Neve Gordon wrote in a piece published on Wednesday 6 May in The Guardian’s Comment is Free section that “one can learn a great deal about a country from the way it treats its human rights and pro-democracy activists”.
Yes.
Neve Gordon’s article is about Israeli human rights activist Ezra Nawi, who is a member of Ta’ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership — a sort of Israeli Rachel Corrie (the American who was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Gaza in 2003.
Except, fortunately, Ezra Nawi was not crushed — though he was arrested, Neve Gordon wrote, while he was “trying to stop a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins from Um El Hir in the South Hebron region”…
As Neve Gordon explains, “These Palestinians have been under Israeli occupation for almost 42 years; they still live without electricity, running water and other basic services and are continuously harassed by Jewish settlers and the military – two groups that have united to expropriate Palestinian land and that clearly have received the government’s blessing to do so. As chance would have it, the demolition and the resistance to it were captured on film and broadcast on Israel’s Channel 1. The three-minute film (above) – a must see – shows Nawi, the man dressed in a green jacket, not only courageously protesting against the demolition but, after the bulldozer destroys the buildings, also telling the border policemen what he thinks of their actions. Sitting handcuffed in a military vehicle following his arrest, he exclaims: ‘Yes, I was also a soldier, but I did not demolish houses … The only thing that will be left here is hatred’. The film then shows the police laughing at Nawi”.
As Neve Gordon explains in his piece, Ezra Nawi is a Jewish Israeli of Iraqi descent who speaks fluent Arabic. a gay man in his fifties and a plumber by trade [and well-known in Israeli human rights circles]. Nawi was accused of assaulting a policeman during the demolition shown on this film, and recently convicted in an Israeli court, He now faces a jail sentence that he is due to start serving in July. This article can be viewed in full here.