Israeli-born author renounces citizenship, calling it ‘a tool of genocide’

Avi Steinberg, an Israeli-born author, announced on Thursday that he had formally renounced his Israeli citizenship.

Justifying his decision in an article for the left-leaning news publication Truthout, Steinberg said that Israeli citizenship had “always been a tool of genocide” that legitimised settlers colonialism.

“Israeli citizenship is predicated on the worst kinds of violent crimes we know of, and on a deepening litany of lies intended to whitewash those crimes,” he claimed in the op-ed.

The author was born in Jerusalem to American parents and raised in an ultra-Orthodox setting. In 1993, his family moved back to the US, first to Cleveland and then to Boston, where his father got a job as a director at Harvard University. 

Steinberg cited a number of laws passed following Israel’s founding that legitimised colonialism and discrimination, including the 1948 Declaration of Independence, the Law of Return in 1950, and the 1952 Citizenship Law.

He argued that this paper trail was shaped by the 1948 Nakba, when Israeli forces expelled approximately 80 percent of the Palestinian population from their homeland, and the subsequent efforts by the settlers to secure international recognition.

“These are forged documents,” Steinberg said. “The look of officialdom… [is] nothing other than this state’s slippery effort to conceal its fundamental unlawfulness.”

Explaining his parents’ migration, Steinberg described the cognitive dissonance that allowed his parents “to become both American liberals who opposed the US invasion of Vietnam, while also acting as armed settlers of another people’s land”. 

Steinberg was later to discover that the house he grew up in was owned by a Palestinian family who were violently expelled to Jordan and barred from returning. 

“This 1-to-1 replacement was not a secret,” Steinberg explained. Rather, it was a selling point to Israeli settlers drawn to the picturesque “native Arab charm” of these villages bereft from “actual native Arabs”.

‘Jewish-led actions’

Steinberg’s comments come as an increasing number of Jewish Americans have criticised Israel’s actions, with many joining or founding Jewish-led pro-Palestinian organisations.

While all Jewish people have the right to claim Israeli citizenship, Israel’s actions have drawn a wedge between Israel and the diaspora, with two-thirds of Jewish Americans saying in an Israeli-commissioned poll in November that they sympathised with Palestinians, and a third saying they sympathised with Hamas.

In an article for N+1 he wrote last year, Steinberg described being arrested at a pro-Palestinan protest in Chicago with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow (INN), two Jewish-led groups that support Palestinians.

“The idea of these Jewish-led actions is that Jews have a specific role to play within Palestinian liberation,” he wrote, both as a counter to “Zionist propaganda” and “to put bodies out front, to draw the fire.” 

Unlike what he said was the liberal hypocrisy of his parents, for Steinberg, “the struggle for a liberated Palestine is linked to the struggle of Indigenous Land Back movements everywhere” – as well as to Jewish liberation, connecting him to a long history of Jewish socialism in pre-war Europe. 

“The Torah is routinely waved around by land-worshipping nationalists, but, if actually read, it is a record of prophetic rebuke against the abuse of state power,” he wrote for Truthout.

“Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish history.”