Editorial · Kommando 161 · · 2h
Netanyahu Wants to Strip Citizenship for 'Smearing' the IDF. The Law to Do It Already Exists.
English (original) · Read in Deutsch ⇄
Benjamin Netanyahu announced this week that he will advance two laws: one to strip Israeli citizenship from anyone who "smears" the IDF, another to multiply twentyfold the damages people can be sued for over statements the military calls defamatory. "Their place is not with us," he said. The trigger, officially, is a list of grievances — a 2025 remark by opposition figure Yair Golan that "a sane country does not kill children as a hobby," a leaked video from a former military prosecutor, and above all the documentary NAZA, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice and alleges the IDF deliberately targeted civilians. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has already named the filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, as people whose citizenship should be revoked, calling their work "an act of treason."
Read that list again. It is a novelist's list, a filmmaker's list, a general's list, a politician's list — Jewish Israeli citizens with public platforms, being threatened with the single harshest instrument a state holds over its own people: expulsion from the polity itself. That threat lands as new and shocking to a domestic Israeli press used to citizenship revocation being something that happens to someone else.
Because it already does. Since 2023, an amendment to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law lets Israel revoke the citizenship or residency of Palestinian citizens whose families receive Palestinian Authority payments linked to attacks — a provision used this February to strip and deport two Palestinian-Israeli men to the West Bank. Long before that, the same 1952 Citizenship Law and its post-2003 "temporary orders" blocked tens of thousands of Palestinian spouses and children of Israeli citizens from ever acquiring status at all, upheld by a split 6–5 Supreme Court decision whose dissent warned that security cannot justify "severe harm to many thousands." The infrastructure for turning citizenship into a conditional, revocable privilege rather than a right was not built for Golan or Abraham. It was built, tested, and normalized on Palestinians first — quietly enough that most commentary on this week's news treats it as a slippery slope rather than the next rung on a ladder already half-climbed.
That sequencing is not incidental, it is how states expand repressive powers everywhere: pilot the mechanism against the population with the least capacity to resist — the already-disenfranchised, the stateless-adjacent, the colonized — then, once the courts and the public have absorbed it as normal administrative practice, extend it inward. A settler state that can already deport its Palestinian citizens for their families' actions has all the legal scaffolding it needs to threaten a filmmaker for her subject matter. The only thing that changes is who gets named on television by name, and how loud the outrage gets when the target has a passport that reads Ashkenazi instead of Arab.
None of this requires the law to actually pass to do its work. The announcement itself is the chilling effect — Abraham and Szor are already facing organized threats and protests outside relatives' homes, whipped up by state ministers before a single Knesset vote. That is the actual function of "we will hit them in the citizenship and in their pockets": not a courtroom outcome, but a public warning to every journalist, soldier-witness, and filmmaker in the country that documenting what the IDF does in Gaza and the West Bank now carries the threat of statelessness. An antifascist reading doesn't treat this as an aberration in an otherwise functioning democracy — it's the same machine, aimed at a new target, running exactly as designed.
Sources
Wikipedia: Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law
Grokipedia: Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, 2026 amendment history
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Source: Kommando 161