Ending Your Relationship with Israel Isn’t Easy
I went to the Israeli Consulate in Chicago the other day to explore the process of ending our relationship.
I’d been thinking of doing this for years, mostly for political reasons; ever since the early 1990s, I’ve felt deeply uncomfortable with the country’s treatment of Palestinians, along with its policies on West Bank colonization, making war, and pursuing peace.
My family immigrated there in 1976, but I left in 1993 and have returned only for short visits.
The Consulate
The security guard buzzed me in: a young, muscular, friendly fellow, all smiles and light. He checked my passport and then, apropos of nothing, asked, “What’s your military number?”
Startled, I rattled it off without thinking; it was as if my tongue had overtaken my brain. A few seconds later, however, I wondered, Why would he ask that?
Perhaps he was trying to establish my bona fides as a security measure, but the question still struck me as inappropriate. After all, many Israelis don’t serve in the military, including people who immigrated there when they were older, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and 20% of the country’s citizenry who are of Arab descent.
While holding the passport in his hand, he could have “tested” me by asking for my citizenship number, which was listed right there. One’s military number is not, however, so how would he even know if I was lying?
Then, he asked me an even stranger question: “What unit did you serve in?” That query seemed truly unnecessary, perhaps even borderline ridiculous. I’m almost 59, which means I was drafted 41 years ago. Why would a guy thirty-five years my junior ask that on a routine visit to the consulate?
I concluded it was a form of macho family small talk. Among Israeli-Jewish men, conversations often gravitate towards all things military — where, what, when, who you know.
I had thought all that would be over by now, but apparently, it isn’t, even though I am pushing 60. The military experience is alive and all too well in my own mind, and it apparently is in others’ as well.
Immature Brain
Despite my dismay at what the Israeli armed forces have done to Palestinians in Gaza after the deadly Hamas raid, my immature brain was strangely proud of the answer I was able to offer the consular security guard: Palhan Tzanhanim.
The airborne Palhan — an all-volunteer, top-tier, paratroop infantry group focused on mines and explosives — hard to get into, and even harder to endure.
I left regular Israeli military service in early 1988, over 37 years ago, but I’m writing about the experience now. The details, including those from the few years I spent in the reserves, remain fresh. Just the training, in and of itself, was impossibly grueling.
Strangely, I then took it upon myself to challenge the guard, provocatively asking him, “So what was your unit?”
As if I were still a 19-year-old macho wanna-be strutting along Jerusalem’s pedestrian mall on a late Friday afternoon. The question had just popped out, the Israeli male teen’s version of, “Whose is bigger?”
He responded with the name of a respectable unit that was perhaps just a tad less prestigious than mine, at least in the eyes of the people inhabiting my 40-year-old teenage world.
Immature brain, I’m sad to say, was gratified.
Despite my profound shame at what the Israeli military has done in Gaza (and before, dating back at least to the 1982 Lebanon war), I am, apparently, still weirdly proud of my ability to endure that kind of punishment all those years ago. Like saying, “I did an Iron Man when I was a kid.”
Not So Easy
After that odd discussion, I entered the consular office itself, the Holy of Holies — a small room with two all-powerful female clerks. I handed my paperwork to the older woman behind the desk, hoping we might develop a rapport based on our age.
“Why are you renouncing your citizenship?” she asked, and I responded with only a partial truth: “I’m downsizing. Selling my house and furniture, getting rid of clothes, trying to live more simply. Reducing.”
I wasn’t looking for a fight.
She looked confused, but smiled pleasantly. “You aren’t selling your citizenship, are you?” We laughed, and it felt oddly nice to chuckle together. I was intensely nervous, and she was putting me at ease.
Then, she studied her computer, presumably perusing whatever data they had on me in the Population Registry.
As she did so, however, her tone took a less friendly turn. “If it were me,” she said tartly, pursing her lips in disapproval, “I’d never let my citizenship go.” I didn’t respond.
Next, bureaucratic disaster: “Married or single?”
“Divorced.”
She looked back at her computer screen and took a deep breath. “OK, that’s a problem. I see you never registered either your marriage or your divorce with the Registry. We can’t proceed until you do so. You’ll need to register the marriage first, and then the divorce. We’ll need all these forms filled out, plus official copies of your marriage and divorce certificates, authorized with an apostille.”
An “apostille” is a difficult-to-arrange credential for international consular documents. Neither simple nor cheap. “You’ve gotta be kidding!” I wailed. “What do you need that for? My divorce was seven years ago, and we were married and divorced here in the US. My ex is not even Israeli.”
“It’s the law. The State of Israel needs to know what its citizens are up to.”
“Can’t you pretend that I didn’t just say I was married?” I asked, half jokingly. “No one would ever know!”
She looked pained. “I’d really like to. Other clerks might do that for you, but I can’t. You’ll have to get us those papers.”
“Please…” I whined, using what I hoped was a winning smile. I’m an educated, upper-middle-class Ashkenazi Jew with perfectly idiomatic Hebrew and a decent military past. Can’t you give me a pass, just this once? For the sake of our own little version of white privilege?
“No. So sorry.”
Hotel California
The clerk turned to her colleague. “Can you perhaps pretend you didn’t hear he was married?” They whispered together for a brief moment.
She turned back to me: “I’m still sorry, but we can’t do it. You’ll have to fill out the necessary paperwork, get the apostilled certifications, and reapply later.”
Then, an added hurdle: “You’ll also have to send in bank statements,” an intrusive detail the Consulate’s website hadn’t mentioned. “You need to show that your financial center of life is here in the US.”
Tax-evasion-prevention, I surmised.
I was so disappointed. I’d been psyching myself up for today’s meeting for months, if not years, and now it wasn’t going to work. Not yet, at least. Still, I tried to make light of it all. “So, it’s like Hotel California, right? You can check in, but you can’t check out?”
She laughed, and we had a moment of genuine connection. We were roughly the same age, with similar Hebrew accents and intonations. She had a daughter roughly my children’s age, and we suddenly bonded like family. That felt good, if only for a few seconds.
Shame
We’d gotten too close, too fast, however. Boundaries were now going to be seriously crossed.
“Why,” she inquired plaintively, “would you want to leave us?” A sudden attempt at emotional manipulation, the kind of thing one family member might do to another. Not at all part of a consular officer’s official job description.
Her question worked as intended, however, and I felt both embarrassed and ashamed.
“Surely, you must understand,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t have to say more. For some reason, I didn’t want to keep on emphasizing my turn towards a quasi-Buddhist lifestyle. Now that we had established a connection, I wanted her to know the truth.
“No, I don’t understand at all,” she said, furrowing her brow. “Why?”
“The war,” I said.
What About Gaza, Precisely?
“Which war?” she asked. She seemed genuinely confused.
I stared at her.
Was I the only Israeli citizen she’d processed in the last two years who wanted out because of the Gaza war? The Hamas attack was brutal, but the Israeli military’s response was wildly disproportionate. Call it genocide, call it something else — it’s been absolutely horrific. Was I the only Israeli who had come to the consular representative’s office for the entire US Midwest to register my protest?
“You know, the one that just happened,” I said.
“Well, what about it?” She really seemed to have no idea what I was getting at.
“It was just too awful,” I said.
Then, I clarified: “I mean, it was too awful for me.” Maybe for you it hasn’t been so bad? I don’t want to presume.
She looked at me as if I were a Martian. “Really? That’s odd. Most of the people coming through here are heading over to enlist.”
She was speaking, I assumed, of Israelis returning to do their military reserve service, and perhaps of young, nationalist, American Jews seeking to get in on the Gaza action. I knew a flood of reservists had returned home at the war’s outset in fall 2023, but had also heard the torrent subsided as the war grew increasingly unpopular.
Were people still trying to enlist, even after everything we knew had happened there?
I smiled, uncomfortably. “I did that enlistment thing a long time ago; I’m now heading in the opposite direction.”
Her face closed; we were no longer friends. A coldness descended on the consular booth, and I felt very alone.
Family time was over.
A Stuck Door
I got up to leave, but the door, oddly, wouldn’t open. I pushed and pulled with increasing desperation, but it wouldn’t budge. I looked back at her helplessly. “You’ll have to wait a few moments,” she explained. “Security is checking someone in on the other side.”
The security booth was sealed like an airlock and could only be opened when the guard had processed a new batch of service-seekers.
I sat down and waited, but then turned back to the clerk, even though I realized we were no longer buddies. “It’s a metaphor, right? You can’t leave this office, or Israel, very easily.”
I smiled, hoping she might still appreciate a joke.
She relented and offered a faint smile. “Yeah, Hotel California, right?”
Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave.”
A Sociology of Belonging
I earned a PhD in sociology years ago and can’t help using those tools to analyze the world around me.
It struck me in that tiny consular office that the Jewish part of Israel functions like a club with powerful, almost mystical sway over its members. Almost cult-like, although that’s a provocative term. Perhaps all nationalist or politically mobilized countries do this, but Israel has brought the process to a higher and more consistent level. There is a quasi-mystical element to that sense of belonging, infusing members’ bodies with powerful forces that propel them through all areas of their lives.
Elements of the Israeli membership-promotion package include:
(1) Rituals of belonging and devotion to the collective, including the country’s ubiquitous youth movements, lengthy military service, and annual reserve duty;
(2) An unspoken requirement to engage in, or tolerate, morally reprehensible acts, including during military service in Lebanon and the occupied territories, as well as disregard for the realities of the Palestinian experience;
(3) Strong inculcation through schools, the military, and the media of two key messages: that Jewish citizens of Israel have only one real home, and that almost all outsiders regard Jews with a unique and irrational ill will;
(4) Restriction and shaping of information about outsider perspectives, chiefly through self-censorship;
(5) Emotional manipulation to ensure members feel shame when they exit the collective;
(6) Bureaucratic hurdles complicate and delay the exit process.
For Jews who become club members at an early age, the Israel attachment rarely fades, even when they leave the country or realize they are immersed in a family-like group that is detrimental to their moral well-being.
The success of these membership-strengthening efforts can be measured, in part, by the extent of the psychological pain members feel when they try to exit, along with the difficulties they face when trying to build friendships with non-members.
In my experience, it’s hard to generate intimate social connections with people who know little about Israel and who do not care much about the experience of those who once drank the Kool-Aid.
The Language of Collective Membership
To put a finer point on this, consider some commonly used Hebrew terms:
- Immigration to Israel is called Aliya, or “Ascent,” as if you are moving upwards to a quasi-divine location.
- The opposite of Aliya is Yerida, or “Descent.” This term transforms the prosaic act of emigration into a stigmatized behavior, reinforcing the notion that Israel is both symbolically and spiritually elevated.
- The areas where Jews live outside of Israel are often referred to as the Galut, or “Exile.”
- Jewish Israelis refer to Israel as Ha’aretz, or “The Land.” Calling the country just “Israel” in daily parlance sounds weird. You never say to a friend, “When did you return to Israel?” Instead, you ask, “When did you return to ‘The Land?’”
- This reinforces, through ordinary speech, the notion that there is only one “Land.” Everywhere else is….something else. In fact, when you get on a plane and leave Israel, even if only for a weekend, you leave to Chutz La’aretz, or “Outside The Land.”
- This linguistic device divides the globe into a geographic and symbolic binary: (1) “The Land,” the place to which one ascends, and (2) “Outside the Land,” the place to which one descends (Vacations excepted. Going to Paris, London, or Rome for a few weeks is considered very cool. If you stay, marry locally, and raise children there, however, you’ve definitely “descended.”)
So What Now?
Will I go through with the bureaucratic process, including asking my ex if she is OK with sending our marriage and divorce certificates to the Israeli Ministry of Interior? The whole thing is turning into an expensive and awkward endeavor, and is causing me a fair bit of distress.
A friend who heard the story wrote me, “You can decide not to belong without going through all the paperwork. Emotionally, it’s the same thing.”
Maybe they are right. I left 32 years ago. Do I really need to process the official paperwork to prove to myself that I’m free? I’d been hoping for some kind of psychological purging, but perhaps I’m old enough now to do that without tying myself in bureaucratic knots.
We’ll see in a few months, I guess.
Note: A shorter version of this piece appeared on Substack.
About the Author
James Ron is a writer and social scientist who taught sociology and political science at multiple universities. He has also consulted for government agencies and NGOs.
His academic books include Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel (University of California Press) and Taking Root: Human Rights and Public Opinion in the Global South (Oxford University Press).
To view James Ron’s scholarly publications, visit Academia.edu | Google Scholar | Research Gate |
To view his website, visit www.jamesron.com.
