Is it possible to be a good citizen of a bad country? I think it’s time we asked ourselves this question. I thought that Israeli dissidents might have some good thoughts. So on a recent trip, I sought out Jewish Israelis and asked them what they think about being a good citizen of a bad country. Michael Sfard is an Israeli human rights lawyer, and he’s been feeling pretty desperate. He ended up writing a piece for Haaretz that framed Israel as a criminal family. For anybody, probably, to say that about their country is a big deal. In Israel, it’s really seen as akin to treason. For Sfard, it was definitely terrifying to publish the op-ed that he published, knowing that he would be branded a traitor. Eighteen-year-old Ella Greenberg is probably the best known refusenik, or young people refusing to serve their compulsory military service. I refuse. The main reason for this act is that my country is committing a genocide in Gaza. She’s actually spending most of her time in the West Bank doing what’s called protective presence. “Protective presence in the West Bank is this practice where Israeli and international activists act as these voluntary human shields.” “I’m going out with Palestinian shepherds today who are grazing their sheep. Unfortunately, they’ve received a lot of harassment.” They literally put their bodies between the Palestinian villagers and the settlers and now, increasingly, Israeli soldiers, and that way protect them. For Ella Greenberg, it’s scary to put her body in harm’s way. Jonathan Dekel is an Israeli filmmaker. He recently made a movie called “Checkout,” which is a satire of serving in Israeli intelligence. “I used to be a spy in the Mossad.” “I think you need a better pickup line than being a spy.” He cannot possibly justify to himself or to others what this military where he serves has been doing in Gaza. And so when I called him before this trip, he said: Oh, I’m not in Israel. I’m on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He said that the only way he could stop serving was if he put himself physically 6,000 miles away. For Dekel, it would be scary to refuse to serve. Resistance can be scary, and I think it’s actually a pretty good way to gauge whether you’re doing enough. I think that as the United States turns more and more of a monstrous face to the world, as the United States is more blatant about building cages for immigrants, about committing murder in the high seas, I think we may also encounter the possibility that saying that you’re American will become embarrassing, as it should be if we’re not actively resisting.
