Avner Wishnitzer

Avner Wishnitzer (Hebrew: אבנר וישניצר) is an Israeli academic, political activist, and cofounder of Combatants for Peace.

Avner Wishnitzer
Born	1976
Occupation	Historian
Academic career
Institutions	Tel Aviv University (2014–)

Political activism

Following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Wishnitzer became involved in activism opposing Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territories. He later described volunteer work with Palestinian communities whose homes had been demolished by the Israeli army as formative in changing his political views.

In 2003, Wishnitzer was among a group of Sayeret Matkal reservists who refused service in the Palestinian territories. The declaration generated substantial controversy across the Israeli political spectrum. Former prime minister and Sayeret Matkal commander Ehud Barak described the refusal as a serious error, and argued that opposition to the government's policies should be conducted through democratic means. Former military chiefs Avshalom Vilan of Meretz and Labor politician Matan Vilnai likewise rejected selective refusal as damaging to democratic and military institutions.

Justice Minister Tommy Lapid accused the signatories of abusing their military service for political propaganda, while Likud MK and former Sayeret Matkal officer Ehud Yatom called for the refusers to be prosecuted and removed from the IDF. Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim similarly argued that using military status to advance a political position undermined the separation between political controversy and military service. However, a small group of politicians, including Meretz politicians Zehava Galon and Roman Bronfman defended the reservists.

Soon after word of the letter to Sharon became public, a group of Palestinian political activists approached the Israeli reservists to talk. It was during this meeting that the idea of an organization of people who had been combatants could come together to discuss differences without violence during an ongoing conflict. In 2005, Wishnitzer and other former Israeli soldiers formally met with former Palestinian militants and engaged in dialogue for over a year before officially founding the organization in 2006. Wishnitzer has argued for critical self-reflection within Israeli society about Israeli rule in the occupied territories. Wishnitzer and fellow Combatants for Peace member Bassam Aramin received the "IIE Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East" in 2010. He is also featured in the documentary films Disturbing the Peace (2016) and There Is Another Way (2025).

In 2021, Wishnitzer and other members of Combatants for Peace were detained in the South Hebron Hills near the unauthorized settler outpost of Avigayil. The incident produced conflicting accounts. The IDF reported that the activists had blocked the access road, attempted to physically attack soldiers, cursed and threatened them, and lay beneath military vehicles.

Combatants for Peace denied the allegations and accused the IDF Spokesperson of falsely portraying the encounter as a violent demonstration. Video footage showed an IDF officer forcefully pushing one of the activists to the ground. The four detained activists, including Wishnitzer, were subsequently released without charges, and police stated that there had not initially been suspicion of a criminal offence. Combatants for Peace subsequently threatened defamation proceedings against the IDF Spokesperson over its description of the incident. The IDF nevertheless maintained that the conclusions of its broader investigation remained valid and stated that videos circulated on social media presented only a partial and selectively edited picture of events.

In May 2025, Wishnitzer initiated a collective statement by Israeli academics known as Black Flag, which called on the leadership of Israeli higher-education institutions to speak publicly against the conduct and humanitarian consequences of the Gaza war. The statement was signed by several hundred academics by the time it was reported by Le Monde, and subsequently gathered additional signatures. The name referred to the Israeli legal doctrine of a "black flag" identifying a manifestly illegal order. The initiative highlighted wartime tensions in Israeli academia between administrators demanding apolitical classrooms and faculty arguing that institutional silence regarding Gaza was untenable.

Academic career

Wishnitzer completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in history at Tel Aviv University.Wishnitzer also received his PhD in 2009 from Tel Aviv University Following his doctorate, Wishnitzer held a Fulbright research fellowship at the University of Washington during the 2009–2010 academic year.

Wishnitzer serves as professor in Tel Aviv University's Department of Middle Eastern and African History, which he also chaired. Wishnitzer has also chaired academic conference sessions, including a session at the 2018 Tel Aviv University workshop Social Constructions of the Self. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman period.

Academic reception

Reading Clocks alla Turca

His 2015 book Reading Clocks alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire analyzes the evolving temporal systems, daily rhythms, and the meaning of time among the Ottoman elite during the long nineteenth century. The book centers on two parallel stories: the transition from a patrimonial tradition of time to a legal-rational system, and the gradual replacement of Ottoman clock-keeping methods by European timekeeping practices. He draws on a diverse range of sources, including poetry, military schedules, ferry timetables, and political cartoons to describe late Ottoman temporality. He explores how time reflected the empire's societal structures and underscores the role of state-driven reforms in the emergence of modern temporality, marking the Ottoman Empire as an unusual case where this shift was more state-imposed than driven by industrial capitalism.

The book was positively received while also attracting criticism concerning its scope and explanatory framework. Reviewing it in New Perspectives on Turkey, Einar Wigen argued that Wishnitzer did not explore several issues raised by his own analysis, including relations among different Istanbul communities, relations between women and men, and relations between the imperial center and periphery. Acclaimed Ottoman studies historian Edhem Eldem, writing in the Mediterranean Historical Review, emphasized the limitations created by the book top-down and state-centered perspective. Eldem noted that Wishnitzer left out large portions of the non-Muslim population and women, and that the narrative was overwhelmingly urban and centered on Istanbul at the expense of the Empire overwhelming rural landscape. He also pointed to the omission of the recurring sıvış-year fiscal crises, which arose from discrepancies between solar and lunar calendars and constituted a major example of the practical consequences of competing Ottoman temporal systems.

Historian Nir Shafir similarly questioned Wishnitzer's emphasis on the nineteenth-century Ottoman state as the principal agent and disseminator of the new temporal order as excessively strong. Shafir argued that greater attention to the commercial circulation of European clocks, earlier Ottoman clock towers, sundials, and other forms of material and visual culture might have made the narrative less schematic and weakened the primacy assigned to the state in explaining temporal transformation. He nevertheless assessed the book as an important contribution to Ottoman and Middle Eastern history.

As Night Falls

In his 2021 book As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark, Witshnitzer explores the Ottoman night in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, showing how darkness shaped everyday life, spirituality, and politics. According to his own account of the book, his project the night as both threatening and liberating, but also a time of illicit trade, entertainment, and rebellion. His main thesis is that the Ottoman state alternately tolerated and profited from illegal night-time activities while using grand illuminations to project power and piety.

As Night Falls received substantial praise but also unusually detailed methodological and philological criticism. In a review written for the premier historical journal, The American Historical Review, Edhem Eldem described the book an important contribution to Ottoman cultural history. Yet, he noted numerous terminological mistakes that reflected authorial errors or misunderstanding of Ottoman Turkish.

Reiterating his previous criticism of Wishnitzer's work, Eldem criticized Wishnitzer's selective treatment of nocturnal life, ommitting key subject associted with night-time like magic and the occult, dreams, and the social significance of Ramadan nights. More fundamentally, Eldem argued that Wishnitzer reduced his description of nightlife disproportionately to a history of crime, drinking, rebellion and displays of political power rather than of ordinary nocturnal experiences such as sleep, repose and domestic intimacy.

Eldem further questioned several aspects of the evidentiary basis of the study. He considered the evidence for Wishnitzer's argument concerning Ottoman patterns of segmented sleep particularly thin and cautioned that court records disproportionately document extraordinary events and violations rather than ordinary life. He also questioned whether eight court registers from Üsküdar could adequately represent Istanbul as a whole and whether the addition of four Jerusalem registers justified the broader category of "Ottoman cities" used in the book's title. Finally, he observed that non-Muslims, apart from Jews in Jerusalem, were largely absent from the book. Eldem concluded that further research would be necessary to recover the more ordinary and less easily documented dimensions of nocturnal Ottoman life.

Personal life

Wishnitzer was born and reared on Kibbutz Kvutzat Shiller in central Israel.

Books

• Wishnitzer, Avner (2015). Reading Clocks alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-25786-0.
• Wishnitzer, Avner (2021). As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-83214-4.