Ralph Gideon-Yaakov Spiro (; born September 1935) is an Israeli journalist and left-wing activist. A survivor of the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Berlin, he is 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 has served some notable Israeli newspapers as a columnist and reporter, and is now an independent political blogger.
Biography
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. 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 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.