February 28 1966 – 8 Adar 5726
Israeli peace activist Abie Nathan lands his plane in Egypt. Nathan was born in Iran, and volunteered for the British Royal Air Force in 1943, training as a pilot. Released from his army service in 1946, he went to work for a private airline. He flew as a volunteer pilot in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and then as an El Al pilot until 1958. In 1965 he entered public life, running for Knesset as a one-man party named Nes (miracle), but failed to pass the electoral threshold with his peace platform at a time when all Israel’s Arab neighbors were actively pursuing the state’s destruction. Abie Nathan vowed he’d fly to Egypt carrying a message of peace after the results of the election were declared, and he duly took off in his own plane, Shalom 1, from Herzliya’s airfield on February 2, 1966. Landing in Port Said, he was arrested, and his request to meet Egyptian President Nasser was refused. Twenty four hours later he was deported – in his plane – and flew back to Herzliya, only to be arrested for leaving the country illegally. Nathan repeated the stunt a number of times, always with the same result.
In 1973, Nathan founded the Voice of Peace radio station, buying the “Peace Ship” with the help of John Lennon, and anchoring outside Israeli territorial waters. The station broadcast 24 hours a day, mostly English-language popular music programs, while promoting Nathan’s political activities. These included meetings with PLO head Yassir Arafat, which landed a prison sentence for contact with terrorists, hunger strikes protesting the illegality of such meetings, campaigns for disaster relief in locations such as Cambodia and Bangladesh, and a trust for the elderly providing clothes and household goods.
The Voice of Peace closed in financial difficulties after the Oslo accords in 1993, and Abie Nathan, partially paralyzed by a stroke in 1997, died in Tel Aviv in 2008 aged eighty-one.
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