Nineteen years after this Citizenship Law of 1952 was enacted, my parents moved from the U.S. to Jerusalem and were granted citizenship and full rights under the “Law of Return.” Out of a youthful naivete that would deepen into willful ignorance, they managed to become both American liberals who opposed the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, while also acting as armed settlers of another people’s land.
They moved into a Jerusalem neighborhood that had been ethnically cleansed only a few years earlier. They occupied a home built and recently inhabited by a Palestinian family whose community was expelled to Jordan and then violently barred from returning at the barrel of a gun — and by the citizenship papers my family held in their hands.
This 1-to-1 replacement was not a secret. People like my family lived in these quarters precisely because it was an “Arab house,” proudly advertised as such for its elegant, high-ceilinged design in opposition to the drably utilitarian, haphazardly constructed apartment blocks of the settler Zionists. I was born in the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Ayn Karim, much prized for possessing all the native Arab charm with none of the actual native Arabs to unsettle the pretty picture. My father was in the Israeli military, from which he and many of his friends emerged, after the monstrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, liberal proponents of “peace.”
But to them, that word still meant living in a Jewish-majority country; it was a “peace” in which the original sin of the state, the ongoing process of ethnic cleansing, would remain firmly in place, legitimated and thereby more secure than ever. They sought peace, in other words, for Jews with Israeli citizenship, but for Palestinians, “peace” meant full surrender, a permanent occupation and exile.
All of this is to say: I don’t regard my decision to renounce this citizenship as an effort to reverse a legal status as much as it is an acknowledgement that this status never held any legitimacy to begin with. Israeli citizenship law is predicated on the worst kinds of violent crimes we know of, and on a deepening litany of lies intended to whitewash those crimes.
The look of officialdom, the trappings of lawful governance, with their seals of the Ministry of the Interior, testify to nothing other than this state’s slippery effort to conceal its fundamental unlawfulness. These are forged documents. They are, more importantly, a blunt instrument used to continually displace actual living people, families, entire populations of the land’s Indigenous inhabitants.
In its genocidal campaign to erase Palestine’s Indigenous people, the state has weaponized my very existence, my birth and identity — and those of so many others. The wall that keeps Palestinians from returning home is constituted as much by identity papers as by concrete slabs. Our job must be to remove those concrete slabs, to rip up the phony papers, and to disrupt the narratives that make these structures of oppression and injustice appear legitimate or, god forbid, inevitable.
To those who will breathlessly invoke the talking point that Jews “have a right to self-determination,” I will only say that if such a right does exist, it cannot possibly involve the invasion, occupation and ethnic cleansing of another people. Nobody has that right. Moreover, one can think of a few European countries that owe land and reparations to their persecuted Jews. The Palestinian people, however, never owed Jews anything for the crimes committed by European antisemitism, nor do they today.
My personal belief, like many of my 20th century ancestors, is that Jewish liberation is inseparable from broad social movements. That is why so many Jews were socialists in pre-war Europe, and why many of us connect to that tradition today.
As an observant Jew, I believe the Torah is radical in its contention that Jewish people, or any people, have no right at all to any land, but rather are bound by rigorous ethical responsibilities. Indeed, if the Torah has one single message, it’s that if you oppress the widow and the orphan, if you deal corruptly in government-sanctioned greed and violence, and if you acquire land and wealth at the expense of regular people, you will be cast out by the God of righteousness. The Torah is routinely waved around by land-worshipping nationalists as though it were a deed of ownership, but, if actually read, it is a record of prophetic rebuke against the abuse of state power.
The only entity with sovereign rights, according to the Torah, is the God of justice, the God who despises the usurper and the occupier. Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish history other than that its leaders have long seen in these deep sources a series of powerfully mobilizing narratives with which to push their colonial agenda — and it is that colonial agenda alone that we must address. The constant efforts to evoke the history of Jewish victimhood in order to justify or to simply distract from the actions of an economic and military powerhouse would be positively laughable if they weren’t so cynically weaponized and deadly.
Zionist colonization cannot be reformed or liberalized: Its existential identity, as expressed in its citizenship laws and repeated openly by those citizens, amounts to a commitment to genocide. Calls for arms embargoes, as well as for boycotts, divestment and sanctions, are commonsense demands. But they are not a political vision. Decolonization is. It is both the path and the destination. We all must orient our organizing accordingly.
