‘Who do you think you are?’ How the Israeli system turned against Yuli Novak

There is an important piece up in Haaretz magazine this weekend, an interview by Shani Littman with Yuli Novak, author of a new memoir in Hebrew.

Novak is a 40-year-old Israeli whose background and early career is as mainstream as they come. She went through a violent transformation and now models her own and Israel’s future on that of South Africa, post-apartheid.

Yuli Novak’s grandparents are Holocaust survivors, her mother was a career officer in the Israeli army and then went on to be the executive director of Israel’s national Holocaust Museum “Yad Vashem”:

“As a schoolchild I was very proud that my mother came to parent-teacher meetings in military uniform. This was at a time when very few moms worked full time and had real careers. I was happy that my mother was doing something important.”

Her parents met at the funeral of her mom’s then boyfriend, Tally. He died in the 1973 Yom Kippur War fighting the Egyptian army in the Suez Canal.

Yuli was raised on Israeli war stories and identified herself with the heroes of Israeli young adult fiction. After high school, she signed up for a five-year stint in the Israeli military as an air force operations officer. She then went on to complete two university degrees in law.

Living in Tel Aviv with this pedigree and upper crust early career experience, Yuli Novak was part of the Israeli elite and poised for leadership in Israeli society.

Ten years ago in 2012 she took her first job out of grad school as Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, at the time a largely-unknown organization in Israel or overseas. Friends thought that it was a domestic abuse organization. Breaking the Silence was just another lefty Israeli NGO.

Three years later, she and her organization of 15 young Israelis became the target of a wholesale campaign of delegitimization in the Israeli media, spear-headed by senior government ministers including calls for the kind of criminal investigations by the dreaded Shabak secret services usually reserved for alleged terrorists. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got into the fray, as did then minister, now Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Novak was harassed on the streets and on social media. She was doxxed by a mole the rightwing had placed in her organization. Her octogenarian grandparents received crank calls in the middle of the night. Recordings of confidential conversations that she had with her friends were broadcast on national media. Rightwing thugs menaced her on the streets of Tel Aviv and the police were nowhere to be seen.

She rarely left her home and when she did she always had a companion. The way she coped was to switch off her fear and go on auto-pilot. But something was breaking:

“We had lost our verbal contract that I thought people like me had with the Israeli regime. I thought of myself as a patriot and a Zionist. I will do my bit for my country, I will serve in the military and in return the state would protect me. But that contract was conditional – only so long as I was obedient. The moment one thing was out of place, the system turned against me.” 

She feared she would be taken to the “secret services dungeons” or that she would be killed. 

The pressure was intense and personal.

“I was heading home after giving a talk somewhere. I stopped by my car for a moment to check on something and right there was a demonstration against Breaking the Silence, a routine occurrence at that time. We got into the car and I noticed that my designated companion’s face had gone quite white. She said: ‘Did you happen to notice what just happened? That was just twenty people swearing at you, spitting at you and screaming at you like crazy people.’ I didn’t even hear them. I had come to a point where I was on cruise control through this situation of hatred and violence and I no longer even saw it.”

Breaking the Silence learned that an imposter who had infiltrated the organization had made secret recordings of private conversations. Novak herself came under suspicion. After all, she was from the very heart of the Israeli Ashkenazi Zionist, Tel Aviv establishment. She had no history of activism and had come to the job just a few years after years of military service and grad school.

The discovery of the mole was deeply unsettling. Israeli dissenters are a tight-knit group. Their work is their social circle and serves as a substitute family when they are rejected by their mainstream parents. On my recent trip to Israel, a radical activist told me how a former classmate, now working in the secret service literally pulled a gun on him at a high school reunion. His siblings ordered him to stop his work; his parents said his reputation was the reason his sister couldn’t find dates.

Nowhere felt safe for Novak. Later she would recall that the worst moments were pulling out her jeys outside the front door of her walk up. She listened for any sound of an intruder climbing the stairs behind her and was terrified what might be waiting for her on the other side of her front door inside her apartment.  

Novak’s emotions burst out the day of her grandfather’s funeral. She went to the beach and the physical experience of pitting herself against the waves brought up deepseated fears that she had put a way for years. She quit her job and left Israel on a year long journey across Europe and finally to an extended stay in South Africa. Along the way, she began writing to process what she had endured during her years at the helm of Breaking the Silence. When she was done, she realized she had written a memoir. “Mi At Bichlal? (Who Do You Think You Are?) has just been published (Hebrew).

The tributes to the recently passed Archbishop Desmond Tutu were a reminder of how South Africa’s journey out of apartheid has served as an inspiration to Palestine solidarity activists. The State of Israel armed apartheid South Africa and was one of the world’s few developed nations to maintain close ties with the White regime. The success of the economic sanctions and sports boycotts against South Africa served as a model for the BDS campaign. 

Yuli Novak found kindred spirits in South Africa in another way. Israelis like her have no other home but Israel. Boers cannot go home to Holland and other South African Whites aren’t going back to the UK. They are White South Africans. Novak feels the same way about Israel.

After a year overseas, Yuli Novak, too, headed back home. She maintains a critical distance from her past, including her stint as the leader of one of Israel’s most famous leftwing organizations in Israel, Breaking the Silence.

She now sees a Zionist organization based on experiences in the male-dominated Israel military as being stuck in the same orbit as the rest of Israel. 

“I was told that the only way to live in the region was to be in perpetual war with everyone else. But that is a choice. And it is possible to tell the story differently. For instance, you can aspire to forefront all who live here without making ethnic distinctions. One could also say that our overarching goal is not to isolate ourselves but rather to familiarize ourselves with the language of the region and not to be disconnected from it ”

I was reminded of my recent trip to Israel and Palestine to visit my Arabic language teacher. I found again that Israeli Jews know no Arabic. It is rarely taught in Israeli schools.

There is heartbreak in Novak’s discoveries, reminiscent of a generation of American Jewish children awaking to criticism of their Religious School Zionist education:

“[N]obody ever invited me to tell the story in any other way but that we must live by the sword.”

And the final breakthrough to a simple, egalitarian ethos, instantly recognizable to any citizen of any of the world’s democracies:

“The fact that this is my home doesn’t mean to say that this can’t also be the home of someone else.”

Novak still hasn’t completely liberated herself from Israeli indoctrination. She says that she feels bad for all that her grandparents suffered in the Holocaust so as to create Israel. There is of course no connection between the two, outside of the official Israeli narrative.

She values the work of Breaking the Silence and is proud of her former organization’s work but its claim to legitimacy is founded on its roots within the male-dominated, occupation military forces. The fact that a woman like herself led it means nothing. She confessed that even under her leadership Breaking the Silence never waged any feminist campaign.

I was reminded that Black Lives Matter flourished not under the U.S.’s first Black president, Barack Obama but under one of its most racist, Donald Trump. Neither Margaret Thatcher nor Golda Meir changed their male-dominated countries.

Finally, here is Novak on Zionism:

“What I know from my universe is: either you are a Zionist or an anti-Zionist. But I am not there. I am beginning to deconstruct the concept of Zionism. There is Zionism as a political structure, a regime that gives the advantage to one [ethnic] at the expense of others. I have stopped believing in that political structure.

But Zionism for me is lots of other things too – identity, family, language, memory of places, moments with friends. And it’s the military too as an essential part of me. I do not want and am not able to chuck this identity.

This will likely sound off-key to Palestine solidarity activists but in Jewish Israel “Zionism” is used loosely, to mean “being a good citizen.” It is often used sarcastically to mean something like “goody two shoes.”

Novak’s main takeaway is: the change that needs to happen to Israel cannot be brought about from within the current system: “the political structure has to go.”

Besides stepping back and letting Palestinian women lead, Novak’s new path reflects an attractive humility on a person level too. She recognizes that when she was constantly in the media and under attack by senior politicians she was on an “ego trip” and that wasn’t healthy.

There are very few Yuli Novaks in Israel, certainly not nearly enough to start bringing about the massive change she is calling for. But it’s good to hear a clear voice of reason: this is what is going on; and this is what it will take to make Israel work.

H/t Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel.