Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 1-1-2018
Rights
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The events of summer 2014 and the painful realizations that they invoked have led me to consider renouncing my Israeli citizenship. Contemplating what may seem like a straightforward stance of resistance, I have come to realize how complex it actually is. This short essay considers renunciation as an act of protest from the standpoint of a Jewish Israeli legal ethnographer and geographer... [The essay] foregrounds the following questions: aren’t all modern states founded upon bloodshed? And, if so, shouldn’t all citizens be renouncing their citizenship? Or from the opposite angle: why bother replacing one flawed citizenship with another? In my own case, how is my current US citizenship better than the Israeli one that I am considering renouncing? What, if any, is a citizen’s responsibility vis-à-vis her nation-state(s), and how far back does this responsibility go? As a citizen of the United States, am I now responsible for slavery? For the war in Iraq? For the continued oppression of people of color and the ongoing colonization of Puerto Rico? And does this responsibility change if I hold double or even multiple citizenships?... In any case, the renunciation of citizenship as protest cannot be a renunciation of responsibility to redress injustice, a shedding of liabilities; it is, rather, a taking on of enhanced responsibility, an act of care.
DOI
Publication Title
Critical Inquiry
First Page
379
Last Page
386
Recommended Citation
Irus Braverman,
Renouncing Citizenship as Protest: Reflections by a Jewish Israeli Ethnographer,
44
Critical Inquiry
379
(2018).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/journal_articles/910