The last of the dreamers of peace

THE LAST OF THE DREAMERS OF PEACE

By Gideon Levy

27/08/2008

It was a Saturday afternoon in summer in the 1980s. I got into the Voice of Peace's rickety Subaru van and went to the Gaza Strip, to the home of Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zahar. Afternoon coffee with the Hamasnik! Look how easy it once was to travel to Al-Zahar on Saturday for coffee, imagine that once there was a man who dreamed of peace. Think that there was once here a pilot who had never driven a car. All of these things sound trippy, now more than ever. Abie Nathan was perhaps the only Israeli who experienced feelings of guilt over 1948. As a volunteer pilot in a foreign air force he blew up Palestinian villages and afterwards sought out the village. He shot but didn't just cry, rather detonated and then sought absolution, something which now sounds like science fiction too.

An Israeli did that? Sounds unlikely.For decades he dwelled among us Israelis, but Abie dreamed in English and thought in Indian. He helped Palestinian children, but also rushed to every other disaster area in the world, universalist that he was. Perhaps in this way too he was the last of the Israelis who thought globally about aid and compassion. He was our own Mother Theresa

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1015848.html