Son of the renowned filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, anthropology graduate and activist Andrei Khrzhanovsky moved to Israel in 2022. He almost immediately adopted a pro-Palestinian stance in the Middle East conflict, dubbing Israel’s actions genocide, and Zionism an ethnically supremacist idea. He says he is fighting for the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank due to his sense of guilt over the war in Ukraine. He spoke with Marina Berdichevskaya about his radical stance and his conflicts with his family.
Andrei Khrzhanovsky, 26, has been living in Israel since 2022. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he found himself in Tel Aviv with his entire family, including his famous father, grandfather, and grandmother. When the time came to fly home, there was nowhere to go. On February 24, Ilya Khrzhanovsky had begun circulating a petition, condemning the invasion of Ukraine, among cultural figures. Andrei flew to Georgia and applied there for Israeli citizenship.
Since March 2022, Andrei X, as he likes to be called, has enthusiastically plunged into the weeds of Israeli life and quite quickly chosen a side: he has taken up activism and, so he claims, journalism, on behalf of “the most vulnerable group on Earth at the moment,” the inhabitants of the West Bank. At the same time, Andrei has been doing battle with “the genocide in Gaza” and on this score has found himself at odds with his father, who has repeatedly said that, in the wake of 7 October 2023, he has felt himself to be Israeli first and foremost.
We talked at length and quite emotionally about how the profoundly erudite Khrzhanovsky, who has a degree in anthropology from the University of London, has decided to atone for the collective guilt of generations for world colonialism. Andrei happily juggles concepts and historical facts and is sure that this is the only way to do things: to always stand up for the downtrodden and to never succumb to propaganda. Whether he himself is suspectible to propaganda is an open question. Ah, yes. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of Republic or its editors—nor should they.
“The closer you are to the empire’s center, the greater the blame”
— Let’s begin with where you live. Your Facebook page says you live in Jericho. Is this true?
— Nowadays, I don’t stay anywhere longer than a few days in a row. I rent a flat, but I won’t divulge its location, because I get several death threats a day. I come home once every month and a half for a couple of days and then I hit the road again. Yesterday, I came from Bethlehem.
— How do people on the West Bank relate to you? Do they understand that you have an Israel passport?
— I’ve never had any problems with this because this is a political conflict, not an ethnic one. I speak with Palestinians deep in Area A (the West Bank is divided into three areas; Area A, which makes up seventeen percent of the West Bank, is wholly controlled by the Palestinian Authority — Republic) whose relatives have been killed, who have done time in prison. Israel fosters the illusion that all Palestinians want to kill all Jews. But this isn’t an ethnic conflict, and not even a religious one at the end of the day.
— In February of last year you said in an interview, “When the war in Ukraine began, I had an enormous sense of guilt that I hadn’t done more [to stop it]. That’s why I’ve thrown myself into all political activism here.” You explained your activism in terms of not wanting to “squander another country.” Where does such a young man come by a sense of personal guilt for what is happening in and with a country? After all, many Russian nationals, especially the remainers, reject the very principle of collective guilt.
Today’s episode of Who Am I After This? is very sensitive for me personally. The conversations with its two subjects, leftists and human rights activists, were the hardest and most emotional in the whole project because they both touch on a very painful personal conflict of loyalties for me. This is the only episode where there are two protagonists at once: journalist Andrei Khrzhanovsky and architect Artyom Nikitin. Quite handsome and young, both moved to Israel after the war in Ukraine began, and both travel to the West Bank to support the local Arab [sic] population, even and especially now, when there is a war in [sic] Israel.
Source: Karen Shainyan (YouTube), 2 February 2024
— Before February 2022 we all lived in a magical reality of sorts: there was a dictatorship in Russia, seemingly, but no one was getting killed, as it were; everything was sluggish, we had to tackle corruption and so on. But there was no sense of the disaster that any dictatorship represents. This illusion personally crumbled for me on 24 February 2022. The disaster started then, and then intensified after the genocide in Gaza began. Over the past few years, the feeling has only grown in me that we are all to blame for what is happening; some more, some less. The closer you are to the empire’s center, the greater the blame.
— And when did you personally start counting down that blame?
— If we speak of the entire timeline, there were three moments. The first was 24 February 2022. The second was an article by Yuval Abraham (an Israeli journalist and co-director of the Oscar-winning film No Other Land — Republic), based on conversations with soldiers fighting in Gaza who admitted that they had been tasked with firing on civilian targets. And the third was the morning when I woke up, opened Instagram, and saw the video of a man in Gaza burning alive after an IDF strike on a hospital.
— How did you get involved in political activism in Israel?
— I had an approximate, general notion of what was happening here when I turned up here. I grew up in the Russophone media space after all. But when I arrived I realized that I had to figure out what was happening. I started reading books and talking to people. The more I researched, the more horrified I was. Suddenly, I found out about the status of Palestinians in East Jerusalem: their land was annexed, but they weren’t granted [Israeli] citizenship. To get into the Shuafat refugee camp, which the Israelis annexed and surrounded with a wall, Palestinians have to go through a security checkpoint. The sheer number of different methods for constructing a state based on ethnic supremacy is insane.
— You have said that you feel yourself to be both a Russian national and an Israeli. Now you condemn both Russian aggression and Israel’s actions. What does it mean that you equate the latter with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine? If you say that Israel annexed the Golan Heights—
— The Golan Heights were seized from Syria in 1967.
— But Syria and other states attacked Israel on the second day of its existence, and the war with Syria has gone on since then.
— But the ethnic cleansing came first.
— You mean when Jews arrived in Mandatory Palestine? Do you think we have the right to live here at all?
— I think that everyone should live where they like. Borders shouldn’t exist. The problem with Zionism is not that Jews move somewhere, and not that this is emigration. Jews have lived here for millennia, they have come and gone.
— Here is one of your posts on X: “I don’t support the fascist Russian regime and never will. I’m categorically opposed to all imperialisms. Russia’s confrontation with American imperialism doesn’t make its own imperialism better. Confronting imperialism should mean opposing all imperialisms, be they American, Russian, or Israeli.” Do you believe that Putin’s imperialist frenzy can be compared with the ideological narratives which America has wielded since the Second World War and on which the state of Israel has based its existence?
— Russian historiography is an exercise in total myth-making. Here we also see another exercise in total myth-making but of a different sort. Russia, Israel, the U.S., and Iran are all states which attempt to seize territory, although only the States have a global empire. Over the last seventy years, they have organized coups and genocides, installed dictators, and opened military bases around the world.
“Huge numbers of people in Israel think racism is right and normal”
— And what does Israeli imperialism consist of?
— All the migrations in and out of here were a normal part of reality until the late nineteenth century, when stricter national borders came into being. The impetus was anti-Semitism: the U.S. and Britain tightened their immigration policies to prevent Jewish migration in the aftermath of the pogroms in Eastern Europe. If you look at what the founding fathers of Israel said, including Theodor Herzl, who was still a theorist, and then David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, all the early Zionists initially wanted to build an ethnic supremacist state.
They said it themselves: “We are colonizing Palestine.” The first aliyah (translated from Hebrew as “ascent,” the word denotes the repatriation of Jews first to the Land and then to the State of Israel — Republic) in the late nineteenth century were people who came for mostly economic reasons, and they integrated into society. The Palestinian peasants mainly didn’t care who ruled them as long as they were living on their own land. Most of the people who sold land to the early Zionists didn’t live here, but in Damascus or Beirut. It turned into a conflict when the concept that a Jewish state would be built here was introduced. The Jewish Colonisation Association was created, which bought up land and drove out Palestinian peasants. There was, of course, a response to that. By the 1920s, the conflict had become violent: for example, there was the famous massacre in Hebron (24 August 1929, in whose wake Jews were expelled from the city until 1967 — Republic), in which a large number of Jews were killed.
— Many of Israel’s opponents now insist that it is not anti-Semitism but “anti-Zionism” which has flared up with renewed vigor in the world, while Zionism is based on the idea that Jews are a full-fledged nation which has the right to self-determination in its historical homeland.
— Zionism has been defined, then as now, via the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. “A Jewish state” implies that it is a state for a particular nation. To make that happen, the Jews had to kick out the people who lived here and establish a legal system in which there is Jewish supremacy. I believe that this is a racist idea by definition. There are a huge number of people living here in Israel who think racism is good, right, and normal.
— So, you think that the fundamental idea which emerged after the Holocaust as a response to what Hitler did, the three-generations idea on which the Law of Return is based, is wrong?
— I can give you an example. Take Tony, the owner of this café in Jaffa. He and I chatted once after I first arrived, when I didn’t have a clear stance yet. He told me that he was traveling to Jordan to see his family. His family had lived here for generations but then they were kicked out. There are still people alive who lived here before 1948, but they cannot come here, even to visit their relatives. But I immigrated by right of blood, because my ancestors may have lived here many thousands of years ago, and I can get a passport and money from the [Israeli] state in three months. This is fundamentally unjust.
At present, I have very little sympathy for the claims, which are being made everywhere, that our main problem is anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Semitism. Israel is right now doing to the Palestinians what those people fear the Palestinians are going to do to the Jews. As we have been saying, “Oh, what a horror! What in the world is going to happen next?” Twenty thousand Palestinian children have been killed. More than one hundred thousand people in total have been killed. More than a hundred Palestinians are shot every day queuing for food. If we can’t talk about that, then how can we talk about opposing racism and anti-Semitism?
“No ethnic supremacist state, whether Palestinian or Jewish, should exist”
— The world is once again talking about a famine in Gaza “provoked” by Israel. Fact: UNRWA regularly distributed humanitarian aid in such a way that most of it was stolen by Hamas militants. The U.S.-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has now taken over the distribution. According to reports, in the two months it has been operating, the GHF has distributed eighty-nine million parcels of humanitarian aid, each enough for three or four days, to 1.8 million people in the Gaza Strip. But UNRWA opposes GHF’s work, and international human rights organizations have been demanding that UNRWA be brought back into the system.
— I wouldn’t believe anything the GHF says because it is an organization created by the States and Israel for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. There are now three or four functioning aid distribution points, while there had been about four hundred before. Why has this been done? To concentrate Palestinians at certain points and to force them to pass through combat zones, often on foot. This system is designed to be inefficient, to make it almost impossible to get aid. So when the GHF took control, the real shit started. Israeli soldiers are just executing people queuing for aid.
— As you know, the IDF denied reports that it opened fire in Mawasi in early June. The GHF, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, and the White House press secretary also denied the reports. Perhaps the issue is that the GHF is currently updating the lists of those eligible for assistance, and surprisingly, these lists include millionaires who have been living abroad for a long time, such as Yasser Arafat’s daughter. It transpires that Palestinians are the only community in the world among whom refugee status is passed on by birthright.
— This is a quite ridiculous argument on the part of Zionists because the whole concept of Zionism is based on a refugee status which is passed down not through one or two generations, but over dozens of generations. The entire country is built on this idea. It is impossible to establish real justice here without a full right of return for everyone, including Palestinians and their children.
— But how could one create one’s own sovereign state without recreating one’s own language and asserting one’s right to self-determination? If you let a thousand flowers bloom and let everyone who wants to come here, then what would happen? There definitely wouldn’t be an Israeli state.
— That would be wonderful. No ethnic supremacist state—neither Palestinian nor Jewish, none at all—should exist, because it is a horrible, racist idea. Jews have every right to be here, just like everyone else.
— Right now, we are talking about starving children in Gaza, but we forget to mention that there is a whole class of ultra-wealthy Palestinians living there in luxurious homes, driving expensive cars, opening new restaurants, even right now, and posting about it on social media.
— Rich people exist as a class everywhere. There are wealthy Palestinians in the West Bank too. Many of them have American passports, money, and big houses. But when it comes to ethnic cleansing, they too are beaten and murdered. Rich people in Gaza are killed by bombs just like everyone else; they are not immune to them. But we can’t deny that there are children starving in Gaza right now, can we? There is plenty of video evidence. It’s an obvious fact.
— How do you envision the return of Palestinians when several generations of Palestinian children have been nurtured to hate Jews? We see textbooks used in schools with exercises such as “How many Jews will be killed by a shahid today, and how many Jews will remain?” Let me draw a parallel. In Ukraine, there has been a long-standing debate about how to return people to Donbas after more than ten years of children there being raised to totally hate Ukraine.
— That’s an enormous question. I also don’t know what to do with the seven million Israelis who have been brought up believing that Palestinians are not human beings, that Jews are the coolest people, and that everyone is attacking us.
— My son goes to an Israeli school. He has never been told in class that Palestinians are not human beings.
— I have spoken with people who had just graduated from school. They said that the concept of the Nakba is forbidden in Israeli schools. (“Nakba” translates from Arabic as “the catastrophe” and refers to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the “exodus” of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs [sic] after the Arab-Israeli and Six-Day Wars — Republic).
— You say that Israelis do not want to talk about those events in terms of a “catastrophe.” If we talk about global discourse, then the word intifada is absolutely legitimate among international human rights organizations. But we remember what both intifadas meant for Israelis, when buses were blown up here almost every day.
— During the First Intifada (the Palestinian uprising from 1987 to 1991 — Republic), no buses were blown up. It started off as a student strike, a completely nonviolent uprising, to which Israel responded by shooting and killing people. The meaning of the word intifada is “shaking off occupation [sic].”
“The reality is that there is a system of apartheid here”
— How did you regard the seventh of October as someone who was already living here at the time? After all, it can also be termed ethnic cleansing and genocide — there were mass rapes, including of minors, people burned alive, bodies desecrated.
— On 7 October, a heap of war crimes were committed that have been clearly substantiated. It was scary and horrible. I don’t know anything about dead people being raped. In the early nineteenth century, Nat Turner’s Rebellion took place in the U.S. (i.e. the 1831 Southampton Insurrection, during which more than fifty white people were killed — Republic). There was a terrific amount of violence, and women and children were slaughtered. I believe that the slave rebellions in the United States, like the violence against civilians here, are [sic] wrong and bad. I am opposed to war crimes.
— Did you go to the kibbutzim of Be’eri and Kfar Aza as a journalist after the seventh of October?
— I don’t deal with Gaza or anything inside Israel. I only deal with the West Bank. Immediately after [7 October], I went to the West Bank. I didn’t even have the means to get to the kibbutzim.
— You say that the IDF operation in the Gaza Strip is genocide and that Hamas has committed war crimes.
— We are talking about what has been going on for almost the last two years: the systematic erasure of Palestinian life with the objective of maximizing damage and carrying out ethnic cleansing. The Israeli top brass constantly admit this themselves. They say, “We want them out of there.” I don’t consider 7 October [2023] an act of genocide. What is more, I believe that the Palestinians have an absolute right to armed resistance, and the international community agrees with me on this score. They have no right to war crimes, because no one has a right to commit war crimes and to kill civilians. There is no equivalence here between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
— Why not?
— The common European liberal view of the events here is that there are two peoples and they hate and kill each other. This framing is designed to conceal rather than to reveal reality. The reality is that there is a system of apartheid here, a system for building an ethnic supremacist state, seizing lands, and expelling Palestinians from them. There is no equivalence between a colonial state and the indigenous people who resist it.
— This is the position taken by many European politicians: since the IDF is the army of a civilized country, higher standards are expected of it.
— I don’t think so. Basically, the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism has been used for hundreds of years by colonial powers to oppress and seize land, for colonization per se. Barbarism did occur on the seventh of October, but then all this nonsense about forty beheaded babies was superimposed on it. Meanwhile, we see footage of children who were actually beheaded by Israeli strikes on Gaza, and people burning alive in hospitals. But this is supposedly not barbarism because it is happening far away from us.
— So, you disagree with the data of OSINT analysts [showing] that the Israeli army is the only [sic] army in the world which kills the least number of civilians in densely populated urban areas?
— This is nonsense and a total fabrication.
“No journalist is neutral”
— You condemn Russian aggression and clearly consider many Russian media outlets propaganda outlets. Why, then, do you ignore those who sponsor media outlets with an openly anti-Israel agenda, and give interviews to Al Jazeera, which, after lengthy discussions, has finally been banned in Israel?
— I think that Al Jazeera, specifically, has been doing very important work in terms of reporting from Gaza and the West Bank, because there are no other journalists there, no media coverage. Israel does not let journalists go into Gaza because it doesn’t want them to report on the genocide. Not only that, Israel has been actively targeting journalists in Gaza, bombing their families and homes. The entire family of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief was killed.
This is a doctrine that was devised by Israel during the Lebanon War: actively targeting civilian sites (residential buildings, schools) to increase pressure on society and reduce the number of reports “from the ground.” Israel has been systematically killing Palestinian journalists and has not permitted journalists from the outside world to enter the country so that it can go on with its genocide, horrific war crimes, and executions with minimal coverage. Because if Israel did permit journalists to go into [Gaza], it would be like sending them into a concentration camp. So all we can count on is what people write on social media.
I give them commentary because I am in the West Bank and I talk about what is happening. I believe that when it comes to genocide, each of us must make every effort to stop it. Media that report on this genocide and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank play an important role in this.
— You know that along with some UNRWA staff members, people who called themselves journalists, including for Al Jazeera, took part in the attack on Israel on 7 October, right?
— If a journalist takes up arms, they are not a journalist. I am a journalist, and I do not take up arms.
— You call yourself a journalist, but many media outlets refer to you as a human rights activist. In recent years, there has been a wide-ranging discussion in the media about whether a person can be both a journalist and an activist, whether a journalist can take sides in a conflict when all the international conventions stipulate that journalists are non-combatants. What is your stance in this debate?
— This is a huge topic of conversation in the post-Soviet space, but less so in the Anglophone world. Personally, I think journalistic neutrality is an illusion. It is a lie that, on the contrary, facilitates propaganda. No journalist is neutral, if only because they choose what to talk about and what not to talk about. They choose how to talk and what words to use. The big media outlets, which are now a little antiquated, are built on this idea of pseudo-neutrality. How do they regard it? “We quote official sources.” But if you found yourself on a ship that was hauling slaves from Africa to the United States in the mid-eighteenth century, you would not give equal coverage to the captain of the ship and to the slaves down in the ship’s hold. A journalist must base their work completely on the facts and absolutely honestly take the side of the victims. I believe it is more honest to voice one’s stance.
“There would have been no genocide in Gaza without the States”
— As for the “leftist global agenda,” do you feel part of this movement? How do you explain the “anti-Zionist” hysteria on American university campuses and in European capitals immediately in the wake of 7 October?
— It’s partly inflicted by propaganda. It’s a complex issue involving free will, about why we defend the stances we take. Perhaps the movement has gained such momentum now because this is the first time we have witnessed such a well-documented genocide. When you view the flood of videos from Gaza on TikTok or Instagram, even if you haven’t studied the history of Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East, you still come away with the striking and obvious sense that something is wrong. All of this has been made possible by the United States. Without them, there would be no genocide in Gaza. Both Biden and Trump could have said “stop” at any moment, and it would have ended. I have friends amongst these people, and many students, for example at Columbia University, are horrified that their country has been financing a genocide on the other side of the world. It’s just wonderful that there is such a global movement happening right now.
— It’s curious why they aren’t horrified that the U.S. and Europe have been financing Hamas for years.
— Netanyahu financed Hamas.
— His idea was that if the flow of money, including from Qatar, didn’t dry up, then Hamas wouldn’t attack.
— The idea was to separate the West Bank from Gaza. We financed Hamas in Gaza and supported the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and in this way we could avoid an alliance between them.
— Well, the idea was to prevent implementation of the “from the river to the sea” plan, which would involve destroying the State of Israel. You agree that’s what it means, right?
— I don’t agree. This phrase first appeared in the Likud party’s original party platform: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.” The fact that the Israeli slogan means that there should be no Palestinians from the river to the sea does not mean that the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” implies the destruction of all Jews.
“IDF soldiers are soldiers of an occupying, genocidal army”
— Your activism has had concrete consequences: last October, you were arrested by IDF soldiers when you tried to enter Nablus. You wrote that you were beaten, but at the same time acknowledged that it was “blatant unprofessionalism” on your part.
— My unprofessionalism consisted in the fact that I wound up in the same car with a reporter from the propaganda publication The Grayzone, which supported Assad and Russia. I think that it is necessary to travel to Area A (Israelis are prohibited from entering Area A — Republic). I go there to report. The IDF soldiers did several things that were clearly illegal, even under their own rules. They confiscated our phones and beat us up, even though we posed no threat to them. The Israeli army had no right to arrest us because we are subject not to military law, but to Israeli law.
— Last December, you were detained by the Israeli police for having put a “Free Palestine” sticker on the memorial to IDF Captain Shilo Cohen, who was killed on the seventh of October, in Sderot in late October. The father of the deceased, Arie Cohen, said that turning a memorial to the dead “into a platform for extremist, absurd, and inappropriate actions is tantamount to exploiting Israeli democracy.” Having paid bail in the amount of 15,000 shekels [approx. 3,800 euros], don’t you think Arie Cohen was right?
— I didn’t even know it was a memorial. It’s a gazebo containing a bench facing toward Gaza. When I put the sticker on the gazebo, I didn’t see any plaque about the deceased. It’s a platform for viewing the genocide. And turning a memorial into such a platform or, conversely, calling it a memorial really tramples all moral values. When I arrived in Sderot and climbed that hill, it was one of the most emotionally shocking experiences I’ve had in a long time, because it’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen. You can pay five shekels to look through binoculars at Gaza being bombed. Schoolchildren are taken there. There is a barrel on which the children can stand and watch as their peers on the other side are being bombed.
— You say that you feel yourself to be Israeli. Your compatriot died defending his home, his children, and women from Hamas terrorists. You are cautious in your statements about the crimes of the militants, but do you sense the general mood? Many of those who survived the seventh of October 7 from PTSD, and several police officers and soldiers have committed suicide. As an Israeli, do you feel that there are a lot of traumatized people here?
— There are many traumatized soldiers, because committing genocide is a very traumatic experience. Do you think that only Palestinian militants are terrorists? I would define terrorism as the deliberate killing of civilians for the purpose of intimidation and psychological coercion.
— Based on this definition, is Hamas a terrorist organization?
— Hamas has committed acts of terrorism. But based on that, the IDF is also committing acts of terrorism. More than two-thirds of the Israelis who died on the seventh of October were armed men, soldiers. When Hamas stormed military bases, it was absolutely not terrorism. I believe they have every right to storm Israeli military bases. This is armed resistance. International law agrees with me on this.
— Did Hamas have the right to capture unarmed female observers (tatzpitaniyot), rape them, and take them to Gaza as captives?
— I am against war crimes, but when you enlist as a soldier in the IDF, you enlist as a soldier in an occupying, genocidal army. Shooting at soldiers is legitimate, shooting at civilians is not. My stance is quite simple.
— You have said that when you began your activism in Israel, you “felt a sense of purpose for the first time in [your] life” and were the only one in your family who “became emotionally involved in it, feeling a sense of community with both Israelis and Palestinians.” How does your family, and especially your father, react to your activism? Ilya Khrzhanovsky said that, since 7 October, he feels himself to be Israeli, first and foremost.
— My father has said several times in interviews that he and my entire family disagree with my position.
— In my opinion, your father has done a great deal to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. How do you feel about his Babi Yar memorial project? It resurrects the memory of how Jews were murdered.
— I believe that the memory of the Holocaust is one of the most important things that should be taught in schools. The moral of the story is that genocide is possible, and anyone can commit it, including the cute hipsters in Tel Aviv cafes. The Holocaust is a very important point through which we must learn the lesson that we must do everything possible inside ourselves and in society to prevent genocide.
“It’s the besieged fortress concept”
— You’ve been living in Israel for three years now. Do you feel that you’ve been fully integrated and understand the nuances and contradictions amongst the different segments of Israeli society? There are so many of them, and the people are passionate, yet patient and tolerant. Do you feel that you’re part of the “Pumpkin Aliyah”?
— There’s also a hierarchy within Israeli society. When you build a state based on racism, racism will be ubiquitous. Israeli society is steeped in racism. Phrases like “Israel for the Jews” and “We have the right to control the demographic makeup” have been completely normalized here. Transfer these phrases anywhere else, even to the United States. This is the stance of neo-Nazis, but even the most peaceful people are capable of saying them here. Because here, everything is tilted very right-wing.
The most privileged Palestinians are those who have Israeli citizenship but even they are subject to oppression. Many Palestinian journalists with Israeli citizenship have been abducted and then convicted of “incitement.” Fifteen percent of the land in the West Bank belongs to the Jewish National Fund, meaning that only Jews can settle there. But again, Palestinians in the West Bank are in a more privileged position than Palestinians in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing has also been taking place in the Negev, where Bedouin villages are being completely demolished and Jewish moshavim are being built in their place.
There is a faction in the Israeli government which I would call neo-Nazi. These are the parties of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. They do not want everyone to live in peace. They want to establish ethnic supremacy and to seize land.
— Let me clarify: the views of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who came to power as part of Netanyahu’s coalition in late 2022, are not shared by the majority of secular Israelis.
— At the moment, their policies are the policies of the state. Even the “notorious” left-liberal Yair Lapid (head of the Yesh Atid party, former prime minister, and leader of the Israeli opposition — Republic) has jumped on this bandwagon.
— This roster of the government will be replaced at some point. This is not the case in Russia. Putin’s power there will only end with his physical demise.
— Even in Israel, there are researchers who argue that Zionism is polite Kahanism (a reactionary movement within Zionism, the followers of Meir Kahane advocate for a Jewish religious state with no voting rights for non-Jews — Republic). Even the most liberal politicians here profess the same thing. When Democrats in the United States come to power, they invade other countries and carry out military coups in exactly the same way. Even the presidents most praised by American liberals have committed war crimes. They should all be tried for the terrible things they have done and supported. Despite his reputation as a socialist, Ben-Gurion was a dictator who did not regard Palestinians as human beings. And his policy was about seizing land. As soon as they had the opportunity, they did it: in 1956, they invaded Egypt and seized the Sinai. Later, they had to give it back. All the most liberal and left-wing politicians here did the same thing—they engaged in ethnic cleansing and seized land. Moshe Sharett (the second prime minister of independent Israel — Republic) was against seizing land, but he was also against the return of the Palestinians. Lapid will come to power, and everything will be less openly Nazi, but the ethnic supremacist state will remain. It is not enough to change the people in power. The system must be dismantled.
— How do you think the current conflict should be resolved?
— It should be resolved by establishing a single state for everyone in which there is no ethnic supremacy.
— Are you against the two-state solution?
— Yes, because, first of all, it still implies the maintenance of an ethnic supremacist state; and secondly, because it closes the door on the right of return for the Palestinians.
— Are you going to live in Israel, have children, and raise them here?
— As long as there is an apartheid state that situates me on this side of it, I cannot morally allow myself to be here if I do nothing. The narrative that “if the Jews laid down their arms, they would be destroyed” is similar to the rhetoric of all fascist states. This narrative has been going on for decades in Russia: “We are a besieged fortress,” “Everyone hates us,” “We must defend ourselves.”
I have spent a lot of time with Palestinians. I have been living in different places in the West Bank for over a year. For them, this is not a ethnic conflict. It is a ethnic conflict for Israelis because it is a story about blood: they say we are a superior race, while [the Palestinians] are subhuman and must be evicted. But the people in the West Bank do not feel that way. They know perfectly well that I am Jewish and am an Israeli national. They have no problem with that because for them it is a political conflict. It is a conflict between colonialism and anti-colonialism. Especially now that neo-Nazis have come to power in Israel, it is a racial conflict for Israelis.
— You said, “Israel is not currently under serious threat of extinction.” What you suggest is precisely that.
— It’s the besieged fortress concept that Putin has pushed and that Hitler promoted—the idea that the whole world is against us. Israel likes to pose as a victim. When you are seen as a victim but you are not a victim, it’s a quite strong position: it gives you the right to do anything. Israel is not threatened with destruction. It has been pretending for a very long time that this is the case.
Source: Marina Berdichevskaya, “‘Genocide can be committed by anyone, even cute hipsters who hang out in Tel Aviv cafes'”: Andrei Khrzhanovsky II on his new neck of the woods,” Republic, 28 July 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader
Tel Aviv is known as Israel’s liberal capital; home to nearly half a million residents it’s also a holiday destination, with beaches, bars and nightclubs. But almost exactly 60km south is Gaza. Reporter Matthew Cassel speaks to Israelis in the city, to see what they think of the war, famine and genocide happening next door, and the growing international condemnation against it.
Source: The Guardian (YouTube), 16 September 2025. Thanks to Rahul Mahajan for the heads-up.
Thankyou andrey, Your presence for Palestinians in west bank is not less than a light in dark. We really appreciate what you do