Ezra Nawi

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 retains. 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.

In opposing such settler actions, which he says "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 states 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 maintains, a deterrence.

Both Nawi and Butavia sued the police for harassment, claiming $28,125 in compensation. They further claim the incident was directed at them for being human rights activists, and that video taken at the time contradicts evidence presented by the police. In June 2019, the Jerusalem Magistrates Court found in favour of Nawi and Butavia, and ordered the police to pay them 7500 shekels in damages and compensation.

Both B'tselem and Ta'ayush criticized the programme for basing their investigation almost wholly on materials passed onto them by people who infiltrated Nawi's group. Rabbis for Human Rights suspended their collaboration with Nawi until hearings could clarify the circumstances. Veterans for Breaking the Silence refused to reply to inquiries by Channel 2 stating:'“We don’t work for the Stasi (East Germany’s Ministry of State Security) and we don’t reply to the Stasi inquiries. Whoever wants a Soviet bloc-style police state—good for them”.'

Nawi's example has also influenced the Israeli film-maker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz.

In January 2016, hidden camera recordings of Nawi were broadcast by Ilana Dayan as part of the Uvda ("Fact") investigative series on Israel's Channel 2. The report revealed Nawi bragging he had passed on to the Palestinian National Security Forces the names of Palestinian land brokers willing to sell land to Jews. In the recording, Nawi relates how Palestinian property dealers mistook him for a Jew looking to purchase land, and says, "Straight away I give their pictures and phone numbers to the Preventive Security Force. The Palestinian Authority catches them and kills them. But before it kills them, they get beat up a lot.”. No reports have confirmed that Nawi's actions brought about the execution of any Palestinians, a practice which, according to Amira Hass, the PA has long abandoned. Mahmoud Abbas said that the PA does not execute land vendors, but sentences them to hard labour. Several unsolved murders in recent years have, however, been regarded as related to such sales.

Ad Kan, the day after the programme was telecast, filed a complaint with the Israeli police against Nawi and two other Ta'ayush activists, and against B'tselem's Nasser Nawaja. On January 11, 2016, Nawi was arrested at Ben Gurion airport, after purchasing a flight ticket, on the suspicion of being an accessory to manslaughter, of conspiring in attempted murder, of contacting a foreign agent, of transporting an individual in Israel without a permit, and of using drugs. Subsequently, both Nasser Nawaja and a third activist Guy Butavia were arrested, denied a lawyer, with a gag order being placed on their cases as well. Butavia was released on 21 January, and Nawi remanded until 24 January. The immediate release of Nawaja was ordered by a judge, for what his lawyer called a 'false arrest', since Israel had no jurisdiction in the matter. The police transferred him to Ofer prison, in what B'tselem called a contempt of the court ruling. On January 24 a judge ordered Nawi’s release to house arrest, and criticized the prosecution for failing to clarify the allegation that he was involved in the death of a Palestinian selling land. Nawi had tipped off relatives of a certain Abu Khalil that the latter was considering a land swap with an Israeli, Yonathan. His relatives would have been harmed by the sale. Some time afterwards, Abu Khalil died. The police failed to provide evidence on the cause of death. An appeal by the police against the lower court decision ordering his release was rejected on 25 January by the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court. According to his lawyer, Eitan Peleg, the police failed to determine whether the putative victim was dead or not. On the 28th of January, Judge David Shaul Gabai Richter nullified the cause for the arrest of both Butavia and Nawi, stating there was nothing in the evidence to substantiate the police's central allegation. He rejected a police appeal that Nawi be banned from the West Bank. He added that the case was part of a political controversy in which one side attacked the other. It was not the court's function, he concluded, to bother with politics. An appeal by police against the decision,which ruled that a ban infringed their freedom of occupation and expression, was heard on 31 January, and partially overturned Richter's ruling. The police requested that the two activists be barred from the West Bank for 2 months was partially accepted when judge Moshe Bar-Am ruled reasonable suspicions exist, and that they were to be denied entry to the West Bank for two weeks.

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.

"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".

Nawi has had other convictions, including illegal use of a weapon and possession of drugs—he freely admits to smoking hash—for private use.

In April 2014, Nawi, together with Guy Butavia, was stopped by police, while driving out from Jerusalem towards the South Hebron hills. The police stated that Butavia was not wearing a safety belt, that Nawi's license was not in order, and that they suspected the two of trying to hide something. A tobacco pouch was seized, on the suspicion it contained drugs. The two were detained for 8 hours at a police station, and released under house arrest for three days. The day after, the order was cancelled. Despite several allegations made by the police, the case was dropped.

Following an incident with a military jeep in the South Hebron hills in March 2013, Nawi was charged with crossing a solid white line while overtaking. He was acquitted of the charge by Judge Miriam Kaslassy who stated in her ruling that "It’s clear as day that we’re not talking about random enforcement of a traffic violation", and that the police had made Nawi commit the offence. Nawi subsequently sued the state, and was awarded 45,000 shekels compensation. The Ministry of Justice stated that the policeman and the army officer involved in the incident would be prosecuted for entrapment.

On June 10, 2012, Nawi was convicted of 'offending public servants' by the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court, with Judge Cjana Lomp presiding, after it was alleged that he had called a deputy battalion commander of the IDF a "war criminal" during a clash at Susya in July 2009, when he and other activists tried to prevent Jewish settlers from establishing an outpost called Givat HaDegel (Flag Hill, alternatively Chisdi Hashem The Grace of God), and thereby depriving Palestinians of their land.

Subsequent to this trial, Ha'aretz revealed that the prosecution had used as part of its case Nawi's prior conviction for statutory rape. The story resurfaced once more in 2011 when the Zionist and blogger John Connolly revealed that the 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.

Incarcerated on Sunday, 23 May 2010, he served out his sentence at Dekel Prison, Emek Sarah, Beer-Sheva.

Sentencing, in which he was expected to serve up to two years in jail, was originally scheduled for July 1, 2009 but subsequently postponed to September 21, 2009, after the judge had been presented with a petition organized in an international campaign conducted over the internet. In August 2009, in a preliminary hearing on sentencing the court heard several witnesses, such as Shulman and Galit Hasan-Rokem, testifying on Nawi's behalf. Aside from these academics, the former Deputy Attorney General of Israel, Yehudit Karp, speaking as a character witness 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 in conditions she considered "surreal". She took the trial as the start of a dangerous process in that root problems are not addressed, and injustices wrought on Palestinians are not met by appropriate application of relevant laws.

In 2008, Nissim Mossek produced a film on his life, private and public, which has had mixed reviews.

According to David Shulman, he is considered a major obstacle to the theft of Palestinian land and he is an Israeli exponent of Gandhian civil disobedience. Nawi has said that he strikes 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 world-wild protest against his treatment that elicited 20,000 signatures.

On 14 February 2007, Nawi went to assist Palestinian families whose homes, several tin and canvas shanties, were about to be razed as illegal structures. According to Shulman, these Palestinians at Um al-Kheir, which lies a few meters from rows of red-roofed settler villas at Carmel, require building permits for any house construction or extensions to their tents or shacks and such permits are almost impossible to obtain since on average, in the West Bank area administered by Israel, Area C, only one is released per month by the Israeli Civil Administration for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents there. Palestinians with their large families regularly build without permits, and the occupation authorities regularly issue demolition orders, of which some 20 are carried out each month.

Nawi said he does not to yield ground when settlers attack, claiming that, rather than running away as other Israeli volunteers do, he hits back. In a 2005 interview, he went on record as saying:-

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:-

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. Made over five years on a shoe-string budget, it was judged a somewhat messy docu by Variety film critic Leslie Felperin, who thought its director "too in love with its subject to ask tough questions". Yet, he added, it managed "to expose both Israeli and Arab bigotry and has its heart in the right liberal place". Raya Morag sees the film as basically about deep-seated Israeli homophobia and racism. Dan DiLandro, reviewing for Educational Media Reviews , wrote that the film had a number of evident problems, technical and narrative, yet judged it "an important work that shed light on many of the area’s conflicts and dynamics". Michael Fox, writing for Jweekly, finds 'Citizen Nawi' to be "a rough-hewn profile in courage that diligently tallies the cost of conscience", and writes of the "discomfiting power" of a "raw and occasionally wrenching film", which stirs a "certain cognitive dissonance" when one "sees Nawi threatened and insulted in the crudest terms by religious Jewish settlers and embraced as a trusted friend by a Palestinian family living in a tent". For Fox, as the film follows Nawi's travails with his lover, run-ins with the police, and battles with settlers, it suddenly jolts one out of the initial impression that Nawi's activism has liberal roots:-

He has been charged for infractions in the West Bank several times. In the first half of 2004, the Israeli prosecution filed three suits against him. The first concerned an incident that occurred after he accompanied a convoy to a harvest at Twaneh, where he was joined by Israeli novelists Meir Shalev and David Grossman and anchorman Haim Yavin. Nawi rushed to put himself between the settlers and the harvesting fellahin to protect the latter, and a settler filed a complaint to police accusing Nawi of attacking him. In addition he was caught entering Area A, forbidden to Israelis, while bringing a consignment of clothes to people in Yatta. He was also arrested for giving a ride back into the West Bank to a Palestinian who had been residing without a permit in Israel; and he was indicted once on suspicion he had hindered a settler from filming him as he helped the Palestinians. In the last instance, his lawyer questioned the plaintiff regarding the fact he had filmed the event on Sabbath, whereupon the settler replied that he had a rabbinical ruling on halakha or Jewish law, which determined that Sabbath may be desecrated if the aim is to stop a goy from stealing hay and straw, as were the Palestinians in the area, which belonged to the settlers. Nawi was convicted by the Magistrate's court and sentenced to probation and a fine of NIS 500. It emerged that the halakhic judgement had been written by the plaintiff's father a day before the trial. On appeal, the conviction was overturned by a District Court when his lawyer Lea Tsemel showed that the land concerned was owned by Palestinians.

In one particular episode in January 2003, captured by Shulman's eyewitness account in his book, Dark Hope (2007), armed settlers wearing skullcaps and tzitzit fringes, and hailing from a daughter settlement of Ma'on called Ma'on farm (Havat Ma'on), charged down on Twaneh peasants sowing their traditional fields while Nawi was present. As shots were fired their way and stones rained down on the sowers, Shulman got the impression Nawi seemed to relish the moment, as he rallied those about him with the cry, "Don't be afraid. Stand your ground". Joseph Dana expresses a similar view. In an incident at the village of Safa, in the face of tear-gas and live ammunition, Nawi's reaction to Dana's anxiety was to smile, slap him on the back and quip: "quite an adventure you are experiencing!" His approach, Dana concluded, cuts the tension in the air.

In 1995, Nawi was convicted of statutory rape of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy, after their relationship had been reported to Israeli police by the boy's parents in 1992. The legal age for such relationships is 16 in Israeli law. The statutory rape case was appealed twice. The prosecution’s case was difficult due to the length of time between the offense and the appeal process, and since the victim, one year under the legal age of consent, was reluctant to testify against Nawi. After 5 years, the High Court upheld the conviction upon final appeal. It found the relationship had been consensual, sentencing him to six months based on a plea bargain, of which he served less than three. In 2011 it was revealed that David Norris, the frontrunner for the position of President of Ireland at the time, had written a letter in support of Nawi on Irish Parliament letterhead, and sent it to the Israeli High Court. In the letter, Norris claimed Nawi was tricked into a plea bargain and requested a noncustodial sentence. This revelation caused him to withdraw from the presidential race.

Nawi became a plumber by profession. He also adopted a lifestyle that is openly gay. He developed an interest in human rights, which he says 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. His interest in human rights developed further 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 subsequently 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 says, 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 has an instinctive sense of relations with Palestinians which other activists, many of them Jewish intellectuals like himself, 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.

Ezra Yitzhak Nawi (Hebrew: עזרא יצחק נאווי ‎; born 1952) is an Israeli Mizrahi Jew, left-wing, human rights activist and pacifist. He is 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 describes as a protracted effort by settlers to cleanse the area of Arab villagers, in the prevention of which he has played a key role. He has been described as a "Ta'ayush nudnik", and "a working-class, liberal gay version of Joe the Plumber".

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 says, 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, will not return to their fields unless Nawi accompanies them. He sleeps overnight in their houses to deter IDF soldiers reportedly throwing rocks at dwellings after dark. He is 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.