LOCAL INSPIRATION of the day. This quilt by Joleigh Kambic is part of a larger quilt titled “Babies in Gaza Who Never Made It To Their First Birthday.” The quilt is composed of smaller quilts created by nearly 40 quilters from across the Monterey Bay, commemorating the children who were killed in the Israel-Hamas war. It is on display through Oct. 3 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Monterey Peninsula, 490 Aguajito Road in Carmel.
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.
Karèn Shainyan, interview with Andrei Khrzhanovsky and Artyom Nikitin (in Russian, with no subtitles)
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.
— 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.
Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Source: social media
— 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.
How bad can it get? When we strip away US president Donald Trump’s insults and temper fits, what can he actually do?
First, he can withdraw US military aid to Ukraine – which he has been talking about doing since long before the US presidential election. If the European states got their act together, which is possible, the effects of this would be constrained.
At the “Russian troops out” march in London, 22 February 2025
US diplomats have reportedly threatened to block Ukraine’s access to the Starlink communication system on which its drones rely, potentially giving asymmetrical advantage to Russia.
Second, Trump can cancel sanctions. The latter would bring him into conflict with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, which was specifically designed to compel the president to lift sanctions only with Congress approval. Of course Trump could play fast and loose with the law, which he has done and is doing in other respects, and/or Congress could go along with him.
The cancellation of sanctions would be bad. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the sanctions were never very effective, in large part because previous US governments, under both Trump and Biden, sought to limit their effect on the oil market and the world economy.
Third, Trump can shift narratives. I broadly agree with people who say we should judge Trump and his cohorts by their actions, not by the constant stream of often incoherent words. Yes, but. Nazi salutes normalise Nazism; speculation about expelling the Palestinian population from Gaza normalises ethnic cleansing; and slandering the Ukrainian president as a “dictator” who started the war in his country reinforces Russian propaganda.
On the third anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion – and the eleventh year of its military attack on Ukraine, and the long chains of suffering it has caused – these are real dangers. It’s not clear how they will play out.
Hundreds of community members add flowers, candles and photographs on Sunday to an altar for healing for local civil rights activist Thairie Ritchie at the Black Lives Matter mural in front of Santa Cruz City Hall. Ritchie tried to self-immolate at the site on Jan. 20 just hours after President Donald Trump took his oath of office and the local Martin Luther King Jr. Day march brought hundreds of people past the mural. Ritchie was treated on scene and then airlifted to an out-of-area burn center where he is now being treated. Photo: Shmuel Thaler/Santa Cruz Sentinel
A light, misty rain fell over Santa Cruz Sunday afternoon as hundreds gathered in the downtown area to honor the life and pray for the recovery of a prominent local activist who set himself on fire in front of City Hall less than two weeks prior.
Thairie Ritchie, a well known Santa Cruz community organizer, reportedly self-immolated Jan. 20 atop the Black Lives Matter mural on Center Street in downtown Santa Cruz, only a few yards from the city’s power center. According to police scanner recordings from that day, first responders around the 5 p.m. hour were at the corner of Locust and Center streets in response to a “male who set himself on fire.” The response was triggered only a few hours after the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day march had finished inside the neighboring Civic Auditorium and President Donald Trump had taken his oath of office for the second time in Washington.
Ritchie’s family, friends and acquaintances quietly poured into the open-air patio of Bike Church Santa Cruz on Sunday, the second day of Black History Month, with many carrying flowers as they embraced one another with tears in their eyes. The smell of incense and burning sage was carried by the crisp winter air as the sun set behind a gray curtain of clouds that covered the more than 300 people that had assembled to collectively process the incident.
Inside space had been cleared to set up a vigil for Ritchie, 29, with photos, candles and seating along with cookies and other snacks. Pens and paper were passed around for visitors to write private notes that many hope he will soon read as his recovery begins.
Ayo Banjo, a friend of Ritchie and the designated media contact for the event, said that Ritchie was awake Sunday and recovering in an intensive care unit. He said “a lot” of Ritchie’s body was covered in burns but declined to share a percentage, adding that the recovery process is estimated to take about six months.
“He (Ritchie) means a lot to us because he was all about community and everybody here from all different walks of life, all different races, all different genders, all different places, come together because we celebrate his representation,” said Banjo. “He is the example of what I think makes America, America. The ability to bring everyone together around issues that are beyond us and bigger than us. And I think that message has to be communicated.”
Accused terrorist Shamsidin Fariduni, with bruising on his face, inside a Moscow courtroom. Photo: Yulia Morozova/Reuters via the New York Times
It seems that one of the consequences of this tragedy [i.e., the terrorist attack on the concert hall in suburban Moscow] has been the legalization, or legitimization, of torture. Torture existed before, but it was concealed and formally condemned. Now torture is openly praised and flaunted, and state institutions, including courts, do not react in any way. Another step towards fascization.
Warning: this newsletter contains numerous descriptions of violence and torture.
People are tortured every day in Russia. For a long time we have been hearing about torture in penal colonies and police departments from victims and human rights activists. Mops and electric shockers have been mentioned in reports in the independent media and in the accounts of people who were subjected to violence, but the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) and the police themselves have usually denied the accusations. Even in today’s Russia, however, the courts have periodically tried to imprison law enforcers who have tortured people, such as those implicated in the Karelian penal colony case, the Yaroslavl case, and the Saratov prison hospital case.
The terrorist attack in suburban Moscow has changed everything.
On 22 March, gunmen killed at least 137 people at the Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow. They set fire to the building and left before the police arrived. Law enforcers have already detained suspects, and the Z bloggers have been salivating over the photos and videos of their abuse at the hands of the authorities. Never before have we had such flagrant acknowledgement of torture.
“The law enforcers have often covered their tracks by sweeping stories of torture under the rug, and we were told that there was no torture, that the reports were nonsense,” Sergei Babinets, head of the Crew Against Torture, said in an interview with Mediazona. “But since yesterday it seems as if there is a path to making torture a little more public.”
Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev (whom propagandist Margarita Simonyan dubbed the “ringleader” of the terrorists) was brought to his arraignment hearing with bruises on his face and remnants of a bag around his neck. He had no bruises at the time of his arrest, and the bag could have been used by law enforcers to strangle Mirzoyev. When the judge announced the pretrial restraint measures (Mirzoyev was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center) Mirzoyev could not stand up. Instead, he leaned against the wall of the “fish tank” in the courtroom.
Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda was brought to the hearing with his head bandaged. A law enforcer had cut off his ear when he was detained and tried to make him eat it. Neo-Nazi Yevgeny “TopaZ” Rasskazov of the nationalist subversive group Rusich announced an auction for the knife that was allegedly used to cut off Rachabalizoda’s ear.
The third detainee, Shamsidin Fariduni, was also apparently tortured. Telegram channels associated with law enforcement circulated a photo of Fariduni lying on the ground with his pants pulled down and law enforcement officers standing over him. There are wires from a field telephone attached to his groin. Such wires are used to electrocute detainees. (They have been used, for example, on detained Ukrainians in the occupied territories.) And someone is also stepping on Fariduni with a foot shod in an army tactical boot. Fariduni arrived in court with a swollen and beaten face.
Finally, the fourth detainee, Muhammadsobir Faizov, came to the court from the intensive care unit in a wheelchair. He could barely speak, and was hooked up to a catheter and a urinal. One of his eyes was injured. For the duration of the hearing, his doctors—two women in ambulance corps uniforms who had arrived with Faizov—were asked to leave the courtroom.
Why is this happening? Sergei Babinets argues that law enforcers could have been affected by the absence of major terrorist attacks in recent years.
“Many people were simply not ready for it—not ready emotionally, not ready psychologically, not ready on various fronts. And people may have started to lose their nerve due to this. That’s why there have been calls to reinstate the death penalty, to locate all the guilty parties and execute them, for example,” he said.
Аccording to Babinеts, Russian aggression in Ukraine has also played a role.
“The normalization of violence may have aggravated the situation with torture. We can see that law enforcement officers are really starting to let themselves go more,” he said.
Babinets adds, however, that there is no point to this violence.
“Torture most often leads to the torturer obtaining the information he wanted to obtain initially,” he said. “If they want a person to confess that they had been working, for example, for the Ukrainian army, they can be tortured until they confess. It is impossible to effectively investigate crimes in this way.”
It’s more than two decades since I read the late Stanley Cohen’s ground-breaking States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (2001). In the introduction, Cohen recalls his own experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, when he asked himself why his own outrage at the injustice he observed all around was not reflected in the society around him:
Why did others, even those raised in similar families, school and neighbourhoods, who read the same papers, walked the same streets, apparently not “see” what we saw. Could they be living in another perceptual universe — where the horrors of apartheid were invisible and the physical presence of black people often slipped from awareness? Or perhaps they saw exactly what we saw, but just didn’t care or didn’t see anything wrong.
Cohen went on to become a sociologist and a lifelong human rights activist. States of Denial was a valiant attempt to bring his discipline to bear on the subject of why people become become ‘everyday bystanders’ of atrocities who ‘block out, shut off or repress’ troubling or disturbing information to the point when they ‘react as if they do not know what they know.’
Some of these observations related to Israel, where Cohen moved in 1980. A Zionist in his youth, Cohen opposed the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and became a strong critic of Israeli repression of the Palestinians. In his book, he describes his work with the Israeli human rights group B’Ttselemon the torture of Palestinian detainees and the obstacles it encountered:
Our evidence of the routine use of violent and illegal methods of interrogation was to be confirmed by numerous other sources. But we were immediately thrown into the politics of denial. The official and mainstream response was venomous: outright denial (it doesn’t happen); discrediting (the organization was biased, manipulated or gullible); renaming (yes, something does happen, but it is not torture); and justification (anyway ‘it’ was morally justified). Liberals were uneasy and concerned. Yet there was no outrage.
Cohen returned to the UK in 1996, and died in 2013, but were he alive today, I suspect he would have recognized the ongoing devastation of Gaza as a textbook example of the ‘politics of denial’. According to the latest figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the IDF has killed more than 31,988 people, most of whom are women and children, with another 7,000 buried in the rubble, and wounded 74,188. To put these figures in perspective, this February civilian casualties in Ukraine were estimated at 10,582 dead and 19,875 injured since the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022.
So in just under six months, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has killed in two years. It has destroyed or damaged more than 60 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 3 churches, 224 mosques, 155 health centres, 126 ambulances. Nearly 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced, and 1.1 million people are facing ‘catastrophic levels of food insecurity,’ which threatens to become a famine.
All this has been done with the indirect support or direct collusion of the United States government, the European Union, and the British government. Despite the outpouring of rage and horror on the streets of so many cities across the world, liberal democracies that claim to uphold an international order based on human rights and universal moral norms have ‘known and not known’ what has been taking place in front of their eyes.
Many of these governments once railed against ‘dictators killing their own people’, and used atrocities and human rights abuses as a moral lubricant for liberal ‘interventions’ and ‘ humanitarian’ wars to prevent ‘massacres’ and ‘bloodbaths.’ Apart from a few tepid words of condemnation, when the obscenity of what is unfolding became too much to ignore, these same governments have enabled Israel to inflict incredible carnage on a mostly unarmed and defenceless population.
None of is taking place in secret. In February, Amnesty claimed that ‘Fresh evidence of deadly unlawful attacks in the occupied Gaza Strip…demonstrates how Israeli forces continue to flout international humanitarian law, obliterating entire families with total impunity.’ Israeli soldiers routinely post tweets and TikTok videos of themselves gleefully blowing up Palestinian homes, wearing Palestinian lingerie and women’s dresses, humiliating Palestinian prisoners made to strip down to their underwear, and generally exulting in the destruction.
KING CITY, Calif. — A group of men in masks opened fire at an outdoor party in central California, killing four people and injuring three others Sunday evening, police said.
Police responded to a reported shooting around 6 p.m. in King City and found three men with gunshot wounds who were pronounced dead in a front yard, the King City Police Department said in a statement.
Four other people sustained gunshot wounds, including a woman who died after being transported to Mee Memorial Hospital in King City, about 106 miles (170 kilometers) south of San Jose.
The three injured men were transported to Natividad Hospital in Salinas, police said.
Several people were at the party outside a residence when three men with dark masks and clothes got out of a silver car and fired at the group. The suspects, who were not immediately identified, then fled the scene in the car.
The investigation is ongoing, police said.
On Monday French lawmakers will vote on whether to enshrine in the country’s constitution a “guarantee” of women’s “freedom” to have an abortion. They will meet at a joint session of the lower and upper houses of parliament in Versailles, a rarely convened body known as the Congress. A constitutional revision requires three-fifths of the votes.
Such cross-party support is widely expected. Last Wednesday the French senate, which is controlled by the opposition centre-right, voted overwhelmingly in favour of the bill. The revision also enjoys backing from the governing centre and the opposition left. Emmanuel Macron, the president, wants women’s freedom to have an abortion to be made “irreversible”. French politicians of all stripes have worried about the potential for a future rolling-back of such guarantees—especially since America’s [sic] Supreme Court overturned the ruling that protected abortion rights there in 2022.
Sources: Spanishdict.com daily newsletter, 4 March 2024; Monterey Herald, 4 March 2024; Time, 4 March 2024; The Economist daily newsletter, 4 March 2024; the YouTube channels of The Insider (“Navalny’s Last Rally”) and Novaya Gazeta (“The Most Emotional Statements of People Who Came to Say Goodbye to Alexei Navalny”), with thanks to Tiina Pasanen; Andrei Bok (Facebook), 2 March 2024; Duolingo; random internet stock image.
I imagine that only this solution can give Palestinians their full basic rights. What is the one-state solution? It enables both Palestinians and Israelis to live in one democratic secular state where everyone has equal rights and is free to practice his or her beliefs. Israelis claimed that Palestinians would be a demographic threat under the one-state solution, as Jews would become the minority. But equal rights are the solution that guarantees the most rights and protections for all. After all, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together peacefully in Palestine in the past. And, after 1948, Christians, who are a minority compared with Muslims, lived peacefully together with Muslims.
It’s July 2050, one of the hottest summers ever in Gaza. I live in Beersheba now, my family’s original city, but I often travel to Gaza where my mother still lives. She decided to stay in Gaza. She owns a house there and is used to the atmosphere of Gaza. Yet she comes to visit from time to time. There is no military checkpoint and no apartheid wall. Travel between the two cities takes only one hour, not the many humiliating hours we endured when we lived under occupation and separation. I work now as a physiotherapist at a new hospital in Beersheba.
Gaza has all the infrastructure and facilities that it needs: fresh water, electricity, and natural gas. The employment rate increases as agriculture improves and farmers no longer fear Israeli bombs. There is free movement of imports and exports and of industrial goods. Also, the population of Gaza has decreased as many refugees returned to live on their original land. There’s a new geographical distribution. My friend returned to Haifa and works as a teacher at one of the government schools.
The medical situation in Gaza is at its finest, with an adequate number of facilities for the population as well as ample supplies and equipment. People no longer need to travel for medical treatment or die waiting to get permission from Israeli officers.
Democratic elections take place every four years. We are now preparing for a new legislative election. Palestinian and Jewish citizens elect representatives together. Electoral lists feature candidates from different backgrounds, religions, and ideologies. The atmosphere is democratic. There are diverse political, social, and religious views, and everyone respects others’ views and beliefs. I call this “normal diversity”: no group is superior to the other.
We have both an airport and a seaport. We don’t have to struggle at crossings. We can simply visit, move, and travel to any other city or country. Gaza lives like any other place in the world with opportunities for development and production. Palestine lives like any other country within the range of acceptable normal diversity. Each citizen is a first-class citizen, and everyone has equal rights.
Source: Basman Aldirawi, “Gaza 2050: Three Scenarios,” in: Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Michael Merryman-Lotze (eds.), Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022). Still, above, from Nicholas Hytner (director), The History Boys(2006).
Friends, if you really want to protect us, put pressure on the governments of your countries to immediately stop the massacre in Gaza, demand an end to the evictions in Sheikh Jerrah (this is necessary, among other things, to stop the bombing by Hamas), and prevent pogroms. When you get right down to it, there are no Jews or Palestinians. There are only people who, for their common survival, need to ensure equality in terms of the right to life, the right not to kill as soon as they’re ordered, the right to freedom of movement and property claims. There is no point in “rooting” for one side or the other. This is not football. We are one: the people who treat my child, change his diapers, love him, and help me in difficult situations, have relatives in Gaza. And they are no less afraid for them than you are for us. Every strike on Gaza is a strike on us.
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(In the photo, my son is with his caregiver, Futna, who has been working with disabled children for twenty years. She’s not safe right now.)
