Abie Nathan: a voice from the sea

Avraham “Abie” Nathan was born in Abadan, Iran, and grew up in India. In 1948 he volunteered as a pilot in Israel’s war of independence. Civil aviation and a Tel Aviv restaurant followed. His later peace activism did not come from a life untouched by war.¹²

The California restaurant was a meeting place. Defeated in the 1965 Knesset election, Nathan pursued his pledge to meet Egypt’s President Nasser.³

A small white aircraft, Shalom 1, left Herzliya for Egypt. Its name appeared in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Israel and Egypt were enemy states; Nathan was not an envoy and had no invitation from Nasser. He landed at Port Said and asked to meet Gamal Abdel Nasser.³²

Nasser did not receive him. Egyptian officials sent him back the next day. The surviving newsreel shows the crowds at his return and his press conference. It also records the false reports that the aircraft had crashed. He returned alive, but without an agreement. The gesture made an argument visible: a private citizen could try to approach the other side before governments were ready.⁴

The ship turned a one-off gesture into a recurring presence. Nathan bought it in the Netherlands; a July 1969 photograph already shows him aboard. Years of preparation and fundraising followed. In May 1973, the Voice of Peace began broadcasting from the Mediterranean. An off-air recording preserves his inaugural address, catalogued as 19 May.⁵⁶⁷

The offshore station combined popular music with peace and aid appeals, broadcasting in English, Hebrew and Arabic without a licence.⁶ Its familiar radio voice brought these concerns into everyday life.

That is why the Voice of Peace belongs in a cultural history as well as a political one. It gave a peace campaign a daily audience, and a humanitarian appeal a way to reach people who had not come to a political meeting.

In 1968 Nathan helped fly food and medicine into famine-stricken Biafra. A contemporary report describes his third relief flight, funded by several organisations. Donors, crews and relief partners made the flights possible.⁸

In December 1984 he helped establish a tent camp at Harbu in Ethiopia. In a January 1985 interview he estimated that it sheltered 6,000–8,000 people, with family shelters, a hospital and kitchen tents, and described plans for more camps. The humanitarian story runs alongside the political one: he raised money and organised material help, not only meetings and broadcasts.⁹

His aid work also reached earthquake victims and refugees elsewhere, while in Israel he supported welfare organisations. It applied the same demand across borders: another person’s suffering calls for practical action.¹²

Nathan’s personal diplomacy was also a deliberate confrontation with Israeli policy. He met PLO chairman Yasser Arafat when such contacts were forbidden. He was sentenced in 1989 to six months in prison, with a further year suspended. In 1991 he received an 18-month sentence and entered Ramle prison on 10 October.¹⁰¹¹

The legal context matters: an amendment enacted on 5 August 1986 prohibited knowing, unauthorized contact by Israeli citizens or residents with leaders or representatives of organisations designated as terrorist organisations. The provision included specific exceptions.¹² The PLO was then so designated. Nathan opposed the prohibition; Amnesty International considered him a prisoner of conscience.¹³¹⁰

Support was not the same as consensus. A large solidarity gathering accompanied his 1991 hunger strike, while the law’s supporters treated contacts with the PLO as a security question. Nathan argued for dialogue; his opponents disputed both the interlocutor and the method.¹⁴¹⁵

On 19 January 1993 the Knesset repealed that contact ban. Nathan watched from the visitors’ gallery. This is the law of that period, not a claim that meeting PLO representatives is prohibited today. The repeal preceded the mutual-recognition letters and the Oslo signing later that year.¹³¹⁵

The Voice of Peace closed on 1 October 1993. Hope after Oslo coincided with debts, maintenance costs and fears for the crew’s safety.⁶

A plan to preserve it as a museum did not succeed. The ship was scuttled on 28 November 1993, almost two months after the last broadcast.¹⁶

In 1997 Nathan and Tunisian human-rights activist Khémaïs Chammari received the International Nuremberg Human Rights Award. Nathan died in 2008.¹⁷¹

He enlarged the repertoire of civilian action. A flight could challenge a taboo; a radio station could make an aspiration familiar; a relief operation could turn concern into supplies and shelter. His failures and controversies belong beside those achievements. The question he leaves the visitor is practical: what can a citizen do before permission, agreement or a diplomatic breakthrough arrives?