“Do you want the international press to be present when we drive a million Palestinians on flatbed trucks across the Jordan River?” he asked.

Hertzberg, who was president of the American Jewish Congress from 1972 to 1978, emerged as an eminent force in Jewish thought with the 1959 publication of his textbook, The Zionist Idea.

“I have been pondering these ideas longer than anyone else,” said the 82-year-old Hertzberg. “I yield to no one on this continent or in Israel on the issue of Zionism.”

Hertzberg was a friend of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, but drew the ire of later Israeli leaders as a result of his longtime support for Palestinian statehood.

The United States must “shove peace down Israel’s throat,” but the Bush administration is “too busy fishing for money from rich Jewish Republicans, Hertzberg said.

He emerged on the American political scene first as a civil rights activist in the 1950s and 1960s and subsequently as a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War.

Hertzberg “is one of the last surviving authorities on Zionism and therefore commands respect,” said Josh Suskewicz ’05, president of Harvard Students for Israel, who worked for Hertzberg as research assistant last summer.

“It was a privilege to have him here,” Suskewicz said.