Ezra Nawi

Ezra Nawi was born in 1951 in Jerusalem

Ezra Nawi was born in Jerusalem in 1951 to a Jewish family from Iraq. He was raised by a grandmother who spoke Iraqi Arabic with him. As a teenager he lived next to Reuven Kaminer of the Communist Party, who influenced his activism.

He served in a combat engineering unit of the IDF. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War he traveled in the US and Europe. He worked as a plumber and was openly gay, and in 1975 he began a relationship with Irish lecturer David Norris that lasted 10 years.

He began his political activity at the time of the First Intifada. In 2001 he became a central activist of Ta'ayush in the South Hebron Hills, where he organized clinics, water projects and volunteers and mediated between Palestinians and Israeli authorities. Settlers in the area saw him as an agitator.

He was convicted of several offenses, including a 1997 conviction for a sexual offense against a 15-year-old, and of rioting and assaulting police in 2007. In 2015 he was recorded saying he gave the Palestinian Authority names of land sellers, and he was arrested and released. He died of cancer in Jerusalem on 9 January 2021.