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Ezra Nawi, born 1952, in Basra, Iraq, is an Israeli human rights activist, pacifist and exponent of Gandhian civil disobedience who came to international attention after being convicted in 2007 of participating in a riot and allegedly assaulting two police officers, in connection with the demolition of an Arab home in the West Bank by Israeli border police. An editorial in The Guardian has called him 'a rarity, even among that most endangered of species, the Israeli peace activist.'
Background
In his youth, Nawi was active in a communist youth movement and he became politically active after the outbreak of the First Intifada in the 1980s. After meeting and dating Fuad Mussa, a Palestinian man, Nawi joined the Jewish-Arab human rights organization Ta'ayush, where his fluency in both Hebrew and Arabic allowed him to serve as a liaison between local Palestinians in the Hebron area and outside activists.
Nawi is said to have adopted the distinctive cave-dwelling Bedouin of the South Hebron area, a people to whom he became attached immediately on encountering them. For the last decade he has set up summer day camps for their children, brought in projectors to show them films, and taken them on trips where, for the first time in their life, they can have an opportunity to swim. He has organized Ta'ayush activities which involve escorting children to school and protecting them from settlers. He is said to charge exorbitantly for his work as a plumber in order to earn enough money to donate to the Bedouin tribesmen. After a Knesset committee grilled an IDF commander on the way children were being prevented from going to school, the IDF instituted armored personnel carriers to accompany them. Such escorts however do not apply when summer camps are conducted, and, according to Nawi, a settler quipped that while the Geneva Convention guaranteed children the right to a schooling, it says nothing about their right to summer camp.
His role has drawn scorn from both the military authorities, who have detained him on numerous occasions, and local settlers who have previously assaulted him and are suspected by the police of attempting to assassinate him. In sworn testimony, David Shulman recalled an incident that took place in Susya in 2005, where Nawi was subject to assault by settlers:-
I have been through many difficult moments with him—attacks by settlers, in particular—and I have never seen him respond to violence with violence. On one occasion in Susya, in 2005, settlers broke a wooden pole over his head, and he stood his ground without hitting back. I was right beside him, and I saw it. I have witnessed such instances many times. He is committed to nonviolent protest in every fiber of his being.
In 2007 a film about Nawi's life and work directed by Nissim Mossek and produced by Sharon Schaveet premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival where it was received with a standing ovation and a Special Mention by the jury.
2007 arrest and trial
Roughly a hundred Bedouin, refugees from Tel Arad in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, eke out their livelihood pasturing their goats and sheep on the rocky land at Umm al-Kheir which they purchased from its Palestinian owners in the early 1950s. On 14 February 2007, Nawi went to assist these Palestinian families whose homes, several tin and canvas shanties, lying near to the settlement of Carmel were about to be razed as illegal structures. Nawi was involved in a clash with border police who had been sent to protect the bulldozers. Nawi threw himself before the bulldozers, and had to be dragged from their path to allow the demolition order to be executed. Though much of the incident was captured on video, the police testified later that, after they caught up with him inside a half-demolished shack, he raised his hands against them and resisted arrest, during some 20 seconds when they confronted Nawi inside the shack, something not caught on video. He was arrested, handcuffed and charged, although the assault later alleged was not included in the original police statements. At his trial, judge Eilata Ziskind determined on March 19, on the basis of testimony from two police officers, that he was guilty as charged and that he had pushed the two policemen, incited people, behaved in an unruly manner and interrupted police in the performance of their duties. The decision at the subsequent trial led to an outcry, some 140,000 letters, according to Nawi, being sent to Israeli officials. Television footage filming the clash had been broadcast on Israel's Channel 1. According to Ben-Gurion university professor Neve Gordon, the verdict was made notwithstanding 'the very clear evidence' captured on film. Sentencing, in which he was expected to serve several years in jail, was originally scheduled for July 1, 2009 but subsequently shifted to September 21, 2009, after the judge had been presented with a petition organized in an international campaign conducted over the internet which drew signatures from 100,000 people in support of Nawi. In August 2009, the court, in a preliminary hearing on sentencing, heard witnesses testifying on Nawi's behalf. Aside from a number of academics, the former Deputy Attorney General of Israel, Yehudit Karp, speaking as a character witness on his behalf and as a former head of a committee that had examined law and order issues in the West Bank, wrote that the situation there was strongly distorted in favour of the settlers, and that this justified the way Nawi, whom she called a modern-day Robin Hood, behaved:
'This is the start of a dangerous process . .The shortcomings require treatment at the root. They are a symptom of a much deeper problem . .Acts of injustice are being carried out against the Palestinians, and the law is not being enforced.
According to Nawi, the judge instructed the court to find an interpreter to translate the sentence for Nawi's benefit, as if he, a Mizrahi Jew fluent in Hebrew, were actually a Palestinian Arab.
In his own defense, given in an article in The Nation at the time, Nawi spoke of his eight years of activism in the area, and asked rhetorically: 'was I the one who poisoned and destroyed Palestinian water wells? Was I the one who beat young Palestinian children? Did I hit the elderly? Did I poison the Palestinian residents' sheep? Did I demolish homes and destroy tractors? Did I block roads and restrict movement? Was I the one who prevented people from connecting their homes to running water and electricity? Did I forbid Palestinians from building homes?' He protested what he regards to be an 'unholy alliance' between the military, civil administration, the judicial system, the police, and the Jewish settlers, whom he regards as the commanders.
This unholy alliance is extremely dangerous, because for them the end--gaining full control of the Land of Israel--justifies the means. In order to advance this end they dehumanize the Palestinians; and because the Palestinians in their eyes are not human, everything is permitted. They can steal their land, demolish their homes, steal their water, imprison them for no reason and at times even kill them. In Hebrew we say damam mutar, taking their blood is permissible.
Nawi's case elicited the attention of several prominent international figures, including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Charles Glass, Sheldon Pollock, Neve Gordon and Elle Flanders, who organized a campaign to protest what they view as his politically motivated arrest, conviction, and pending imprisonment.
On September 21, the Jerusalem Magistrate Court sentenced him to a term of one month in prison30 days in prison, fined NIS 750,000 and order to pay an additional NIS 500 to each officer he was found guilty of assaulting. It also directed that he serve a further six months were he to participate in similar activities for the following three years.
Aftermath
Subsequent to this trial, Ha'aretz revealed that the prosecution had used as part of its case a prior conviction of Nawi for statutory rape of a minor. The offense, which occurred in 1992, regarded an affair he had with a 15 year old Palestinian boy. Nawi argued that it came to light when the boy's parents, on discovering their relationship, lodged a complaint with the Israeli police. In Israeli law, such relationships are forbidden with minors below the age of 16. Nawi admits that it was a mistake. The story resurfaced once more in 2011 when newspapers in Ireland alleged that the popular Irish senator and presidential candidate David Norris, a former lover of Nawi's, had written a letter to the Israeli court requesting clemency for Nawi at the time.
References
- Editorial, 'In praise of ... Ezra Nawi,' The Guardian, 3 July 2009.
- According to David Shulman,'The Trial of Ezra Nawi,' Boston Review, September/October 2009.
- McGirk, Tim. Ezra Nawi: Jewish Pacifist Facing Jail for Aiding Arabs, Time, August 15, 2009: 'In his many confrontations over the years with Israeli police, soldiers and settlers Nawi has never struck back, say his colleagues at Ta'ayush. "Non-violence is Ezra's natural affinity," says David Shulman, a Ta'ayush member and professor of Sanskrit who has on multiple occasions witnessed Nawi's encounters with settlers and police. "He is amazingly gentle and empathetic. He's not capable of violence.". That's not how Israel's police and courts see Nawi. The avowed pacifist . is to be sentenced for allegedly assaulting a policeman. After the 2007 incident, in which a riot ensued after Israeli soldiers were sent to tear down an Arab home in the West Bank, Nawi was videotaped in handcuffs on the back of a police truck, surrounded by police taunting him for helping Arabs. "I was a soldier, but I did not demolish houses," Nawi replied."The only think that will be left here is hatred".'
- 'Ezra, a stocky man with thick eyebrows and a bronze complexion, is not a politician at all, but a plumber, a gay Jewish plumber, from an Iraqi Jewish family. He became an activist in an Arab-Jewish human rights group in the 1980s after becoming intimately acquainted with the hardships of Arab life in Israel through his Palestinian lover. Ezra's activism is more practical than overtly political. He goes wherever Palestinians are in trouble, being chased off their land by the Israeli army, or assaulted by armed Israeli settlers. His main area of operation is south Hebron, where Bedouins try to survive as best they can in the desert or in the slums. When they refuse to move from their land, their animals are poisoned, their wells blocked, and their plots of land destroyed or simply confiscated. Israeli settlements surround the squalid towns where Arab shepherds, deprived of their traditional livelihoods, are often forced to live.' Ian Buruma, 'Israel and Palestine: Robbed of Dreams,' in New York Review of Books, April, 7 2011 pp.37-39, p.38.
- Editorial, 'In praise of ... Ezra Nawi,' The Guardian, 3 July 2009.
- For this side of his life see Daphna Baram, 'My plumber, my hero,' The Guardian, 29 November 2004
- Breda Heffernan, 'Plumber Nawi became an ardent campaigner for Palestinian rights,' Irish Independent, 1 August.
- Daphna Baram, 'My plumber, my hero,':'I was attached to this community from the moment I came in contact with it, living like people in biblical times, working the land with the most primitive tools. And all of a sudden, they are in existential danger, prosecuted, having their fields burned, their wells poisoned, their elderly beaten and their land taken away from them. You can't just walk away.'
- Daniel Gavron, Holy land mosaic: stories of cooperation and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, Rowman & Littlefield 2008 pp.36-37
- Nir Hasson , 'Settlers attack left-wing activists in the West Bank, injure two,' Haaretz, September 25, 2005.
- Nir Hasson,'A one-man protection force,' Ha'aretz, April 6, 2009.
- David Shulman,'The Trial of Ezra Nawi,'
- Ezra Nawi Thanks Everyone For Supporting Him At His Trial
- David Shulman, 'Where peaceful protest begets jail,' Haaretz, 19 June 2009.
- David Shulman,'The Trial of Ezra Nawi,' Boston Review.
- Ezra Nawi, 'Israel's Man of Conscience,' The Nation, June 29, 2009.
- David Shulman,'The Trial of Ezra Nawi,':'If a Palestinian in Um al-Kheir needs to build a home or add a room to his tent or shack, he must obtain a building permit, and there is virtually no chance he will succeed. On average, one building permit is issued each month in Area C, a portion of the West Bank under direct Israeli control and home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Inevitably, people build without permits—they usually have very large families—and just as inevitably, the Civil Administration—that is, the occupation authority—issues its demolition orders. Sixty such orders are issued in a typical month, of which about twenty are carried out. It has happened many times at Um al-Kheir, only a few meters from the rows of modern, red-roofed villas erected by Israelis at the Carmel settlement..'
- David Shulman,'The Trial of Ezra Nawi,'.
- David Shulman, 'Where peaceful protest begets jail,' Haaretz, 19 June 2009.
- Editorial, 'In praise of ... Ezra Nawi,' The Guardian, 3 July 2009.
- Chaim Levison, 'Campaign seeks to keep rights activist out of prison,' in Ha'aretz, 17 September 2009.
- Ezra Nawi, 'Israel's Man of Conscience,' The Nation, June 29, 2009
- Neve Gordon, 'Israeli activist to be jailed for caring, in The Guardian, May 6, 2009.
- Apparently the maximum sentence is 18 months to two years imprisonment, according to Gay Israeli Defender of Palestinian Human Rights Ezra Nawi Spared Jail … For Now, UK Gay News.
- Tim McGirk, 'Ezra Nawi: Jewish Pacifist Facing Jail for Aiding Arabs,' Time, August 15, 2009.
- Gay Israeli Defender of Palestinian Human Rights Ezra Nawi Spared Jail … For Now, UK Gay News, August 17, 2009.
- Chaim Levinson, 'Anti-settler lawyer urges clemency for 'Robin Hood' of the 'Wild West Bank', Haaretz, 27 August 2011:'She said the Palestinians' life in the southern Hebron Hills "is surreal - they have no water, no power supply, they are subject to constant harassment by settlers and are also up against a government that wishes to expel them." "Where there is no law and no one to turn to, Ezra is seen as a law breaker, while the state itself breaks the law and fails to uphold its basic obligations. Ezra is the savior of these people. He blocks with his body settlers who stop the farmers from working on their land. You could call him Robin Hood of the Wild West," she said.
- Chaim Levinson, 'Campaign seeks to keep rights activist out of prison,' Ha'aretz 28 August 2009.
- Ezra Nawi, 'Israel's Man of Conscience,' The Nation, June 29, 2009.
- Ezra Nawi, 'Israel's Man of Conscience,' The Nation, June 29, 2009.
- Ezra Nawi, [http://www.thenation.com/article/israels-man- conscience 'Israel's Man of Conscience,'] The Nation, June 29, 2009.
- "Help Israel Human Rights Activist Ezra Nawi". supportezra.net. Archived from the original on 2009-05-11. Retrieved 2009-06-14.
- Chaim Levinson, 'Leftist jailed for 1 month for assaulting police in West Bank,' Haaretz, September 21, 2009.
- Richard Silverstein Ezra Nawi Railroaded, 30 Day Sentence, Tikun Olam, 21 October 2009, says the figure was $200.
- Danna Harman, Chaim Levinson, 'Relations with Ezra Nawi threaten to derail Norris’ Irish presidential hopes,' Ha'aretz 31 July, 2011.
External links
- Video of Nawi's arrest. YouTube.