“The real root of the problem is racism. Some people here think that they’re much stronger, much better, and much smarter than other people, than Arabs… Later they justified it through religion and nationalism, but the real root of the conflict is clearly racism” — Ezra Nawi, a mortal man
The day’s rains had dropped the dust from the air, so I could see the mountains of Jordan in the east shining brilliantly in the setting sun. Tommy and Oriel were playing soccer with the Umm Al Khair guys. Most of the younger boys had been relegated to tending the nearby campfire, a lucky two permitted to play goalie on opposing teams. The tall fence of the settlement of Carmel forms the northern border of the dirt field. I stood on the sideline, watching the game, until I got distracted by a black plastic bag swirling in the breeze 30 meters above the lattice wall.
Wow—my new friend Ilias is really good at soccer. He is fa’naan (an artist) as they say in Arabic. After Ilias scored, I watched him do one of those full-body celebrations like the soccer players on TV, where they throw back their shoulders, punch their fists behind their hips, and howl skyward. He was wearing jeans, a belt, and Blundstone boots—not ideal for athletics.1
Moments later, a misfired kick sent the ball flying over the barrier and into the settlement. I looked back and forth from the nearby Carmel houses to the faces of our Palestinian partners. They were also looking back and forth, but they seemed calm. A boy jogged over from the fire toward the fence, and Ilias lifted up a large overturned bucket from its base, revealing a small rectangular passage, which the kid scurried through to retrieve the ball. I held my breath until he returned safely to our side.
After some cajoling from the guys, I joined the game. My first play was defending against a corner kick. I stood next to Oriel, perpendicular to the goal, protecting my progeny with my hands.
I’m really not a soccer player, but after five minutes of play, I scored. I ran around with my arms raised to the heavens screaming, “Goal!”
“Ya assad!” my teammate Abad said to me, slapping me on the back. “You are a lion.”
“Ya jamal!” Ilias said with a high five. “You are a camel” (a compliment; the word “camel” in Arabic has the same three-letter root as the word for “beautiful”).
I was buzzing. When I first approached the match, I had been wondering whether during gameplay the Palestinian players ever forgot the occupation, even for a split second. I do know that as I ran and kicked and attempted a header, I did temporarily forget the space beyond the rectangle.
In the communal tent afterward, I was juggling a cup of sugary Bedouin tea and a cup of Arabic coffee while trying to jot down some notes on my iPhone, when I noticed a small dark brown spot on the pad of my left thumb. I vigorously scrubbed at it, but the damned spot remained. Where did it come from?
~
The following day we were called to Al Nizan and Zanuuta, two villages at the southern reaches of the occupied West Bank, in order to accompany Palestinian shepherds who feared harassment from the settlers and the Israeli army. Sally (they/them), Katie (she/her), and I (he/him) went out with Jam, a handsome 17-year-old Palestinian with light eyes and fair complexion who reminded me of the character Lip from Showtime’s “Shameless.” The day was quiet, calm, and just a little breezy. From nearly any hilltop, we could look out and see across into “Israel proper,” or what Palestinians and anti-occupation activists sometimes just refer to as “48” (i.e., “1948”).
On the walk back from shepherding, Jam had just finished explaining to Sally and Katie how they needed to cover their hair and how we were all going to burn in hell because we’re not Muslim and don’t pray, when he suddenly asked me if I knew Ezra Nawi, the celebrated Iraqi Jew who co-led the pro-Palestinian Israeli solidarity group Ta’ayush. I knew him.
Without Ta’ayush’s sustained solidarity work with Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, my fellow Jewish activists and I very likely would not be volunteering here now.
“Where is he?” Jam asked. I paused.
“Ezra died a year ago,” I told him softly.
“Allah ya harmo,” Jam said. “May God rest his soul.”
The moment that I met Ezra in spring 2018 on the brown and green fields outside Turmus Aya, just south of Nablus, he immediately asked me a question that caught me off guard.
“Why aren’t you apologizing?” he said. Ezra was wearing a wide-brimmed woven fedora.
“Why should I apologize?”
“Because you are American,” Ezra said with a slight smile.
“But you’re Israeli!” I protested. “You should be apologizing.”
“I apologize all the time,” he said. His dark, angular eyebrows tinted his aged countenance with a touch of drama. “America is the Great Satan. Israel is the Little Satan.”
I chuckled. I didn’t know it then, but Ezra was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
By the time I first met him, Ezra had already suffered several strokes. Close friends whispered that the intrepid leader, whom some had described as an exponent of Gandhian nonviolence in Israel/Palestine, was not the same guy that they knew before: Ezra had significantly deteriorated, both mentally and physically. But this mischievous, wry wit resonated with the stories that I’d already heard about the man.
~
The second paragraph of Ezra Nawi’s Wikipedia page states that:
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.2
Let’s take these charges one at a time.
First, speaking personally, I can easily forgive possession of drugs.
Assaulting two policemen? Well, what was the context?
At the time of his sentencing in 2009, Haaretz reported that, “Nawi was convicted in March for assaulting policemen during the demolition of illegal Palestinian caravans in the southern Hebron Hills.” Following a plea bargain, the Jerusalem Magistrate Court sentenced Ezra to one month in prison and ordered him to pay a fine of NIS 750,000 (about $230,000 today) along with an additional NIS 500 ($150) to each officer he assaulted.3
“Ideology is ideology, but this trial is not about ideology,” the judge had said. “Wild behavior from the right or the left is inconceivable, even if the goal is to help the weak. Without order, there can be no democracy.”
Ezra pointed the finger back at the court, charging them with authorizing the occupation of Palestinian land for years, and claiming that the court had long been trying to silence him. “The punishment doesn’t scare me,” he said.
But statutory rape? How could this conviction be politically motivated? Seriously?
In August 2011, Irish Independent said it “learned that the prosecution struggled from the outset to make a case against Nawi as the victim was reluctant to give evidence against the openly gay campaigner.” For his part, Ezra insisted to friends that he was not a pedophile. He claimed that the boy, a Palestinian, had assured him that he was over 16, which is the legal age of consent in Israel.4
And Ezra’s friends defended him; among them, the Irish presidential candidate David Norris, Ezra’s former lover, who intervened in Ezra’s appeal to the Jerusalem High Court, requesting clemency and a noncustodial sentence. Norris’s presidential bid in 2011 collapsed after this intervention was revealed 14 years after the fact. (Ezra was originally prosecuted and convicted of statutory rape in 1992. Following the appeal, he accepted a plea bargain of six months in prison in 1997.)
Nissim Mossek, an award winning Israeli director who spent five years filming Nawi for the 2007 documentary “Citizen Nawi,” told Irish Independent, “Nawi did not know the age of the boy and the boy told him that he was over 16.”
In the same article, Ta’ayush founding member Amiel Vardi is quoted as saying that fellow activists had been unaware of Ezra’s rape conviction until Norris’s political crisis was covered in an Israeli newspaper.
I watched “Citizen Nawi” (“Ezrakh Nawi” in Hebrew) with Sally and Tommy (he/him) one evening a couple weeks ago. If you search the movie title, you will see that Google has categorized it as an LGBT film. Indeed, much of the film follows Ezra’s tumultuous relationship with Fuad Mussa, a tall, handsome Palestinian man from Ramallah who wears tight t-shirts and struggles with the Israeli authorities who constantly pursue him for residing in Jersualem illegally with Ezra. We see the two of them kiss and cuddle and dance together. It’s all incredibly sweet and heartwarming. And Ezra never stops supporting Fuad throughout Fuad’s ongoing ordeals, even after Ezra and Fuad break up and Fuad marries a woman.
Ezra volunteered regularly in and around Tuwani, a Palestinian village in the South Hebron Hills where I have been with Hineinu nearly every day for the last month. In one scene, soldiers are trying to stop a Palestinian construction worker on a large yellow excavator from building a clinic that I’ve driven by dozens of times. Ezra intervenes as the Palestinian is preparing to comply with the soldiers’ orders. Ezra tells the soldiers, “You have no right to tell him to stop.” The soldier walks up to Ezra and touches the sleeve of Ezra’s pink button-up shirt.
“Why are you touching me?” Ezra says very calmly. “You don’t interest me in that way.”
Several times we see Ezra accompanying Palestinian school children from the village of Tuba past the settlement of Havat Ma’on, an especially violent outpost constructed in the hilltop forest directly above Tuwani. We watch as the dirt bag Jewish settlers spit slurs like venom in Ezra’s direction, accusing him of being a “faggot,” “homo,” “pervert.” After a dousing, Ezra turns and fires back, “Do you also have a tiny dick?”
A settler threatens to one day hang him.
Later on, Ezra attends the Jerusalem Pride Parade. We see him jovially passing out pamphlets about the Israeli occupation to the other LGBTs celebrating “Gay Day,” as Ezra calls it.
A heckler stands on the sidewalk. “You sickos! Go screw some animals!” Another man chants: “Beasts! Beasts! Beasts!”
Ezra narrates: “There is a connection between homophobia, racism, nationalism… Nationalism and homophobia go together very well, and not only here. You saw it with Franco, with Hitler, with Soviet Russia, the Junta in Greece. Every nationalistic dictatorship is against these things.”
By the end of the parade, a man has been stabbed. We see blood on his shirt and he sits in the road applying pressure. There is also blood on a woman. We don’t see the assailant.
But I also have to tell you about the incredible scenes with Ezra’s dear old mother.
One day, Ezra takes Mom for a tour of the South Hebron Hills. She sits in a tent and sips tea with the local Palestinian residents. She holds hands with one of the women. She watches as the settlers accost the Palestinians, and Ezra when he runs over and tries to help. When Ezra and his mom drive past the tomb of Baruch Goldstein in Kiryat Arba, the American-born Israeli terrorist who murdered 29 Muslim worshipers at the Ibrahami Mosque in Hebron in 1994, Ezra points it out, and she says: “He has a special grave? Shit on his soul.”
At the end of the day, as they’re winding down, Mom turns to Ezra and says:
Aren’t you wasting your time? Forget all this nonsense… The way you smoke, I wonder what’s in your lungs. A contractor with two workers, and you’re broke? In debt? … [turning to the videographer] Look at his bank account. I gave him 40,000 shekels last year. How much can I give him? Now he’s 48,000 shekels in debt. For what? Does he go to restaurants? Buy clothes? Does he have a family? No. [To Ezra] I think you need to see a psychiatrist. Yes, to find out why. They can treat you for this. I don’t know. May God help you, and me too. The sin will be on your head, and I won’t see your children or your wife… I’ll never forgive you.
Halfway through the film, David Norris returns to Israel/Palestine for a visit. Somebody asks how David and Ezra met, and David says that they met in Dublin.
“You were 23, Ezra, I think,” David says. “Something like that, yes.”
“I was over 18,” Ezra says with a grin.
“He wasn’t a virgin,” David replies. “And he certainly wasn’t a virgin when he left Ireland.”
Since that day with Jam, the young Palestinian shepherd/proselytizer, I’ve returned a few times to Zanuuta in order to accompany more Palestinian shepherds. Last Monday, Katie and I were walking back with Suleiman and his flock following a quiet, sunny morning in the fields, when a woman in the village ran towards us.
“Settlers in the valley! Settlers in the valley!” she cried in Arabic.
Katie and I broke off from the flock and ran alongside the local Palestinian men to the upper part of the valley by Highway 60 where the settlers had been spotted. We arrived to see three settlers from Metarim with their sheep grazing on a grassy plot that the Palestinians said was theirs. I noticed that the left cornea of one of the setters was cloudy. Three Israeli soldiers were already there, including a familiar face—Etai, the commander from our mornings escorting the Tuba kids on their way to school in Tuwani.
One of the Palestinian leaders asked me to call the police. As de facto policy, the army generally will not touch Israeli settlers, even when they break the law or are acting violent. The police, on the other hand, will sometimes force the settlers into compliance.
After a mess of a phone conversation in broken Hebrew, the police pledged to respond, and Katie and I turned to documenting the army and settlers.
The settlers and the army were grimacing in our direction. One soldier kept arguing with us. When I told her that the settlers were not allowed to be here, she corrected my Hebrew, telling me that these people were not “settlers,” but “residents.”
20 minutes passed and the police had not arrived. The sheep were gobbling up more and more of the greenery that the Palestinian shepherds depend on for financial solvency. So I walked over to the settler flock and started clapping my hands at them in order to shoo them away, like I’d seen an older activist do in the Jordan Valley. A settler in a black baseball cap accosted me, nudging me repeatedly in the stomach. I put my hands in the air and said loudly, “Don’t touch me, bro! I don’t like you like that.”
I asked Etai, the commander, to help me, but instead Etai pushed me in the chest.
“You’re annoying me,” he sneered.
Eventually, a police officer showed up. He listened to the soldiers and the Palestinians, and then decided that everyone, the settlers and the Palestinians, needed to leave the area. The officer forced the settlers to retreat first, then us.
One of the Palestinian leaders, a tall, balding man of maybe 55 years, turned from the officer after he received the order not to return to his ancestral land. He walked four paces down the valley and then lowered himself onto the grass. He plunged his hand into the soil, and then looked skyward.
“Wein Allah?” he said. “Where is God?”
Katie, the Palestinian leaders, and I trekked back to the village. Another shepherd, Assad, invited us to lunch at his house.
“My home is your home,” he said as his wife brought out coffee, taboon bread, and hummus. “You remind me of my children,” he said to us, beaming. “Ahlan wa’sahlan.”
I spoke to my fianceé Clarissa that night on the phone. Her voice felt warm, like her right hand gently brushing my temple.
She expressed the same concern that Mom would later: “You’re such a sweet boy. I just worry what the soldiers and the settlers are going to do to you.” The physical danger isn’t so bad, I told her earnestly. “I’m more concerned about what it will do long-term to your soul,” she said.
The next day, I took the afternoon off. I was standing in the Umm al Khair kitchen, heating up a large, gold tea kettle for my shower and examining the dark brown spot on my thumb for the twelfth time. Have I been cursed like Canaan?
It was warm and sunny outside, maybe 60 degrees fahrenheit. A boy from the village walked by. He is 15 years old. I know because the Umm al Khair guys had ordered him around the other night, forcing him to fetch the group tea, which prompted me to question the dynamic. They told me his age and said that all the young guys in the village serve this role for a while. The older guys, who are about my age, assured me that the kids these days have it much easier than when they were growing up.
Ilias entered the kitchen wearing a black headwrap.
“Keefak?”
“Alhamdulillah.”
Glancing at my shower bag, he asked me: “Why don’t you cover your body more after your shower?”
“What? I do. I wear a t-shirt and sweats.” I gestured to the “Solidarity of Nations” t-shirt and salt-and-pepper Roots sweatpants that I had on.
“No. Why don’t you wear more clothes? You will be cold afterward. You will get sick.”
I smiled and thanked him for his concern.
“I’ll be fine.”
The next morning my comrades and I returned to Zanuuta.
The names of the Palestinian men from Umm Al Khair, Al Nizan, and Zanuuta have been changed.