Andrei Khrzhanovsky: Even Tel Aviv Hipsters Can Commit Genocide

Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Source: social media

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.

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.

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Hasbara

Here’s a great example of Israeli hasbara targeting Russian speakers.

I found the short post on a friend’s Facebook news feed. It consists of three sentences attached to a powerful image of at least thirty missiles or rockets fired simultaneously.

The message reads (in Russian), “Israel today [sad face emoji]. This is exactly the instance when one photo is worth a thousand words. The world needs to know what’s really going on! — feeling down [sad face emoji].”

The post has been shared 6,800 times, garnered 451 likes, and elicited 173 comments in the 20 hours since it was published.

We are meant to imagine, of course, that the “photo worth a thousand words” is a photo of a Hamas rocket installation in the Gaza Strip firing its deadly cargo towards the utterly innocent state of Israel.

A simple Google image search turned up several instances of the same image, all of them bearing different dates and captions, none of which link the “photo” in question to Hamas or the current hostilities between Hamas and the IDF.

So, in fact, the photo is worthless, except to underscore something we already knew.

Zionist hasbaristas are utterly unscrupulous. They count on people not bothering to check any of their claims, but just to pass the “horrible truth” along, thus confusing more people about the real, complicated facts about the relationship between the state of Israeli and the stateless Palestinians. {TRR}

Aliyah

aliyah

Canadian professional wrestler Aliyah. Photo courtesy of WWE

It’s really unpleasant to discover that, for no apparent reason and unbeknownst to you, you have been unfriended long ago by someone you really did think of as a friend,

The funny thing is that, two years ago, I translated a dozen or so pages of essays and other documents this particular friend needed for their Fulbright application. I did all of this work literally overnight, with almost no advanced warning.

The friend didn’t think to offer me any money or anything else for my work, but when they did, in fact, get the Fulbright, they suddenly popped up again to ask for free English lessons.

Since I haven’t heard word one from them since then, I assume they and their family stayed in the States.

What happened to the film I had been helping them make for several years is for me to wonder alone about, too.

This is a lesson I should have learned the hard way when A.S. and I held what proved to be a truly savage and unpleasant “solidarity evening” for our old friend the artist B. in 2008 after he was deported from Brexitland, where he had applied, quite sincerely and on impeccable legal grounds, for asylum as a gay man whose life was threatened in his home country.

All three of us were roundly denouced by the rather odd audience in attendance at the erstwhile artists squat Pushkinskaya 10 (now a municipally subsidized arts center) for advocating the international human rights approach to asylum seeking.

The thing to do, we were told in no uncertain terms, was to trick your way into the promised land of your choice by hook or by crook, not to openly apply for asylum and get mixed up with the allegedly politically dodgy types (i.e., anarchists and other No Borders activists) who support asylum seekers in other countries.

Meanwhile, my wife’s cousin M., who up until a few months ago showed no interest in their late grandfather and his Jewishness, has suddenly decided to make Aliyah. The only problem is that his cousin, my wife, is the only living member of the family who knows anything about their grandfather, his Jewishness, and Jewishness in general, and who has kept anything she could pertaining to her grandfather’s life, because she loved him, and because she finds her fascinating multi-ethnic family’s history fascinating.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that politics in Israel has been badly skewed to the hard right by the huge influx of “Russian Jews” who emotionally, religiously, philosophically, and technically speaking had about as much business making Aliyah as I, a third-generation Scandinavian American, would have.

Naturally, since they have no real business being there or, rather, since they know they fudged their way into the country, they are even more resentful of the Palestinians, the natives brutally shunted aside to make room for their illegitimate millions.

This has been borne out by Likud’s strangehold on power in alliance with Avgidor Lieberman and the other radical right politicians heavily supported by immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

The only way out of this impasse is to declare Zionism a “triumphant failure” that did the job it set out to do when circumstances for Jews in the world were desperate. Now that they are much less desperate, Zionism, like “communism” in its own time, can phase itself out, giving way to a single Israeli-Palestinian state where everyone would learn Arabic and Hebrew at school, and to which anyone in the world would be eligible to immigrate if they chose to do it.

Of course, it would be a big mess, but it would also be a lot more fun than the current US tax payer-subsidized disgrace in Israel-Palestine.

But what to do about the alleged right of Russians to immigrate anywhere they choose by any means necessary when, in their majority, they themselves refuse to acknowledge the same rights for non-Russians? Spend enough time in these parts and you will realize that really large numbers of Russians do think quite sincerely and distressingly that Muslim, Asian, and African riffraff should not be allowed to live in their precious spiritual homelands of North America, Western Europe, and Israel, and certainly not in their beloved-and-hated Motherland itself.

I have no cheeky pie-in-the-sky solution to this racist silliness. I do know, though, that it had something to do (minus the racism) with why I lost a real friend. {TRR}

“The Australian Prime Minister Has Done It Again!”

I hate to get down and dirty with you all, but this is what the current prime minister of Australia actually looks like.

2588176-3x2-940x627-640x427 — Malcom Turnbull, the actual prime minister of Australia. Photo courtesy of newskaada.com

His name is Malcolm Turnbull, and he is the new leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, which currently governs Australia in coalition with the National Party of Australia.

Mr. Turnbull is new at his job, because he ousted the rather wretched Tony Abbott in what the Australians quaintly call a “leadership spill” less than a week ago.

While I don’t like Mr. Turnbull’s politics for the most part, he will be a real improvement over Mr. Abbott, if only because he is less prone to saying and doing blatantly stupid and awful things. Mr. Turnbull comes across as an intelligent, affable and well-spoken fellow.

But that is beside the point.

I wonder whether events like this ever make the news in Russia, because frighteningly large numbers of Russians think that Kevin Rudd (of the Australian Labor Party) is still the prime minister of Australia.

Or, alternately, they think that John Howard (Liberals) or Julia Gillard (Labor) is the prime minister of Australia.

Basically, for the Russian “grassroots” imaginary, it doesn’t really matter who the prime minister of Austrialia is, because whoever she or he is (or isn’t), the “prime minister of Australia” is a folklore character with a penchant for making outrageously Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, and, now, in a new twist, rabidly pro-Zionist statements such as this:

В отношениях евреев и арабов Израиля, да и всей Палестины в границах мандата Лиги Наций. хозяин страны и земли в этой стране НЕ ТОТ, КТО ПРОЛИЛ БОЛЬШЕ ЧУЖОЙ КРОВИ, А ТОТ, КТО ЕЁ СТРОИЛ, ЗАЩИЩАЛ И ТРУДИЛСЯ ДЛЯ ЕЁ ПРОЦВЕТАНИЯ. Из этого следует что мировой порядок не может определяться голосованием в ООН, созданной коалицией , организовавшей массовое истребление евреев в 1933-1945 годах и пытавшейся завершить это истребление в 1953 году – коалицией из Британии, СССР, США, Германии и Франции Эти государства своими тайными и открытыми действиями на протяжении 1933-1945 годов активно участвовали в истреблении еврейского народа и сумели в лагерях и поездах, в расстрельных рвах сожженных сооружениях методично и организовано уничтожить не менее 12 миллионов беззащитных жертв, избранных по национально-расовому признаку. И они же создали организацию ООН и при ней – UNWRA – НЕ ТОЛЬКО ПРОДОЛЖИТЬ ПОЛИТИКУ ДИСКРИМИНАЦИИ ЕВРЕЙСКОГО НАРОДА, НО И СОЗДАЛИ НОВЫЙ “НАРОД” с единственной задачей – не допустить выполнения решений Лиги Наций о СОЗДАНИИ В ПАЛЕСТИНЕ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОГО ДОМА для еврейского народа,

Историческое тайное решение о ликвидации еврейского народа принимали правительства перечисленных выше государств на конференции в Эвиане и неких тайных совещаниях. . И сегодня, когда над миром, над всей Западной цивилизацией нависла исламская угроза Третьей Мировой войны для Европы и Америки, пора опомниться и присоединиться к Австралии и Японии и остановить самоубийство человечества.

[Source: NewRezume.org]

I won’t even bother to translate this fake crap into English. If you are curious, go to Google Translate and let the smart robots there do the hard work for you.

The forger of the above libel goes on to express his and “the Russian world’s” delight in the “Australian prime minister’s” continuing campaign against Islam:

Премьер-министр Австралии снова сделал это!! Этого человека следует назначить королем мира..[sic] Более правдивых слов никогда не говорили..[sic]

The Australian prime minister has done it again! This man should be appointed king of the world… Truer words were never spoken.

God knows that real Australian prime ministers have done and said a lot of really awful things in their time, although, if actual truth be told, besides being remembered for being a fairly goofy customer himself, Mr. Rudd is also remembered for his apology, in parliament, to Australia’s Indigenous people for the so-called Stolen Generations.

Again, that is not the point. The point is that there are rather vigorous forces in Russian society, both at the top and the grassroots, who are keen on putting the most dire spin on current events while also fostering the illusion that their bleak outlook or their own aggressive, imperialist policy has lots of fans in the outside world.

If you are wondering why Kevin Rudd (or, rather, the “prime minister of Australia”) is such a folk hero on the Russian internets, the simple answer is that not enough Russians speak or read English well enough to be able to sort out hoaxes like this.

In more vegetarian times, this would not have mattered as much, but now the Kremlin has been actively priming the pump with fake news and commentary via its “active operations” on social media.

I hope to be describing another such recent hoax, involving a non-existent Finn named Veikko Kerhonen from Oulu, in the next day or so. Here is a sample of the imperialist Russian screeds this non-existent Finn is into posting, exclusively in Russian!

In the meantime, you can reread my recent, obviously futile attempt to expose the “Australian prime minister” canard.