Abraham “Avrum” Burg is an Israeli author, politician, and businessman. Born in Jerusalem, he is the son of Yosef Burg, a founder and longtime leader of the National Religious Party who served in numerous Israeli cabinets.
Burg held senior leadership positions within the Israeli political establishment. He served as Chairman of the Jewish Agency from 1995 to 1999, Speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003, and briefly as acting President of Israel in 2000 following Ezer Weizman’s resignation.
In 2003, while still serving in public life, Burg published an op-ed titled “The End of Zionism” in The Guardian, arguing that military occupation was eroding Israel’s democratic structure. He subsequently left institutional politics, writing books such as “The Holocaust Is Over: It’s Time to Rise From the Ashes” (2008), which warned against using historical Holocaust trauma to justify state expansion or ethno-nationalist policies.
Burg advocates for defining Israel as a “state of all its citizens” rather than an ethnic state, joining the Arab-Jewish Hadash coalition in 2015. In 2012, he petitioned Israeli courts to remove the classification of “Jewish” from his official state registry, citing structural discrimination against non-Jewish populations.
He is one of the initiators and prominent signatories of the 2025 public statement, “Global Jewish Call on the UN and World Leaders to Sanction Israel,” which urged international bodies to institute arms embargoes and political sanctions against Israel over its actions in Gaza and the West Bank.