Roy Aloni, Palestinian rights activist who decided to leave Israel: It’s still a lot better to be imprisoned as an Israeli. After being arrested, I usually knew that in a few hours or after a night or so I would be released home. And Palestinians who would do a lot less would be detained for months without knowing the accusations or remain in detention for years in some cases. since the genocide began the Israeli prisons became Torture camps. There’s been an ongoing struggle for Palestinians to remain on their land. The international community needs to cancel all trade agreements and collaborations with Israeli institutions that are complicit in and profiting from the genocide and the occupation.
A few days ago, an interesting message arrived in the portal’s email inbox. The owner of an estate in Umag informed us that she had hosted, through an online accommodation-sharing platform, a kind and hardworking young man who had been active in Israel as an advocate for the liberation of Palestinians.
Already during the first meeting in Zagreb, organized after a short correspondence, Roy Aloni left the impression of a compassionate, brilliant and sincere person. Many would not agree to share his fate. Since deciding a year ago to leave Israel for good, Roy has been wandering around Europe, periodically exiting and re-entering the borders of the European Union due to visa restrictions, managing as best as he can along the way. He says he would like to settle down somewhere soon if the opportunity arises.
Yet, as he tells us his story, not once does he indulge in self-pity. Instead, he constantly emphasizes the privileged position he enjoys by virtue of being born in Israel, in contrast to the circumstances and destiny of Palestinians. He has participated in the struggle for their rights through work with activist initiatives in West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is clear that, because of this, he has been imprisoned and beaten by the police forces several times.
After the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel placed West Bank and East Jerusalem under military control, thereby violating the so-called Green Line established in 1948–49. Since then, continuous violence has been inflicted upon Palestinians in strictly divided territories, some of which are under full military control (the so-called Area C, as our interviewee mentions). The violence is carried out by the Israeli administrative apparatus, the occupying army, and, in many cases, settlers, whose colonization of Palestinian enclaves has for decades been Israel’s way of securing the future of its colonial project.
Public opinion research frequently shows that most people in Israel have no issue with such a state of affairs. But not our interlocutor, who has selflessly decided to share his story with H-Alter.
You have told me that after visiting villages in the Masafer Yatta area everything was “different from what you knew” before. What did you know before?
I grew up in Israeli society – the colonizing society in Palestine, in a secular so-called “left Zionist environment”. It is south of Tel Aviv, around an hour drive from those villages and also about an hour from Gaza. The area I grow in was ethnically cleansed during the Nakba, and you wouldn’t see Palestinians living around almost at all.
I was always taught that Arab countries around us are threatening and that we have to be strong, independent, and successful in order to even stay there. I’ve lived close to the villages that were expelled and destroyed during the Nakba, and I only learned more about them after I started being active in the solidarity movement. I had to look back and understand that Palestinians were evicted from villages during the Nakba, like from Qatra, which is now Gedera – a Palestinian village that was always very close to my house, just a few kilometers away.
So it is very hard to get out of it because all your life you grow up in an educational system with a state and media apparatus, with your family and friends that are all Zionist. It’s hard to break out of it, but I had the luck, in a way, to have a friend who went to the villages in Masafer Yatta area. He told me about his daily experiences as a solidarity activist in the West Bank.
Can you tell me more about your experience in those villages and the moment of realization about what the Israeli occupation really is?
Those are mostly agricultural and nomadic villages. Some of them are there for centuries, while some arrived to the area after being expelled from their villages inside the 1948 territories during the Nakba.
These are very small communities, mostly living their traditional way of life, and they are also one of the poorest areas in Palestine. Israeli courts have been trying to evict them for years and years already. Actually, in 1999, the Israeli army had already expelled them.
Shortly after the eviction, there was a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court which led to a temporary decision to allow them back to the land, until a final decision in the petition. It was a long process. In May 2022 the High Court in Israel decided that they were finally being evicted because it’s part of a so-called military zone named firing zone 918.
There’s been an ongoing struggle for Palestinians to remain on their land, and it increased with the court decision. Continuous house demolitions and massive land grabs, army raids, settlers’ and police violence and attacks. It was mostly agricultural land and an area with herds that is now being controlled by settlers and by the Israeli state. Just recently, one of the Palestinian activists in the region, Awdah Hathaleen, was murdered by a Yinon Levi – a settler that was released a day afterward.
With the movie No Other Land getting an Oscar, the problem of this area reached an international audience. But the ethnic cleansing efforts are still ongoing, and they happen all around Palestine. There are thousands of house demolitions every year of Palestinian Bedouin communities inside the 48 territories, for another example. It’s all part of the same process from its beginning in the late 19th century until today, and the genocide in Gaza is just the extreme of this ongoing process.
Can you tell me about exact situations you saw in the Masafer Yatta area?
Once we were documenting army bulldozers closing roads. And at some point, we were on one of those roads that had a pipeline close to it, leading water to the entire community in the so-called military zone. Palestinians were trying to talk to the army officials not to harm the pipeline, as it was the main drinking water resource to the entire community. At first, it seemed that they were trying to be nice with us, but after about an hour of “trying”, they cut the water pipe on purpose and rushed to block yet another road.
It’s just one example of the daily experiences of Palestinians everywhere, and those examples are more common in the in smaller communities – has those communities are very widespread, and it’s easier for Israel to conduct its daily oppression. In other places, they have different ways. One of the ways the Israeli regime uses its power over Palestinians is by separating them into smaller communities, using different forms of oppression in order to make it harder for them to unite and fight together against the apartheid regime.
Those villages in Area C are the smaller ones and face these daily issues. If you go to bigger Palestinian cities and villages in the West Bank, in Areas A or B, they have more army raids and city closures. People are being shot to death there regularly. In East Jerusalem, they are facing a lot of house demolitions and evictions, and I was also involved in activism there.
Polls are showing that the majority of Israelis are supporting the war and extermination in Gaza. But you told me you had a choice to make – to “leave the country or become a solidarity activist.” You show by your example that people in Israel do have a choice…
There was a moment when I decided to act regarding all of this, influenced by what I saw each day during my week visit there – army raids, house and road closures, and the already mentioned demolition of a pipeline for entire village. I had to make a choice because I realized that everything was so different from what I had known before.
After weeks of shock, I decided to be a solidarity activist. From there began my process of understanding that Israel is a settler-colonial project and an apartheid state.
You start to understand the specific policies in specific places, and then you read and talk with people, and you understand more and more. It resulted in a very sharp turn in my personal life. But most Jewish-Israeli’s support the apartheid regime, the ongoing Nakba and the genocide in Gaza.
A few years ago you entered Hebrew University in Jerusalem. How does academic society stand about all of this? What are your experiences?
I think that the Israeli academia looks at itself as so-called more progressive, more liberal, more oriented to the international community than most of Israeli society, and there you can find more people talking about the so-called two-state solution, which is still a colonial solution and a bad one.
But they are still part of the apartheid regime and the war machine. Academia there is involved with arms companies, conducting manufacturing and research for them. Academical institutions give better conditions to people who went to the army and have special programs for soldiers and police. The state helps them get degrees or helps them with courses, paying less and getting preferred accommodations in student housing. So there are obvious perks if you were in the army.
During my last year at university, the campus was full of Israeli flags everywhere. You couldn’t miss it. And with signs saying in Hebrew a phrase that means “We will win together” – “we” referring to the majority of campus – Zionists.
At the same time, since the start of the genocide, Palestinian students in Israeli universities are being arrested and expelled because they shared opinions on social media.
Even some professors were being forced to resign and were investigated by the police for what they said in public. One known example is Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who was talking on a podcast, and the university called on her to resign because they couldn’t legally fire her. In the end, she was suspended for a few days from working at the university, and the police arrested her and investigated her. Professor Nadera is just one example of how Israeli academia is silencing critical Palestinian voices.
You became an activist against evictions of Palestinians from East Jerusalem. Can you tell me more about that period of your life?
Most Palestinians in Jerusalem live in the easter part of the city. This part was occupied by Israel in 1967, and Israel annexed it, illegally. The Palestinians there got a special statue in the Israeli law – they are recognized as “permanent residents.” That’s mean they cannot vote for parliament, and they will lose their legal status if they will live outside of the city for a few years. They also suffer more violence against them by the state– between house demolitions, evections, police brutally, arrests and trying to control and monitor every aspect of their lives – they are heavily oppressed by the Israeli state.
So I got involved in activism in East Jerusalem when I moved to Jerusalem for my studies. And I got involved with a group named Free Jerusalem. It is a group that is mostly based on Jewish-Israelis opposing the crimes of the Zionist regime. With the start of the genocide, they were also involved in protests regarding Gaza, but the main focus is on Jerusalem. The group was established in 2014. I started to get involved at the end of 2021, in the beginning mostly through the weekly protest in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem very close to the so-called Green Line, which was the 1948 line. Protests began because of evictions that happened in the neighborhood in 2009 and kept every week until the beginning of the genocide – because it became too dangerous to demonstrate.
In this specific neighborhood, residents are living on land or in houses that Israeli organizations and the state claim Jewish Israelis were living in before 1948 and the Nakba.
After Israel occupied Jerusalem again, they made rules that Israelis can claim their houses from before 1948 in East Jerusalem. And there is another law that says that Palestinians cannot reclaim their houses in West Jerusalem, so it means that Israelis win twice. They get the houses or land that their family apparently had before 1948, and Palestinians are losing their houses again after they lost them in 1948 – which is the reason they had to live in East Jerusalem in the first place, after being evicted from West Jerusalem. So it’s a very clear example of apartheid. In recent years the neighborhood is also facing increased ethnic cleansing efforts by the state.
And Sheikh Jarrah is just one of the neighborhoods where it’s happening, and it’s ongoing. At the moment, there are about six families in Silwan in East Jerusalem that can be evicted in the next couple of weeks because of these laws. There are also demolitions of hundreds of houses every year in East Jerusalem.
How did you organize?
We were sometimes protesting and on immediate eviction threats we sometimes joined the families in their houses. I took part in three different immediate threats in Jerusalem. One of them was the Salem family, who are still in the house because of the family and community fight, with the help of international pressure and solidarity actions. The Grandmother, Fatma, passed away last year. She died in the house she was born in, which is a big win and a show of Sumud. In the other two situations, the families were expelled in the end.
On of those families is the Sub-Laban family. Nora, the mother living in the house before the eviction, told us afterward that “her house is not stolen, but a prisoner.” Settlers took it, but one day it will be free again.
This kind of solidarity is very strong, because you get to know the people in a very intimate way. They let you enter their house, which is a unique and hard thing to do. They let solidarity activists live with them 24/7. All for the fight and for the sumud. Sumud is a term in Arabic which can be translated to something like stiffness of remaining — the purpose is to remain and to resist by remaining.
How were you treated when arrested?
It’s very random most of the time. They just pick you up, sometimes already recognizing you from different initiatives. But it’s still a lot better to be imprisoned as an Israeli. After being arrested, I usually knew that in a few hours or after a night or so I would be released home.
And Palestinians who would do a lot less would be detained for months without knowing the accusations or remain in detention for years in some cases. And since the genocide began the Israeli prisons became Torture camps. Sometimes protests were suppressed very brutally. In a protest after the start of the genocide, I was beaten with a stick by a policeman, and for months afterward, I felt pain in my leg and couldn’t walk properly because of it. It’s still a very small price compared to Palestinians who try to do anything.
After the start of the genocide, in last November, you decided to leave Israel for good. You’ve told us there’s nothing you can do anymore there…
I felt that nothing I could do from inside with so-called resisting was worth the money Israel gets just from me being there and paying taxes.
It was a hard decision because, in the end, as a solidarity activist you get in touch and very close connections with residents and people in communities who are suffering and trying to remain there. When I say there was nothing I could do, I mean it in the sense that Israel can’t change as a society, there isn’t a “better Israel.” The nature of the state is settler-colonial and apartheid, and those structures needs to be Disassembled.
How do you see the recent situation in Gaza? Do you believe in peace over there?
It’s a very important question because, first of all, the reaction should be happiness that the killing of dozens or hundreds of people every day across Gaza has ended. But we still need to make international pressure and to mobilize.
This is just the first step because the ceasefire plan is another colonial and Western plan in order to help Israel remain strong and let the ethnic cleansing continue. The goal now needs to be ending the apartheid regime – in order to achieve a just future between the river and the sea, and that the responsible to the genocide will be held accountable.
Nothing can go back to normal because tens of thousands of people have been murdered and millions have been displaced, and while people are still being killed.
So it’s a start, but it needs to be built upon. We still need to mobilize and end this settler colonial apartheid regime which still has the same plan. We need international cooperation, a strong BDS movement, and activism. The international community needs to cancel all trade agreements and collaborations with Israeli institutions that are complicit in and profiting from the genocide and the occupation and expand the boycott. Without this, everything that is happening is just rhetorical.
