Avi Steinberg writes:

I recently entered an Israeli consulate and submitted papers to formally renounce my citizenship. It was an unseasonably warm fall day and office workers on break were lounging by the pond in Boston Common. The night before had seen a particularly gruesome series of aerial attacks by Israel on refugee tent camps in Gaza. Even as Palestinians were still counting bodies or, in many cases, collecting what remained of loved ones, the suburban woman in front of me in line at the consulate cheerfully asked what brought me here today.

Scholars, journalists and jurists around the world are keeping a detailed inventory of all the ways that Israel’s crimes since October 2023 amount to legally actionable war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. But the story extends far beyond the horrors of the past year. Citizenship, of the kind I hold, has been a material piece of a long-standing genocidal process. The Israeli state, from its inception, has relied on the normalization of ethnically determined supremacist laws to bolster a military regime whose clear colonial goal is the elimination of Palestine.

At the top of the form that I’d brought to the consulate that day is a citation of the Citizenship Law of 1952, the legal basis upon which my status was conferred at birth. My reason for renouncing this status is indeed directly linked to that law — or rather, to the situation on the ground in the 1950s, the Nakba context, which shaped this law. [Continue reading…]