'Israeli' Citizenship Has Always Been a Tool of Genocide

Posted by: John Phoenix

My decision is an acknowledgement that this status never held any legitimacy to begin with.

Israeli tanks move along the border near Rafah, Gaza, on May 29, 2024.Saeed Qaq / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Op-Ed

War & Peace

Israeli Citizenship Has Always Been a Tool of Genocide — So I’m Renouncing Mine

My decision is an acknowledgement that this status never held any legitimacy to begin with.

By Avi Steinberg , Truthout December 26, 2024

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Irecently entered an Israeli consulate and submitted papers to formally renounce my citizenship. It was an unseasonably warm fall day and office workers on break were lounging by the pond in Boston Common. The night before had seen a particularly gruesome series of aerial attacks by Israel on refugee tent camps in Gaza. 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.

Scholars, journalists and jurists around the world are keeping a detailed inventory of all the ways that Israel’s crimes since October 2023 amount to legally actionable war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. But the story extends far beyond the horrors of the past year. Citizenship, of the kind I hold, has been a material piece of a long-standing genocidal process. 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.

At the top of the form that I’d brought to the consulate that day is a citation of the Citizenship Law of 1952, the legal basis upon which my status was conferred at birth. My reason for renouncing this status is indeed directly linked to that law — or rather, to the situation on the ground in the 1950s, the Nakba context, which shaped this law.

In 1949, in the months after armistice agreements were signed, ostensibly ending the 1948 war, the Zionist settlers, having managed to massacre and expel three-fourths of the Indigenous Palestinian population in territories now under their control, began to look for ways to secure their militarized garrison state. Their most pressing concern: to ensure that Palestinians who’d been pushed out of their ancestral villages and farms would never return; that their lands would pass into the legal possession of the new state, ready to be occupied by coming waves of Jewish immigrants from abroad. Over 500 Palestinian villages and cities had been hollowed out within that year, and now it was time to erase them from the map forever.

Though it would take many more decades for the settler state to formally acknowledge that it was a de jure Jewish supremacist entity, the practice of ethnic cleansing was baked into the military, social and legal strategy of the state. This was always intended to be a Jewish state engineered to create and maintain a Jewish majority in a land that had been 90 percent non-Jewish before the Zionists arrived in large numbers in the early decades of the 20th century.

Members of the activist group Jewish Voice for Peace join others in protesting President Joe Biden's visit to Manhattan and calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, on February 7, 2024, in New York City.

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The effort to complete the process of ethnic cleansing, however, would indeed require aggressive engineering, and, given stiff Indigenous resistance, would never succeed. The arbitrarily drawn borders were still porous in 1949, and the rural territories under Zionist occupation rule were still far from fully in their control. Palestinians, newly refugees, were living in tents only miles from their homes. Many were surviving on a single meager meal a day, and they were determined, after the armistice, to return to their homes and their crops.

Some tried to operate within the hastily imposed new colonial legal system. They appealed to the new entity’s “Declaration of Independence” that claimed equal rights for all. But this document had no legal standing and was designed as a propaganda piece intended to curry international acceptance within the new United Nations. An application for membership to the UN, submitted by this new entity calling itself the “State of Israel,” had already been rejected once, and the Zionist leadership was scrambling to give their re-application an air of legitimacy. A token nod to Palestinians’ rights, they hoped, would give political cover for this decidedly illiberal state to join the emerging, U.S.-dominated international order.

Regardless of what the state’s propaganda machine was pushing abroad, the situation on the ground was a clear-cut case of ethnic cleansing. For nearly the next decade, Zionist settlers used every means of force to sever the connection between Indigenous Palestinians and their lands. In April 1949, they adopted a “free fire” policy, in which thousands of so-called infiltrators — that is, Indigenous Palestinians walking back to homes they’d inhabited for generations — could be, and often were, shot on sight. The state created concentration camps through large round-ups of villagers and farmers. From these camps, masses of Palestinians were deported across the “border” where they would be shunted into growing refugee encampments in Jordan and Lebanon, and in Egyptian-ruled Gaza. This is how Gaza came to be the most densely populated piece of land on Earth.

Recall that scenes like this were occurring post-armistice, that is, after the 1948 war was supposedly over. This was part of a deliberate post-war strategy that used ceasefires as cover to secure an ethnically cleansed territory, a pattern that would be repeated for decades. The goal was clearly articulated from the outset: to remove Palestinians from their lands forever, to weaken the stake of those who remained, and to erase Palestine in both concept and material reality.

This was the context in which the state’s citizenship laws of the early 1950s were enacted – first, the Law of Return in 1950, which granted citizenship to any Jew in the world; and then its elaboration in 1952 Citizenship Law, which nullified any existing citizenship status held by Palestinians. The state’s re-configuring of citizenship along the lines of Jewish supremacy would be its key constitutional principle. The effect of this sweeping legislation, enforced by a brutal armed occupation force on the ground, “rendered settlers indigenous, and produced Palestinian natives as alien,” writes scholar Lana Tatour. This legal framework wasn’t a failure of policy, Tatour notes, but rather it was “doing what it was created to do: normalize domination, naturalize settler sovereignty, classify populations, produce difference, and exclude, racialize, and eliminate indigenous peoples.”

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 a traditional 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.

It’s already happening. A different reality is already being built by a broad, energetic and hopeful movement of people from all over the world who know that the only ethical future is a free Palestine, liberated from colonial domination. The way we get there is through a globally supported but ultimately local liberation movement led by Palestinians, a movement whose politics and tactics are determined by Palestinians. This liberation will come about through a diversity of tactics, whatever is called for in different situations — including armed resistance, a universally acknowledged right of any occupied people.

Decolonization starts with listening to and answering the calls of Palestinian organizers to develop a decolonizing consciousness and practice, to remove material structures that have been placed between Palestinians and their land, and to reverse the normalization of these arbitrary barriers. Decolonization of citizenship also means understanding the material connection between Israeli settler colonialism and other forms of it across the globe. It is well-known that the U.S. supplies endless arms and political capital to its colonial ally; less known is that Australia’s conception of anti-Indigenous jurisprudence served as a legal model for Israel. The struggle for a liberated Palestine is linked to the struggle of Indigenous Land Back movements everywhere. My single citizenship is but one brick in that wall. Nevertheless, it is a brick. And it must be physically removed.

Those who occupy my exact position are invited to join a growing and supportive network of people who are divesting of their citizenship as part of a larger decolonizing practice. Those who aren’t in that position should take other steps. If you live in occupied Palestine, join the draft resistance movement and turn it into something with teeth. Fight to decolonize and revolutionize the labor movement and turn it into the lever of anti-state power it ought to be. Join the Palestinian-led resistance. If you cannot do these things, leave and resist from abroad. Take material steps to dismantle this colonial edifice, to disrupt the narrative that says this is normal, that this is the future. This is not our future. Palestine will be liberated. But only when we commit, right now, to the practices of liberation.

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Avi Steinberg

Avi Steinberg is currently at work on a biography of the writer and radical organizer, Grace Paley.