Israeli writer renounces 'citizenship' in denunciation of Gaza genocide

An Israeli writer has formally renounced his "citizenship" in support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in condemnation of the occupying regime’s genocidal war in the besieged territory.

Avi Steinberg announced his decision in an article for Truthout news publication on Thursday, saying the so-called Israeli citizenship had "always been a tool of genocide" that legitimized settler 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 said in the op-ed.

The author was born in the occupied al-Quds to American parents and raised in an Orthodox setting. In 1993, his family moved back to the US and his father got a job as a director at Harvard University. 

Steinberg cited the 1948 Declaration of Independence, the Law of Return in 1950, and the 1952 Citizenship Law as among the laws passed following Israel's founding that legitimized colonialism and discrimination.

"These are forged documents. The look of officialdom… [is] nothing other than ... slippery effort to conceal" the regime's "fundamental unlawfulness,” he said.

Pointing to his parents' migration, the writer added that the cognitive dissonance 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 later founded out that he grew up in a house which 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."

Steinberg's article comes as many Jewish Americans have criticized Israel's war of genocide in the Gaza Strip, with several joining or founding pro-Palestinian organizations.

Israel's crimes in Gaza have drawn a wedge between Israel and the diaspora. In a poll in November, two-thirds of Jewish American teenagers said they sympathized with Palestinians, and a third expressed sympathy with Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.

Last year, Steinberg was arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest in Chicago with 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". 

"Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish history," he wrote for Truthout.

Israel’s reverse migration crisis prompts call for drawing Jews to occupied territories

Tens of thousands of illegal settlers have left the occupied Palestinian territories since the onset of intense retaliatory strikes by regional resistance groups.

Tens of thousands of illegal settlers have left the occupied Palestinian territories since the onset of intense retaliatory strikes by regional resistance groups in response to the Israeli regime’s multi-pronged wars across the West Asia region, prompting the regime’s foreign minister to call for bringing more Jews from abroad.

The settlers broke the record of reverse migration in 2024, with an unprecedented 82,700 of them fleeing the territories, causing the regime to find itself at a great loss amid huge investment on the part of Tel Aviv and its Western backers towards keeping the settlers inside the territories and bringing in more.

The developments came amid the regime’s ongoing October 2023-present war of genocide against the Gaza Strip that has so far claimed the lives of at least 45,553 Palestinians, mostly women and children, namely six percent of Gaza’s population.

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