Margaret Olin and David Shulman remember Ezra Nawi who died on January 9 at the age of 69. “During the eighteen years I knew him, he was usually under arrest, or on the verge of being arrested, or just released from jail,” Shulman writes. “Unknowingly, he embodied the Gandhian principle, or rather its negation: the best way to maintain an unjust system, Gandhi said, is to obey its laws.”
I live inside a nation (Israel) embedded and indoctrinated with a sense of victimisation whilst inflicting the most unjust suffering, the most cruel and senseless oppression, on another people. I live in a nation embroiled in a self-righteous defensiveness without any ethical conscience, without any wish or ability to scrutinise the sickness of its own psyche.
Two weeks ago a right-wing Israeli group called Ad Kan released an undercover video that claimed leftist Israeli activists were a driving force behind Palestinian violence. After the footage was aired on a major local news station three people were arrested on charges of conspiracy—one Palestinian and two Israelis. Now Ad Kan has released a second video, this time targeting the organization Anarchists Against the Wall as so-called “extremist Israeli activists” who “have a clear goal: to injure and kill IDF soldiers and police officers.”
In the last nine days, Israeli authorities have cracked down on activists associated with Ta’ayush, the Jewish-Palestinian partnership that works to stop settlement growth in the occupied territories. There is a gag order on the case, but details have emerged. Israeli authorities have arrested Ezra Nawi, the great campaigner against human rights abuses in the occupied territories, as well as another member of Ta’ayush and a staffer of the human rights group B’Tselem.
Ezra Nawi will be sentenced tomorrow in a Jerusalem courthouse for allegedly assaulting a police office while attempting to stop a house demolition in the occupied territories. Today, The Nation has published an aptly titled article by Nawi – “Israel’s…
This photo of Ezra Nawi, the Israeli human-rights activist, appears at Jesse Hochheiser’s blog here. What a beautiful man. He’s about to be sentenced this week for trying to stop a house demolition in the West Bank two years ago….