In memory of Abie Nathan, the original voice of peace

By Meretz USA Executive Director, Ron Skolnik

One of my fondest memories of my early years in Israel was the late afternoons. As the sun edged toward the horizon to make way for evening, I would turn the dial of my pre-digitized radio to 1540 AM to tune in to the “Voice of Peace” radio station and listen to the enchanting and tranquil melody by The Eagles, “I Wish You Peace”, which the station played every day at sunset.

The man responsible for the radio station, for the “pirate ship” from which it broadcast “from somewhere in the Mediterranean” (in reality, just outside Israel’s territorial waters, near Tel Aviv), and for the message of peace that it aired between 1973 and 1993 was Abie Nathan.

Last week, on August 27th, Abie Nathan passed away at the age of 81.

Abie Nathan was a peace activist and lifelong maverick, who made a career of pushing the envelope. He advocated positions when they weren’t popular and waited for the rest of Israeli society to play catch-up. He employed controversial methods that most of his fellow countrymen thought “uncouth”. He exposed himself to harsh criticism and even put his own safety and health on the line in order to challenge the stagnant normative refrain of Israeli society: “There is no Arab partner for peace”.

Nathan began his quest even before the June 1967 war. On February 28, 1966, Nathan decided that if the leaders weren’t able to show the way, he would do so himself. Flying a small single-engine plane, dubbed “Peace One”, from Tel Aviv to Port Said, Egypt, Nathan asked the Egyptian authorities for a meeting with President Nasser. He was turned away and deported back to Israel. Nathan tried again after the war, flying to Egypt with a peace proposal he had drafted. Once again, he was expelled, and later jailed in Israel for “unauthorized contact with the enemy”.

After years spent raising money for the venture with which his name is most closely associated, he launched the Voice of Peace radio station in May 1973 on board an old freighter that he called “The Peace Ship”. The station aimed to spread the message of peace throughout the region, to Jews and Arabs alike. “Peace, love and good music,” was how the Voice of Peace framed its mission. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, he sailed The Peace Ship toward Egypt, anchoring off its coast and calling for cease-fire and dialogue.

In 1978, Nathan again employed “guerilla marketing” to focus attention on Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank and Gaza, which had received a giant boost after the 1977 ascent to power of the Likud party. Nathan declared a hunger strike, which he ended 45 days later, and only after forcing the Knesset to discuss the issue in plenum.

In 1991, Nathan returned to his hunger strike tactic in order to protest the Israeli law that banned meetings with PLO leaders. Since the early 1980s, Nathan had met with PLO officials, and continued to do so even after Israel’s Knesset had declared such contacts illegal in 1986. In September 1989, he met with Yasser Arafat in Tunisia, and called on the PLO chairman to cease terrorism and start negotiations with Israel. For his trouble, Nathan was later sentenced in Israel to 18 months in prison, of which he served 173 days in jail.

But Nathan was no “Israel-basher”: He fought in the 1948 war as a pilot in Israel’s nascent Air Force, worked as a pilot for Israel’s national air carrier, El Al, and later volunteered for reserve duty in the 1967 war – though his request was denied. He campaigned for the release of Soviet Jewry, and took part in the effort that enabled the mass aliya of Jews from Ethiopia in the 1980s.

Most of all, though, Abie Nathan was a humanitarian: He engineered a campaign to help feed starving children in Biafra; he lobbied for Israel to take in “boat people” – refugees from Vietnam; he created a movement aimed at caring for Israel’s old people in need; he sponsored the creation of Israel’s first drug rehabilitation village; he was involved in disaster relief efforts around the world.

And all throughout, Nathan had a flair for the dramatic and unorthodox: He organized an annual ceremony on his birthday, in which he would bury war toys given to him by the public. In 1975, he sailed a small boat to Port-Said, Egypt, carrying thousands of flowers which had been collected by Israeli citizens. Less than a year before Anwar Sadat’s historic flight to Jerusalem in 1977, he was given permission by Cairo to sail through the Suez Canal with a cargo of chocolates and toys for children.

In his lifetime, Nathan was often roundly criticized for his “gimmicks” and “stunts”. He was called a publicity hound. He was accused of giving succor to the enemy. He was attacked for trying to impose his personal agenda on the nation.

But, as time went on, most Israelis realized that, more often than not, Nathan had gotten it right. So it’s fitting that none other than Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, retroactively validated Nathan’s life work in his graveside eulogy: “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.”

Abie Nathan blazed a trail in Israel, and made it easier for all the other voices of peace to follow in his footsteps. “I Wish You Peace,” Abie Nathan.

(For a charming Israeli TV report on YouTube on the 2006 Voice of Peace reunion, please click here. For a 1990s interview with Abie Nathan, click here.)