An Israeli-born Jewish author based in the US announced he is renouncing his Israeli citizenship citing “ethnically determined supremacist laws” and the “genocidal campaign” against Palestinians, Haaretz reported on Monday.
Avi Steinberg made the announcement in an op-ed for media outlet Truthout, where he said he went to the Israeli consulate and submitted papers to formally renounce his citizenship.
“Even as Palestinians were still counting bodies or, in many cases, collecting what remained of loved ones, the suburban woman in front of me in line at the consulate cheerfully asked what brought me here today,” he wrote, as Israel’s war on the enclave has killed over 45,484 Palestinians.
He added that one of the primary reasons he was denouncing his citizenship was due to Israeli citizenship laws, which he said are “predicated on the worst kinds of violent crimes we know of, and on a deepening litany of lies intended to whitewash those crimes”.
According to Haaretz, Steinberg was born to American parents in Jerusalem.
His parents migrated to Jerusalem under Israeli law that gives anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent citizenship. The law has been widely denounced by rights groups and millions of Palestinians who had been forced out of their homes to make space for the immigrants.
In his op-ed, Steinberg criticises his parents’ decision to move to a “Jerusalem neighbourhood that had been ethnically cleansed only a few years earlier”.
Calling his parents’ move “wilful ignorance” he added that they became “American liberals who opposed the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, while also acting as armed settlers of another people’s land”.
“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,” he continued.
He went on to describe how many Israelis specifically chose to occupy Arab homes and areas rather than the haphazard apartment blocks erected by settler Zionists.
The Nakba of 1948, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes at the hands of Zionist militias, was another reason why Steinberg said he was renouncing his citizenship.
Commenting on the formation of Israel through the Nakba, he said the “Israeli state from its inception has relied on the normalization of ethnically determined supremacist laws to bolster a military regime whose clear colonial goal is the elimination of Palestine”.
Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, now surpassing 14 months, is a continuation of this military regime he said, calling it a “genocidal campaign to erase Palestine’s indigenous people”.
“… Our job must be to remove those concrete slabs, to rip up the phoney papers, and to disrupt the narratives that make these structures of oppression and injustice appear legitimate or, god forbid, inevitable,” he writes.
Steinberg is a regular contributor to publications including the New York Times and the New Yorker. He said he still identifies as a traditional Jew and that according to the Torah, no one has any right to any land.
He urged other Israelis to join him in renouncing citizenship or refusing to serve in the mandatory military draft.
“Join the Palestinian-led resistance,” he wrote.