Ezra Yitzhak Nawi (; 1951 – 9 January 2021) was a left-wing Israeli Jew human rights activist. He was particularly active among the Bedouin herders and farmers of the South Hebron Hills and against the establishment of Israeli settlements there, in what Uri Avnery described as a protracted effort by settlers to cleanse the area of Arab villagers, in the prevention of which he played a key role. He was described as a "Ta'ayush nudnik (nuisance)", and "a working-class, liberal gay version of Joe the Plumber".
He was regarded by some as an extreme leftist activist and troublemaker. He was charged with numerous infractions of the law, with convictions ranging from statutory rape, illegal use of a weapon and possession of drugs to assaulting two policemen. In addition, he also served several short stints in prison as a consequence of his activism. Defenders claimed that many of the prosecutions were politically motivated.
David Shulman regarded him as a major obstacle to the theft of Palestinian land, and considered him an Israeli exponent of Gandhian civil disobedience. Nawi once said that he would strike back when attacked. He came to international attention after being convicted in 2007 of participating in a riot and assaulting two police officers in connection with the demolition of Bedouin homes in the West Bank by Israeli border policemen. His trial and imprisonment spurred a worldwide protest against his treatment that elicited 20,000 signatures.
In 2008, Nissim Mossek produced a film on his life, private and public, which had mixed reviews.
In 2015, an undercover pro-settler group taped him bragging that he had identified Palestinian land brokers willing to sell land to Israeli or Jewish brokers to the PA security services. Under Palestinian law, such sales are a capital offence, and Nawi claimed they would be tortured and killed. The case triggered a political backlash in Israel and there were calls for England and France to stop foreign funding of two Israeli civil rights NGOs, Ta'ayush and B'Tselem, whose members were involved in the incident. Nawi and two others were arrested, and then released and banned from the West Bank for two weeks.
Biography Ezra Nawi was born in Jerusalem, one of five siblings, to a Mizrahi Jewish Iraqi family originally from Basra, which had made aliyah from Kurdistan shortly before his birth. His mother gave birth to him when she was 14 years old. He was raised by a grandmother who spoke to him in Iraqi Arabic, an accent he still retained. When Nawi was a teenager, they lived next door to Reuven Kaminer, a leading figure in Israel's Communist Party, and Kaminer, he has reminisced, influenced his activism. As a conscript in the IDF, he served in a combat engineering unit. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, where his duties included laying mines along the Suez Canal, he went abroad, travelling widely in the US and Europe, spending some time in both the UK and Ireland.
Nawi worked as a plumber. He was openly gay. He developed an interest in human rights, which he said comes from his experience of "belonging to a despised minority", after meeting Irish University lecturer David Norris and forming a relationship with him in Dublin when they met at Christmas in 1975. Nawi insisted on going home with Norris after meeting him at a party – it was mutual love at first sight – and Norris found his sterile home, replete with every modern commodity but where only eggs and tea were the staple, suddenly transformed as Nawi's spicy Middle Eastern cooking suffused his Edwardian home. Nawi mulled the idea of emigrating to Ireland; Norris helped him buy a home in Ramot. Their partnership, predominantly a mariage blanc since the physical side ended after three years, lasted 10 years, and ultimately broke up after Nawi refused to commit, having in the meantime fallen in love with an Israeli athlete, with whom he lived for a decade. The three remained on the best of terms.
Nawi suffered his first stroke shortly after the release of an Uvda broadcast. Close friends attributed it to the severe harassment he had experienced. He suffered another stroke in the summer of 2020, and during his hospitalization doctors discovered he had a brain tumour. He had recurrent minor strokes later that year, in autumn. He died on 9 January 2021 in Jerusalem, at the age of 69. Shortly before his death, he remarked to his friend David Shulman, "I did something good with my life," and to Amira Hass that, "I could have done much more."
Political activism His interest in human rights developed over several years while he shared his home in Jerusalem with a West Bank Palestinian, Fuad Mussa, who feared an honour killing because of his homosexuality. Nawi was convicted on charges of allowing his partner to live illegally with him in Israel. The difficulties they encountered acquainted him with the hardships of Arab life, and, he said, this was a turning point that led him to embrace an activist role in the West Bank in the 1980s. Friends and clients of Nawi's raised £30,000 to bail out his companion when Fuad was arrested after restrictions tightened during the Second Intifada. An appeal was made to the President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, for his release, and an ex-gratia permit was eventually given to them to allow the couple to reside together in Jerusalem. By then, however, the relationship had broken up. Nawi had in the meantime 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 Israeli activists. According to Amiel Vardi, a classics scholar of Hebrew University and co-founder of Ta'ayush, he had an instinctive sense of relations with Palestinians which other activists, many of them Jewish intellectuals, lack. He used surplus earnings from his plumbing trade to subsidize his activities, and was reputed to charge exorbitantly for his services in order to earn enough money to donate to the fallāḥīn.
According to Ian Buruma, his activism is more practical than political. Nawi himself said of his work, "(T)his is not about ideology. It is about decency". According to Max Blumenthal, he is widely revered by young activists as a guide and mentor in the West Bank.
Nawi, one of several Israeli activists in the South Hebron hills but according to David Shulman, the "real hero" of the area, is said to have adopted the distinctive cave-dwelling Bedouin resident in this zone, Eighty to a hundred members of these families, of the Bedouin al-Hathalin clan, refugees from Tel Arad in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, dwell at Umm al-Khair, a village south of Hebron, 30 metres from the Israeli settlement of Carmel, Har Hebron. This is one of the many khirbehs of that area. They eke out a rough livelihood pasturing their goats and sheep on rocky land purchased from its Palestinian owners in the early 1950s. They are hardscrabble farmers of desolate hills where, according to Nawi, "nobody else would even try to grow anything," but where these Bedouin are often prevented from working the land. His attachment to these people and their biblical way of life flowed, he said, from his first encounter with them. He thought their distinctive lifestyle was subject to an "existential danger" in the way their fields were burned, their grazing stock poisoned, their wells poisoned, or demolished, their aged beaten and their land expropriated. He has been assaulted by settlers while helping Palestinians harvest olives from their own olive groves. Some, fearing for their lives, would not return to their fields unless Nawi accompanied them. He slept overnight in their houses to deter IDF soldiers reportedly throwing rocks at dwellings after dark. He was active in many of their encampments from Bi'r al-'Id to Susia and Umm al-Kheir. His arrival on the scene when settlers attacked a Bedouin family near Twamin and stole 450 head of their sheep livestock, was sufficient, according to Rabbis for Human Rights, to cause the settlers to desist and retreat.
Nawi and this small group of activists have been described as an "independent aid agency": "whatever cash went into their hands was immediately translated into solving the problems of the poorest of the land." For the last decade he has set up summer day camps for Bedouin children, brought in projectors to show them films, and taken them on trips to Jericho where, for the first time in their life, they can have an opportunity to swim. He has introduced computer technology in these communities, installed solar panels and electricity-generating windmills with the assistance of an Israeli engineer from COMET:ME for a Palestinian refugee camp. He helped ambulances get through roadblocks and handed out cash to poor people. He has organized Ta'ayush activities which involve escorting children to school and protecting them from settlers. After a Knesset committee grilled an IDF commander on the way children were being prevented from going to school, the IDF instituted armoured 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 from local settlers who have previously assaulted him, thrown rocks at his car at night, threatening to kill him when he intervened and who have been suspected by the police of intending to assassinate him. He has complained of multiple forms of harassment, from repeated fines for petty traffic incidents where enforcement is otherwise loose, to having his business audited and receiving a huge tax bill to, he suspected, having his phone monitored and being subject to vicious homophobic taunts. Some brand him ironically as "the saviour of the Arabs" whose concern for "unfortunate" Arabs extends to assisting them when they are "stealing" what settlers consider to be state lands in the southern Hebron hills and Gush Etzion.
Nawi said he did not yield ground when settlers attack, claiming that, rather than running away as other Israeli volunteers do, he hit back. In a 2005 interview, he went on record as saying:- The settlers have become used to seeing Israelis caving in and crumpling when they get beaten. I don't cave in. If anyone beats me, I strike him back. And I'm not exactly a pip-squeak.
The Israeli academic David Shulman states that Nawi is non-violent and recalled in sworn testimony an incident that took place in Susya in 2005, where Nawi was subject to one such assault:- "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 Susia, 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 opposing such settler actions, which he said "serve the state's interests," Nawi is on record as saying that, "I'm here to change reality.. The only Israelis these people know are settlers and soldiers. Through me they know a different Israeli", and stated his conviction that their acts "are destroying Israel. We (Israelis) have to live side by side with the Palestinians as good neighbours, not as conquerors". Mere presence can be, he maintained, a deterrence.