Naaman was one of the pioneers of science and the founders of the space and nuclear programs in Israel
The funeral of former minister Yuval Na'eman, who passed away today, will take place tomorrow, Thursday, at 15:00 PM at the old cemetery on Trumpeldor Street in Tel Aviv. Earlier, the public will be able to pass by his casket, which will be placed in the plaza of the Senate building of Tel Aviv University, starting at 12:00. At 13:00 p.m., a funeral ceremony will be held in the presence of the family and the president of the country.
Professor Yuval Naaman passed away this morning (April 26, 2006) at the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. In what appears to be the last interview, published in Galileo magazine in May 2005, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Prof. Naman told me that he had known four careers in his life: engineering, military, scientific and political, but he loved the scientific one more than all of them.
Naman suffered a stroke on April 22 and has since been hospitalized, unconscious, in the hospital's neurosurgical intensive care unit. Naaman is the recipient of the Israel Prize for Exact Sciences. Naman was one of the founders of the "Revival" movement, its chairman and a Knesset member on its behalf during three terms, during which he served as Minister of Energy and Infrastructure and Minister of Science and Technology. Among his many other positions, he founded the Israel Space Agency and headed it for many years since its establishment in the early 2005s, in fact only in XNUMX did he hand over the position of chairman to Prof. Yitzhak Ben Israel.
Yuval Naaman grew up in Tel Aviv and studied at the Herzliya Gymnasium. At the age of 15 he graduated with unprecedented honors from high school and at the age of 16 he began studying mechanical engineering at the Technion, which he graduated with honors.
Already at the age of 15, Naman enlisted in the ranks of the Haganah organization. During the War of Independence he served as deputy battalion commander, as the operations officer of Tel Aviv and as deputy commander of the 51st Battalion in the Givati Brigade. Then he was appointed head of the operations branch under the command of Yitzhak Rabin, head of the operations department, who was his good friend. Naman was identified as an MPM man, and despite this he was promoted to the position of head of the planning department at the General Staff and to the rank of lieutenant colonel, after acquiring a military education at the Higher War School in Paris. In this capacity, he designed a script for the Blitzkrieg, 12 years before the Six Day War.
At the end of 1954, after the removal of the head of AMN, Binyamin Ghibli following the "disgraceful business", Naman actually filled his place for a while, and then continued as the deputy of Yehoshaphat Harkavi. Among other things, he was involved in the promotion of encryption and decryption technologies. During Operation Kadesh coordinated the military coordination with Great Britain and France. After that he was responsible for the relationship with the Kurds in Iraq and with Jewish communities in Islamic countries. In 1958 he was appointed IDF attache in London, and devoted himself to studying for a doctorate in physics. In 1961 he was released from the IDF.
In 1967, on the eve of the Six Day War, he was entrusted with handling political affairs. He made the decision to publish the famous telephone conversation between Nasser and Hussein, in which Nasser described the great achievements of Egypt at the start of the war, achievements that did not exist and were not created. At the end of the Yom Kippur War, Na'am served again, as after the "disgraceful business", as acting head of the National Security Agency for a short time, following the removal of Eli Zaira. In addition, he investigated the intelligence failures in the war.
In the XNUMXs he served as an adviser to Shimon Peres in the Ministry of Defense and his pretentious ambitions, including launching an Israeli satellite, angered Yitzhak Rabin and created a rift between them.
At the same time as this activity, and mainly he started this at the same time as his position as a military attaché in London, during the late fifties Naman made time for scientific research. He studied doctoral studies at the University of London. His mentor was the Pakistani physicist (who later won the Nobel Prize) Abdus Salam.
Naman's great scientific achievement is in identifying basic symmetry principles that underlie the world of elementary particles. He showed that the existence and properties of the subatomic particles can be explained with the help of a model based on the symmetry group. In particular, he showed how the proton and neutron are part of the octet of baryons that is a representation of this bunch. Neman arrived at these discoveries at the same time as Marie Gell-Mann, who named the particles at the base of the model as quarks. After the discovery of a particle (in 1964), whose existence and properties were predicted by the model of Gal-Man and Naman, Gal-Man alone won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1969 for this model, although their work was done simultaneously and independently. Missing out on the prize caused the faithful a frustration that accompanied him many years later, and he said about it:
"I felt a lot of frustration that Gal-Man had an entire establishment behind him and I only had myself. As far as the University of London was concerned, I was almost the enemy, since I allegedly stole the glory from their senior professor, and there was no one in Israel to support me. The Atomic Energy Commission is not an issue at all. It is clear that the anti-Israeli consideration also played a role in the committee's considerations. ... I have no doubt that the work I did surpasses in importance many of the works done since then and before." (Interview with Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronoth, 18.3.05/2005/XNUMX). Also in my interview with Galileo (May XNUMX issue) Na'im said that he deserved the Nobel Prize and that it was taken from him for non-essential reasons.
Naman is one of the founders of the physics department at Tel Aviv University and the winner of the Israel Prize for Exact Sciences in 1969. In 1965-1966 he served as vice president of Tel Aviv University, and in 1971-1975 as president of the university.
He also devoted his time to the popularization of science, giving lectures to youth, writing popular science books, and lecturing in the "Broadcast University" series of "IDF Waves".
Neman and the Israeli core
As early as 1952, he was a loyal member of the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1961, after completing his doctorate, he became a trustee scientific director at Nahal Sorek. At that time, Shimon Peres was the head of the team that led the establishment of the Kriya for nuclear research in Dimona and Naman, who worked under him, did not have good relations with him and finally retired. He had a role in concealing Israel's nuclear activities from the United States. Peres claimed that the scientists were skeptical of him, but it seems that Naman was among those who supported the construction of the reactor from the beginning. Naman then served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Committee. In 1981 he pushed to launch an operation against the nuclear reactor in Iraq.
political activity
In 1979 he founded the "Revival" movement with Geula Cohen and was elected to head it. Naman strongly opposed the Camp David Accords and the naval evacuation. His activity in the revival raised eyebrows from those who were aware of his atheistic views that stood in sharp contradiction to the positions of the religious right-wing group of faiths with which he cooperated.
After the elections to the Tenth Knesset (1981) he was elected to the Knesset on behalf of the "Revival" and between the years 1982-1984 he was the Minister of Science. On January 30, 1990, he resigned from the Knesset, and with the establishment of the Shamir government in June of that year, he returned to the Ministry of Science and Technology, and also received the portfolio of energy and infrastructure.
In May 2005, the Science and Technology Committee of the Knesset held a special meeting to mark the 80th birthday of Prof. Naman. After hearing praise for his actions in the scientific, military and ministerial fields in the government, Naman said: "On the one hand, I am embarrassed to hear all the things about this man. It reminds me of Natan Yonatan's song "That Man". The obituary is absolutely embarrassing. Although it is based. I do not deny that I have done things throughout my life. Part of the lesson is that under any condition, if you want, you can still continue to donate. I have lived at least four careers - engineer, scientist, security man and also a public figure. Nevertheless, in each of the careers I also thought about the other three. It definitely paid off because everything started from a very small beginning."
Naman added that "even in the field where I made a great contribution - physics - we still don't know much. We are just fleas on a remote planet. We must be more humble. Everything we know in physics relates to 5% of the contents of the universe. For 25% we call dark matter and we don't know how to explain what it is and for 70% we call dark energy and which we still don't know how to explain. Contrary to what Hawking spoke about the end of physics - we are only at the beginning of the road".
Neman said that although he himself understood things, he was not always able to convince the decision makers. For example, his friend to the Palmach, Yitzhak Rabin writes in his book service book that when asked why Israel needs a satellite, he said "no need, it must be some nonsense of Yuval Neman". Later, according to Naman, he was among the pushers for the development of Israeli military satellites.
He also accepted that in the early days of the country it was easier to take on big projects like the national carrier. Whereas today no one is ready to carry out a project that is longer than a term, such as the Sea Canal.
