Revolution of 1977”, when the Likud was elected to power under Menachem Begin, Spiro became the coordinator for counseling in the Educational Television in Tel Aviv. After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 he became one of the founders of Yesh Gvul,Mary Elizabeth King, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (introduction by Jimmy Carter). Nation Books, New York, 2007. Chapter 8. an organization of reservists who announced to the government that they would have no part in what they saw as an unjust war. He published strongly worded letters and articles in which he expressed harsh criticism of Begin, Sharon and Eitan – the latter two being former commanders of his from his army days – and called for the three of them to be put on trial for war crimes. That led to a disciplinary hearing under the rule that a civil servant should not publicly criticize the government’s policies. The case lasted for three years at the end of which Spiro was dismissed from his job and he was stripped of his pension and other benefits. After an appeal at the Supreme Court his pension was restored to him. Spiro was the first Israeli civil servant to be disciplined under that rule.