Ezra Nawi facts for kids
Ezra Yitzhak Nawi (Hebrew: עזרא יצחק נאווי; 1951 – 9 January 2021) was an Israeli Mizrahi Jew, left-wing, human rights activist and pacifist. 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 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.
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.
He was raised by a grandmother who spoke to him in Iraqi Arabic. 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 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 a further 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
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 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.
His attachment to Bedouin herders and farmers and their biblical way of life flowed, he said, from his first encounter with them: "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".
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.
Films about Nawi
Nawi's story has been recounted in two documentary films. In 2005, Canadian-Jewish filmmaker Elle Flanders made a documentary entitled Zero Degree of Separation, which intertwined the story of her family in Jerusalem, for whom Ezra Nawi once worked as a gardener, with the lives of two gay couples, one of which was Nawi and his companion. In 2007, a further film about Nawi's life and work, "Citizen Nawi" (HaEzrach Nawi) directed by Nissim Mossek and produced by Sharon Schaveet, premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival, where it won a special jury mention. The film documents the plight of the Bedouin, the difficulties of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the hardships of being gay.
Nawi's instincts, Fox concludes, are those of the humanist, and the director Mossek's gutsiest move was to have made "a film that doesn't aim to inspire us with platitudes but instead tries to shock us with the hard business of building a road to peace".
See also
In Spanish: Ezra Nawi para niños
- List of peace activists
