Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Israeli Activist’s Conviction Roils Irish Pol

The revelation that Irish Senator David Norris’s former lover, Jewish-Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Ezra Yitzhak Nawi, was convicted of statutory rape of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in 1992 may have torpedoed Norris’s bid for his country’s presidency.

The openly gay Norris has been up front about his former sexual relationship with Nawi, as well as about their continuing friendship. However, he has not yet commented directly on the revelation about Nawi, nor about a clemency letter he wrote on official Irish parliamentary stationery on Nawi’s behalf, calling his former lover a “good and moral person.”

Several senior members of Norris’s campaign staff have resigned following the revelation and publication of the letter, but the senator has vowed to forge ahead in the political race. Norris’s campaign was already reeling from the resurfacing of an interview he gave in 2002 in which he seemed to comment positively about sex between men and boys. The candidate claimed that he had been misquoted and that what he said had been taken out of context.

Nawi is a Jerusalem-born Israeli of Iraqi descent. He is in his 50s. A pro-Palestinian activist who has defended the rights of Palestinian farmers near Hebron, he has been known to have had sexual relationships with Palestinian men. When his Palestinian lover at the time (a man named Saleem with a rap sheet that included car theft and assault of collaborators during the First Intifada) was facing deportation back to the Palestinian Territories in 2003 (when there was a crackdown as a result of the Second Intifada on Palestinians illegally in Israel), Nawi proclaimed, “We are like a mirror of life here. The main problem we pose is not that we are gay, or his criminal past. It is that people are afraid of anything that can prove there is another way, that Jew and Arab can live together.”

Norris’s main problem also does not appear to be that he is gay, nor that he is a human rights activist. It’s just that he got himself involved with the wrong gay human rights activist.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.