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Ezra Nawi arrives to the Jerusalem Magistrate s Court, July 16, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
The news didn’t surprise any of us. We knew that Ezra Nawi was on his deathbed; some of us in his closest circle of friends even managed to say our goodbyes to him, before he passed away of cancer on January 9 at the age of 69. And yet, the news left us stunned. Perhaps it was because none of us were able or wanted to imagine a radical left in Israel without him.
Ezra, who was a plumber, Mizrahi, and gay, dedicated his life to the struggle against the Israeli occupation, Jewish supremacy, and to defending Palestinians. He was one of the founders of Ta’ayush (Arabic for “coexistence”), an anti-occupation direct action group. For years he put his body and the little property he owned on the line in the struggle alongside the most vulnerable people living under Israeli control, especially the Palestinians living in the South Hebron Hills in the occupied West Bank. He did so with