“I pledge to continue my parents’ work for Palestine.”

Lurie first went to Mandatory Palestine on a tramp steamer in 1928. He recounts the 28-day trip. “We went through the Dardanelles to Constantinople in the Black Sea and then to Haifa.”
Lurie enrolled in the pnimiya (boarding school) of the Beth Sefer Realli in Haifa. He referred to himself as the “halutz” [pioneer] for his parents who made Aliyah the following year and “rescued” him from the terrible food at the boarding school.
At that time, Haifa had the only public pool in Palestine. Lurie successfully pitched a story on the pool to Gershon Agronsky (later Agron), editor and publisher of The Palestine Post, precuror to The Jerusalem Post. Agronsky liked Lurie’s work and hired him on as a cub reporter.
Lurie got his first big scoop through a friend’s older sister. She invited him to Shabbat dinner along with two men who worked for the Palestine Public Works Department. “Now, for months there had been lying at the side of the road from the coast up to Jerusalem water pipes waiting to be installed while the residents of Jerusalem continued to ration water that had been collected during the winter rains. These guys didn’t know that there was a reporter at the dinner and they told the story of the pipes. They were screwed the wrong way and could not be connected.” Lurie’s story about the water pipes was featured as a series in The Post.
Following his discharge from the U.S. army, Lurie served as a foreign correspondent for The Palestine Post based in New York and helped the Haganah with public relations. When the Jewish paramilitary organization wanted to go public, they asked Lurie to open the first Friends of the Haganah office in the summer of 1947.
Lurie also worked with the Jewish Agency when it was thrust onto the world stage in 1947. As a representative of the Jewish people, the Agency cooperated with the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), created to make recommendations regarding the future government of Palestine.
In the fall of 1947, Lurie began working for Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Hired to professionalize their publication, he stayed on for the next 33 years turning the eight-page tabloid into a nationally known magazine. Lurie remembered vividly the headline of Hadassah’s December 1947 newsletter: “U.N. Declares Jewish State.”
As a peace advocate, Lurie considered his 30 years at Hadassah “very difficult years.” A faction led by a longtime board president had tried to get Hadassah to oppose the settlements. “It didn’t work. Hadassah supported the government, whatever it did, and that was it.”

He knew the history of these internal Jewish conflicts from before the creation of the State. So, the concept of disagreement and dissent as ways of expressing patriotism were part of his way of looking at the present arguments over the same thing they were arguing about before the State: What is Israel and how can it live with Arabs?”