January 29: Abie Nathan

Israeli peace activist Abie Nathan was awarded the Abraham Joshua Heschel Peace Award by the Jewish Peace Fellowship on this date in 1992. His daughter, Sharona Nathan El Saieh, accepted the award on behalf of her father, who was serving prison time in Israel for meeting with Yasser Arafat. Nathan had a history of intrepid and independent peace-making: he had flown to Egypt on the eve of the Six-Day War to seek a way to avert the conflict; he ran an extremely popular pirate radio station, Voice of Peace, for twenty years from a ship anchored off Tel Aviv, which was financed, in part, by the sale of posters signed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono; he fasted for 45 days in 1978 to protest Israeli settlement-building in the occupied territories. While visiting Washington in August, 1996, Nathan suffered the first of several strokes which would ultimately deprive him of speech. He died on August 27, 2008 at age 81.

“We were annoyed with him for not acting like everybody else, for crossing borders, breaking laws — why wasn’t he obedient? But woe to us had he listened to us.” —Shimon Peres