“The only response Palestinians are allowed is complete surrender”
JVL Introduction
Many supporters of liberation for the Palestinian people nowadays find it nigh on impossible to hear an Israeli voice without feeling intense rage and a desire to reject the speaker out of hand. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) has just removed the word “Israeli” from its name, rejecting a label which identifies it with a genocidal state.
At such a time it is remarkable to listen to Aharon Dardik, a young Israeli born into an orthodox Jewish, intensely Zionist American family, who earlier this year was among Jewish students chaining themselves to a gate to protest Columbia university’s complicity in the detention of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.
Peter Beinart, interviewing Aharon for The Beinart Notebook, introduced him as the son of an orthodox rabbi who “spent part of his childhood in a religious settlement in the West Bank. After studying in yeshiva in Israel, he went to prison rather than serve in the Israeli military, and then enrolled at Columbia, where after October 7 he founded Columbia Jews for Ceasefire.”
In their long discussion, Aharon speaks with humanity and humility about his evolution from childhood in the US, through a religious Zionist education in West Jerusalem, to defying orders in the Israeli airforce and becoming fully committed to the cause of Palestinian liberation back in the US.
When he was born, Aharon’s parents put a drop of Eden Springs mineral water in his mouth so that “the first thing I tasted was from the land of Israel…I knew the eventual destination point for my family, the place where we were supposed to settle down and then live forever, was Israel.”
NWI
This article was originally published by The Beinart Notebook on Sun 27 Jul 2025. Read the original here.
How a Mind is Changed
Aharon Dardik’s Journey from the West Bank to Columbia Protests
Loading article text…
It is sad indeed
The only kind of response the Palestinians are supposed to have, if they want freedom, if they want a state, is complete surrender.”
But even that would be futile, given Netanyahu’s sworn refusal to ever allow the existence of a Palestinian state Yes, Bibi, hostage to the ultra right-wing members in the Knesset, will eventually be gone but his all-powerful puppet-masters are well embedded and there is more Israeli public approval of the IDF’s killings than I would have believed possible. As for Starmer’s heavily caveated ‘promise’ to recognise the Palestinian State, it is dependent on Israel changing its genocidal nature and signing a ceasefire/peace agreement without again breaking it as they did the three-phase agreement broken during the first phase. Intentionally KS has given Israel a veto on recognition by them simply not changing anything. KS has had to be pressured into this but believes his enforced ‘promise’ will never need to be met. Not by him in any case.