Shulamit Aloni, a former minister and one of the founders of the Meretz party,  an early champion of human rights, a challenger of religious hegemony and an outspoken opponent of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, was laid to rest on Sunday at the Kfar Shmaryahu cemetery. In 2008, at the age 80, she published “Israel: Democracy or Ethnocracy?”- a harsh assessment of her homeland. She wrote on the cover, “The state is returning to the ghetto, to Orthodox Judaism, and the rule of the fundamentalist rabbinate is becoming more profound.”

The protest of Shulamit Aloni at the Knesset against the coalition agreement of right-wing Shamir’s government, October 10, 1983. On the left side: the late Hadash’s MK Tawfik Toubi (Photo: Knesset)

After Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, she was among the peace activists to call for the expulsion of hundreds of Jewish settlers from the West Bank city of Hebron. She also said that high school trips to Holocaust sites were turning Israeli youths into xenophobes, and she incited outrage by holding official meetings abroad in non-kosher restaurants.  Aloni was one of the 12 founders of the Zionist left-wing Meretz party, leading the party and bringing it into Rabin’s coalition.

The ceremony was attended by leading politicians, past and present and civil rights and peace activists. Among them former Meretz party colleague Yossi Sarid, current party faction leader MK Zahava Gal-on (Meretz), MK Muhammad Barakeh (Hadash) and MK Dov Khenin, among many others.

Her son Dror Aloni, recalling Aloni’s civil rights activities, spoke of his mother being a different and special kind of hero whose banner was freedom, culture, and a responsibility. Another of her sons, Udi, read out a letter of condolence from the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas.