Avi Steinberg, an Israeli-born author, walked into the Israeli consulate to take a step that few have dared: he formally renounced his Israeli citizenship. As office workers relaxed in Boston Common, Steinberg carried with him a heavy burden shaped by decades of reflection on Israel’s settler-colonial project. The previous night had seen Israeli airstrikes decimate refugee camps in Gaza, leaving countless Palestinians dead or dismembered. For Steinberg, the horror of witnessing these atrocities was the final push in a long journey of disillusionment.
Steinberg recounts his experience in an article published by Truthout, where he states unequivocally that Israeli citizenship has “always been a tool of genocide” enabling settler colonialism. His decision to renounce it, he says, was not merely symbolic but an outright rejection of what he called the “normalization of domination.”
The Legal and Historical Foundations of Israeli Supremacy
Steinberg traces his decision back to the roots of Israeli statehood. He specifically references the 1952 Citizenship Law, a cornerstone of Israeli governance, which nullified the citizenship of Indigenous Palestinians while granting automatic citizenship to Jews under the 1950 Law of Return. These laws, he argues, were never about coexistence but about solidifying Jewish supremacy on stolen land.
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This framework was born in the aftermath of the Nakba—the catastrophic expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war. By the time the 1949 armistice agreements were signed, Zionist forces had destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, erasing them from maps and memory. Steinberg highlights the brutality that followed: Palestinians attempting to return to their homes were labeled “infiltrators” and shot on sight. Others were rounded up into concentration camps and deported, while their lands were handed over to Jewish settlers.
Steinberg makes clear that these acts of ethnic cleansing were not aberrations but essential to the Zionist project. The goal, he argues, was to establish a Jewish majority where one had never existed before, transforming Palestine’s Indigenous population into a permanently exiled, stateless underclass.
Personal and Familial Complicity
For Steinberg, his decision to renounce his Israeli citizenship is also an act of reckoning with his family’s role in this system. His parents, American liberals who opposed the Vietnam War, moved to Jerusalem in the 1970s and were granted Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. They settled in a home that had been violently taken from a Palestinian family during the 1967 war, embodying what Steinberg calls a “1-to-1 replacement” of Palestinians by Zionist settlers.
Born in the ethnically cleansed village of Ayn Karim, Steinberg grew up surrounded by the remnants of Palestinian life—homes and neighborhoods stripped of their original inhabitants but cherished for their “Arab charm.” He recalls the contradictions of his upbringing: a father who served in the Israeli military and friends who sought “peace” while never questioning the foundational violence of the Zionist state. For them, peace meant the continued erasure of Palestinian existence, legitimized by the trappings of legal governance.
Citizenship as a Tool of Genocide
Renouncing his citizenship, Steinberg writes, is less about rejecting a legal status and more about acknowledging its illegitimacy. He argues that Israeli citizenship is a weapon of oppression, wielded to displace Palestinians and cement settler sovereignty. Citing scholar Lana Tatour, Steinberg describes how Israeli laws were designed to classify, racialize, and eliminate Indigenous Palestinians while granting settlers the veneer of indigeneity.
This process, Steinberg argues, continues unabated. From the apartheid walls that prevent Palestinians from returning to their homes to the ongoing bombardment of Gaza, the Israeli state’s genocidal campaign is as much about identity papers as it is about military force. “The wall that keeps Palestinians from returning home,” he writes, “is constituted as much by identity papers as by concrete slabs.”
Rejecting the Weaponization of Jewish Identity
Steinberg’s critique of Zionism extends to its misuse of Jewish history and identity. He rejects the notion that Jewish self-determination can ever justify the invasion, occupation, and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Instead, he calls for a return to the radical traditions of Jewish liberation that stood in solidarity with oppressed peoples.
As a practicing Jew, Steinberg invokes the Torah’s ethical teachings to condemn Zionism. He argues that the Zionist project has co-opted Jewish history and scripture to justify colonial violence, betraying the Torah’s core message of justice and humility. “The only entity with sovereign rights, according to the Torah, is the God of justice,” he writes. “Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism other than that its leaders have long seen in these deep sources a series of powerfully mobilizing narratives with which to push their colonial agenda.”
A Call to Action
Steinberg’s renunciation of Israeli citizenship is not just a personal act of conscience but a call to others to dismantle the structures of Zionist oppression. He urges Jews and non-Jews alike to reject the narratives that legitimize settler colonialism and to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation.
In the face of what he calls a “deepening litany of lies” perpetuated by the Israeli state, Steinberg’s act of defiance is a reminder that the fight for justice in Palestine is inseparable from the broader fight against colonialism and genocide. “Our job,” he concludes, “must be to remove those concrete slabs, to rip up the phony papers, and to disrupt the narratives that make these structures of oppression and injustice appear legitimate or, god forbid, inevitable.”