‘Their Place Is Not With Us’? Citizenship Is Not a Reward

“Hit them in their pockets and in their citizenship,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week, announcing two proposed laws aimed at people he says defame Israeli soldiers abroad. One would dramatically increase damages in defamation cases. The other would allow the state to revoke citizenship.

The two measures were presented as if they differed mainly in severity. They do not. A defamation law asks whether something a person said crossed a legal line. Revoking citizenship asks whether, because of what that person said, she still belongs. That difference matters more than the controversy that prompted the proposals.

Netanyahu was responding in part to NAZA, the documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. The film, based on testimony from 24 anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel, makes grave allegations about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The IDF disputes them, questioning whether the interviewees can be verified and whether some of them were in positions to know what they claim to know.

The film is not currently distributed in Israel. Most Israelis arguing about it have not seen it. Perhaps a proper examination will show that its creators assembled unreliable testimony into an accusation the evidence cannot sustain. Perhaps some of what they document happened but does not support their broader claim about policy. Perhaps the evidence will prove harder to dismiss than the film’s critics expect.

Those are very different possibilities. But they have something important in common: they can all be argued about. Evidence can be checked. Testimony can be challenged. A documentary can be accused of selective editing. If a publication is defamatory, the people responsible can be sued and required to defend what they published. If classified material was obtained or disclosed illegally, that can be investigated. If another offense was committed, it can be prosecuted.

In every case, the state has to say what someone did and prove why it was unlawful. Citizenship answers a different question. It no longer asks what is true in what was said, but whether the people who said it still belong.

Israel already has an exceptional legal mechanism for revoking citizenship for a breach of allegiance. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called for Abraham and Szor’s citizenship to be revoked and asked the Shin Bet to investigate how material used in the film reached its creators. But that exception does not blur the distinction. It sharpens it. The mechanism is built around defined acts, such as terrorism, espionage or treason, and the decision rests with a court, at the interior minister’s request and with the attorney general’s written consent. If there is evidence that an offense amounting to such a breach was committed in obtaining material for the film, that allegation should be investigated on its own terms.

But an allegation of betrayal in obtaining evidence does not turn the content of the allegation into betrayal. Defamation does not become treason simply because its subject is Israel.

This is where Netanyahu’s choice of language matters. He did not limit his proposal to spies, people who disclose classified information or people convicted of assisting an enemy. He spoke of those who “defame” Israeli soldiers abroad. And “defamation,” outside the precise confines of defamation law, is an unusually elastic political category.

A lie can defame a country. So can an exaggeration. But so can an accusation that is true and profoundly damaging. An accurate report can harm Israel’s reputation. A justified criticism can be quoted by Israel’s enemies. The things a country most needs its citizens to be free to say may sometimes be precisely the things it least wants said about it.

That is why the issue is not simply freedom of speech. Freedom of speech has legal limits. Citizenship has a different function. A citizen can be sued. A citizen can be fined. A citizen who commits a crime can be prosecuted and imprisoned. None of those things requires the state to pretend that the person was never one of us. Citizenship is the status from which a person stands opposite the power of the state, including when she says things about it that are harsh, infuriating or even wrong.

Once citizenship itself becomes part of the response to criticism, something changes even if no one ever loses it. Netanyahu made that change explicit in the reason he gave for his proposal. He said:

“Their place is not with us.”

That sentence turns disagreement into a question of membership. It says that there are things a citizen can say about Israel that do not merely make her wrong, irresponsible or even legally liable. They can become evidence that she does not belong here.

And that condition does not hover only over the people currently being threatened with losing their citizenship. Once a government says there are words for which a citizen’s “place is not with us,” every citizen learns something about the terms of belonging, including the citizen who chooses to remain silent.

Citizenship is not an award Israel gives those who represent it well abroad. Nor is it something the state holds in escrow until it discovers whether its owner has embarrassed it. It is the political status from which Israelis disagree about what their country is and what it has done.

That is also what the anger surrounding NAZA reveals. Its Israeli critics are making a claim about national identity: This is not the country we are. This is not how our army behaves. This is not an accurate description of Israel. Those are claims worth arguing about. They require evidence, counter-evidence and, perhaps, some difficult answers. But “their place is not with us” does not answer the claim “this is Israel.” It answers the person making it: perhaps you are not Israeli.

Citizenship should not be the final argument in a dispute about what kind of country Israel is. It is what gives its citizens standing to have that dispute in the first place.