Andrey X is Getting Sued by Israel
Andrey came to Israel looking for freedom. What he found was the opposite.
The state of Israel has leveled 13 charges against independent journalist and activist Andrey Khrzhanovisky, better known as “Andrey X”. Out of those 13 charges, one of them is for spraying the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv with red paint as an act of protest against Russian imperialism. In Israel, people generally do not get criminally charged or brought to court for such actions. However, because repression has been going “up and up, even for anti-Zionist Israelis”, Israel seems to be cracking down on dissent.
Andrey’s work centers around documenting settler violence in the West Bank. In an earlier, he documented an act of aggression in which settlers’ teenagers from Khavat Shoroshim, an illegal farm, “entered private land” and used their boss’s car to blare a horn throughout the village of Um al Khair. Having happened repeatedly, this is not an isolated incident. Many complaints have been filed regarding these incidents and have gone unaddressed by police and other authorities.
Hailing from St. Petersburg, Russia, Andrey X came to Israel to escape repression in his home country. Before he took up his work documenting settler violence, he focused on the Russia-Ukraine war. However, on October 7th, he saw that repression created a pressure cooker-like environment for Palestine. In his words, it is simply a matter of time before attempts to repress people “blow up” in the faces of oppressive forces. Having this mind, he moved from Tel Aviv to the West Bank to employ a strategy called protective presence.
Protective presence is a practice in which someone from a more privileged group shields someone from a less privileged group by simply being there and bearing witness to human rights violations. In Palestine’s West Bank, this can take the form of filming the army and settlers, taking part in demonstrations, and accompanying Palestinian children on the way to school. Although Jewish Israeli citizens and international activists are less likely to be targeted than Palestinians, this work still carries risks. It is fairly common for those practicing protective presence to be arrested, attacked by settlers, or exposed to tear gas, especially at demonstrations.
Between the siege of Gaza and the razing of the West Bank, both Israelis and Palestinians are calling for an end to the cycle of violence. Andrey X’s work is indispensable both for the Palestinian communities he serves and for people who support him from abroad. Having fled Russia during the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, he deeply empathizes with Palestinians and draws on that experience to work with them.
