Ezra Nawi comes from radical Iraqi tradition

Ezra Nawi, at the centre of a scandal broken by Israeli TV, is  the far-left activist who turned over Arabs selling land to Jews in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, leading to their torture and execution. From a family of Kurdish Jews, the notorious Nawi  belongs to a tradition of Iraqi-Jewish radicalism. Iraqi Jews were not only prominent in the Iraqi Communist party, they set up the anti-Zionist League in 1945. Many found refuge, ironically, in the Zionist state.

 Ezra Nawi...scandal
 

The Times of Israel reports:

"A key figure from a left-wing Israeli group was arrested at Ben-Gurion airport on Monday as he tried to leave the country, days after being filmed in a television investigation that has rocked the halls of power.

Ezra Nawi, a Jewish far-left activist from the Ta’ayush group, is reportedly suspected of conspiracy to commit a crime. 

Nawi, a prominent campaigner for Palestinian rights, featured in a television investigation last week in which he was recorded saying that he helps Palestinian authorities find and kill Palestinians who sell land to Jews."

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 Steve Plaut gives some background to Nawi's activities on his blog:

"The "star" of the story is a leftist extremist named Ezra Nawi, who has become something of a poster boy for the radical Left.  "Nawi" is a well-known and ordinarily distinguished surname among Jews who came from Iraq.  Most of these are patriotic Zionists, but a small minority of them were communists back in Iraq in the 1940s/1950s and have remained such.  A few of these Iraqi Jews continue to embrace communism, like the radical anti-Zionist sociologist from Tel Aviv University, Yehouda Shenhav. 

"Nawi famously was convicted of pedophilia and rape of a minor boy some years ago.  Later he was also convicted of violently attacking police as part of a riot of violent Palestinians he helped lead.  He speaks Arabic and likes to dress as an Arab.  He is active in small far-leftist anti-Israel NGOs operating in Israel that pretend to be "human rights groups," including B'tselem and Taayoush.  These are foreign-funded subversive groups that have never heard of any human right for Jews worthy of being defended and certainly not the right of self-defense against genocidal terror and Islamofascist aggression.  They are also notoriously indifferent to violations of free speech rights of anyone not from the far Left."

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