These Israeli Dissidents Can Show Americans How to Be a Good Citizen of a Bad Country

When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you? In my experience, it is strikingly easy to shrug off one’s responsibility for the country where one pays taxes, contributes to the public conversation and, at least nominally, has the right to vote, if that country is the United States. It seems one can just say “Not in my name” and continue to enjoy the wealth and the freedom of movement one’s citizenship confers. But as this country builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder in the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions, that may change. It should change. What does one do then? How can one be a good citizen of a bad state?

On a recent trip to Israel, I talked to a number of Jewish citizens who have grappled with this question. In the last two years, as Israel has carried out a genocide against Palestinians and has all but dropped any pretense of democracy, many Israelis have come to dread telling people what country they are from. Some see this as unfair, having never personally supported their country’s far-right politicians or its prime minister, and having done what they could to change the course of Israeli politics. Others — a tiny minority — are grateful for the scorn of other nations, in hopes it can bring change to their own.

The people I sought out don’t agree on everything. But all of them have reckoned with questions of belonging and complicity, have wondered whether they should stay in their country, and have asked themselves what they are morally obligated to do to stop or slow the actions of their government. (About 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian, but for this article I spoke only to Jews, for it is in the name of Jewish safety and Jewish nationhood that the Israeli government claims to act.)

We were having breakfast at one of Tel Aviv’s myriad lovely cafes where one could have good coffee and fresh food while some 40 miles away people were starving. One could reasonably assume that many people at the cafe were at least somewhat uneasy about that starvation, but the discomfort wasn’t visible; what was, Sfard pointed out, were three different displays devoted to Israeli hostages in Gaza, who were still captive when we spoke. He had no objection to these displays, he hastened to add; it was the lack of any acknowledgment of the genocide that concerned him. Both the genocide and the obliviousness were policies of a state to which, Sfard stressed, he continued to contribute, “not just by paying taxes, but even now, as I’m talking to you, I contribute to an understanding of Israel, which Israel benefits from.”

Over the summer, Sfard told me, “I had to get away.” He and his family went to Italy. While they were there, some of the most dire reports of mass starvation started coming out. The distance helped put things in perspective. When Sfard returned, he wrote an essay that Haaretz, a left-wing newspaper, published with the headline “We Israelis Are Part of a Mafia Crime Family. It’s Our Job to Fight Against It From Within.” Many people look at the far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, “these two petty fascists, who — unlike their Italian or German counterparts — have neither class nor aesthetics, only raw racism and sadistic cruelty,” Sfard wrote, and think, with relief, “This doesn’t represent us.” But, he continued, “the criminal, felonious, unforgivable project of Gaza’s destruction is an all-Israeli project. It could not have happened without the cooperation — whether through active contribution or silence — of all parts of Jewish Israeli society.” Admitting one’s complicity means being called to action, including action that many Israelis perceive as disloyal. Sfard called on his readers to get behind people who refuse to serve in Gaza, and to support sanctions, political isolation and international investigations into Israel’s actions.

The question that haunts all Israeli Jewish parents is what will happen when their kids turn 18, the age of compulsory military service. A family’s biggest contribution to the state is a child who joins the army. Universal military service (with some exemptions, including for the ultra-Orthodox and for Palestinian citizens of Israel) has been a pillar of security and national cohesion since the founding of the state of Israel. It is also the state’s most effective instrument for implicating the maximum number of people in its policies and its crimes. At one of the weekly protests in Tel Aviv, where, for many months, thousands of people gathered every Saturday night to demand a cease-fire and the return of the hostages, I met a left-wing journalist two of whose children were serving in Gaza. So were the children of two friends who usually joined her at these protests.

Almost 35 years ago, when Sfard reached conscription age, he joined the military. But when he was ordered to serve in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, he refused — and went to military prison. Now, he told me, he wouldn’t serve at all — both because the military has changed and because his understanding has evolved: He has come to see that the entire military structure reinforces an apartheid system.

Refusing to serve in the military is probably the most potent form of protest available to Israeli Jews. During the 2023 mass protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to abolish judicial independence, thousands of reservists publicly pledged not to report for duty if called, and more than 200 teenagers signed an open letter saying they would not enlist. It’s impossible to track down every signatory to every such letter, but it seems that the teenagers might have kept their word better than the reservists, many of whom reported for duty following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on the south of Israel.

These days Greenberg spends much of her time in Masafer Yatta, an area in the South Hebron Hills featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land.” Masafer Yatta comprises more than a dozen small villages, each of which is fighting for survival in the face of constant attacks by Israeli Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers. In July, a contributor to “No Other Land,” a teacher and activist named Awdah Hathaleen, was killed by a settler. In other incidents, Greenberg told me, settlers have commandeered sheep and used rubble from their own construction sites to block entrances to the caves where some villagers are living. Soldiers and settlers routinely detain Palestinian residents for hours or days, subjecting them to physical abuse and humiliation. Greenberg is one of dozens of activists — all of them Israeli Jews or foreign nationals — engaged in what’s called protective presence. They often insert their bodies between the villagers and their attackers. Most of the time, attackers seem to recognize these Jewish or Western bodies as more valuable than those of the Palestinians. Still, Greenberg has taken her share of beatings. A few weeks before we met, Greenberg told me, there had been a “pogrom,” in which settlers had fractured at least one activist’s skull.

What is it like to be protecting Palestinians from your countrymen? “I’ve had shame and guilt, but these are not the things that bring me to action,” Greenberg said. “Responsibility brings me to action. And rage.” She sees no way to disavow being an Israeli. “No matter what I do, I am Israeli. It’s a choice that I have no choice but to choose.” She can decide what to do about being Israeli, though — and doing nothing is not an option. “Being an idle bystander is doing something, too. I’m either maintaining the system or dismantling it.”

For a few months, Greenberg was living in the West Bank, only returning to Tel Aviv, where her mother, grandmother and older sister live, every other weekend. The hourlong journey from Jerusalem was the hardest part of her life. “I am on the train with those soldiers, and they see me as one of them — and at that point I am actually one of them,” she said. After what she has experienced in the occupied West Bank, being among people who are wearing Israeli uniforms feels unbearable. “It’s too much to hold at once, to remind yourself, ‘These are kids my age, they were brought up this way.’ No. I have to think, ‘They are fucking monsters.’” A couple of years ago, her older sister was doing her mandatory service. One time, Greenberg went home straight from an anti-occupation protest that the Israel Defense Forces broke up with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings — and there at the dinner table sat her own sister, wearing the uniform.

The last time I interviewed Shuster-Eliassi, about a year and a half ago, we sat at a cafe in Jaffa and people kept stopping by to say hello or ask for a selfie. She is popular. And yet, she told me, bookings have dried up. The comedy scene is alive and well, and some comedians are cracking jokes about Gazans dying when a shipment of humanitarian aid falls on their heads. “These comedians who are making fun of starving children — I know the booker, I know the guy, I know how bad he smells, because I’ve shared the stage with him,” she said. That proximity makes Shuster-Eliassi think that she is “just lucky” to have been raised differently from most Israelis. Her father repeatedly went to prison for refusing military service. Her Iranian-born maternal grandmother, faced lifelong discrimination. And in the village, Shuster-Eliassi grew up alongside Palestinian kids whose families carried the memory of the Nakba. If not for this unusual childhood, she said, “I could easily have been swept up.” It’s a humbling awareness — and a reminder that she cannot shrug off her Israeliness. “Even if I were to burn my passport, I couldn’t escape. It would be irresponsible of me to escape.” Shuster-Eliassi takes her cue from Iranian artists she knows, who manage to find ways to resist in a country that’s far more repressive than hers.

I have been visiting Wahat-al-Salam/Neve Shalom for about seven years, and have seen the village transformed by both the passage of time and, especially, the attack of Oct. 7 and Israel’s war on Gaza. On my first visit after Oct. 7 I met Jonathan Dekel, a filmmaker who had signed a reservists’ pledge not to serve an undemocratic government. And then, on the morning of the Hamas attack, he reported for duty. Knowing that people — including someone he knew in a kibbutz in the south — were being slaughtered made him feel as though he had no choice. Just before Oct. 7 he had completed a film called “Checkout,” a dark satire of Israeli military intelligence. Now he was serving in intelligence, where his first task was to sift through footage from Hamas body cams — footage that formed the core of the 47-minute film Israeli officials have been screening all over the world for two years, to justify the onslaught on Gaza. Israelis refer to the reel as “the atrocity film.” When I met him a few months later, he seemed to be struggling to make sense of his life: He was still serving, and still coming home every night to the co-living village where he had moved his family in the hopes of raising his children for a different future. He found it increasingly hard to see what Israel was doing in Gaza as a just war, and yet he felt that he should continue to serve.

This time, Dekel and I met on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A couple of months earlier — nearly two years into the war — Dekel had moved his family to the United States because, he told me, “that was the only way I could avoid forever active duty.” He felt that if his unit called again, he wouldn’t be able to say no. But if he was 6,000 miles away, he wouldn’t have to make the choice.

It was a few days into the cease-fire, and Dekel was again — still — trying to get his bearings. He told me that he wished he could see things in clear black-and-white terms, like his friends who are further to the left do. These friends back in Israel used to judge him for serving in the military. He tells them that they, too, could be doing more to resist. “The fact that you are not in uniform doesn’t mean you have to keep paying taxes for these uniforms.” Then he shifted his gaze to American leftists. “It’s great that you go to ‘No Kings’ protests, but who is paying” he asked, for the bombs that had been raining on Gaza? As Dekel pointed out, “Trumpism and Bibism are joined at the hip.”