Miko Peled

Avraham "Miko" Peled (Hebrew: אברהם "מיקו" פלד, born 10 December 1961) is an Israeli-American activist, author, and karate instructor.

He condemned the Israeli military for seizing the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights, calling the war a "cynical campaign of territorial expansion".

Miko Peled followed his father's footsteps at first, joining Israel's Special Forces after high school and earning the red beret, but he soon grew to regret his decision.

At her funeral, according to an article summarizing Peled's book, Ehud Barak, who had just been elected to lead the opposition, explained that in order to gain appeal he must disguise his real intentions of becoming a "peacemaker."

In reply, Peled said, "Why not tell the truth... That this and similar tragedies are taking place because we are occupying another nation and that in order to save lives the right thing to do is to end the occupation and negotiate a just peace with our Palestinian partners?

"[7] The murder of Smadar, and his sister Nurit's insistence that it was caused by the occupation, "jolted him back into Middle Eastern reality," an interviewer has written.

"[7] He joined a Palestinian/Jewish-American dialogue group in San Diego, where he "found that the Jewish Americans he met – with their 'New York humor and deli food' – were more foreign than the hummus, tabouleh and warm hospitality offered by his new Palestinian friends.

He was shocked by random anti-Arab venom spewed casually by Jewish Americans he met who assumed he shared their views, in an atmosphere of growing Islamophobia."

"[5] Returning to activism, Peled decided that the two-state solution his father had promoted would no longer suffice, and began to support for the creation of a single democratic state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.

In 2016, Peled generated controversy after tweeting that "Jews have reputation [for] being sleazy thieves," leading to the cancellation of his speaking engagements at Princeton and San Diego State University.

[11] At a talk titled Segregated and Unequal: Palestinian Life under Apartheid Israel, at University College London the following November, Peled said "The pro-Israel lobby uses all sorts of dirty tactics.

He has also written that Israel's educational system is designed to turn Israeli children into racists who view Palestinians "as culturally inferior, violent and bent on the annihilation of the Jews, and...void of a true national identity," and "as a problem that must be solved and as a threat that must be eliminated."

"[3] The book, he has said, is based largely on long conversations with his mother, on a thorough reading of "everything my dad had ever written," and on material about his father's career in the Israeli army archives.

In October 2012, he sold the business to his top student of over twenty years, David Michael Adams, in order to focus on promoting his book The General's Son.