When we meet at a cafe in Tel Aviv, Andrey Khrzhanovsky (26) has an injured shoulder from when he was hit by the barrel of an M-16 rifle a few weeks earlier. The Jewish Russian activist and journalist says he was attacked, along with two Palestinians, by a settler in Al-Farsiya in the occupied West Bank – “what is being missed in the media is that settler terrorism is a daily thing”, he says.
From St Petersburg, Khrzhanovsky was visiting his grandparents, who had emigrated to Israel years earlier, in February 2022 when he woke up to the news that Russia had started bombing Ukraine – “I made an immediate decision that I can’t go back there.” Along with tens of thousands of Ukranians, Belarusians and other Russians with at least one Jewish grandparent, he applied for Israeli citizenship.
In total, about 220,000 people of Jewish ancestry have emigrated to Israel from former Soviet states since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 1.3 million Russian-speakers account for about 15 per cent of Israeli citizens, the majority of whom arrived after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent economic turmoil in Russia.
The post-Soviet wave of migration significantly enlarged Israel’s right-wing voting bloc, which has dominated recent Israeli elections. In contrast, the mostly young, educated Russians who have emigrated since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 tend to identify as left-wing or centrist, according to polling on Russian wartime migration by Outrush, a research project on Russian emigration. The polling found that 75 per cent of the post-2022 immigrants viewed themselves as political and civil activists.
When he became an Israeli citizen in 2022, Khrzhanovsky says he had only a “surface level” understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Russian language media in Israel is skewed heavily to the right and widely read via social media, with right-wing Russian-speaking influencers playing an outsize role in shaping the views of Russians and Ukrainians in Israel.
Khrzhanovsky’s activism in the West Bank began after a first-hand encounter that year with a settler attack in the South Hebron Hills. He subsequently launched a project to bring newly arrived Russian-speaking immigrants to the West Bank to educate them on the Israeli occupation, and at the end of 2023, along with some fellow Russian-Israelis, launched Kompass Media to provide Russian-language reporting on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and war in Gaza.
Relatively small numbers of newly arrived Russian and Ukrainian immigrants have moved to settlements in the occupied West Bank such as Ariel. Khrzhanovsky says that, in general, Russian and Ukrainian immigrants living in settlements are driven more by the availability of cheaper housing in the West Bank, rather than ideological or religious reasons, although the attack led by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, has hardened views towards Palestinians.
Data from before October 7th from the Viterbi Family Center, an Israeli research and polling institute, indicates that only 4 per cent of the post-2022 immigrants to Israel believe Jewish citizens should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens, compared with 43 per cent of Jewish Israelis in general. Some 53 per cent of new immigrants believed that Palestinian citizens of Israel are discriminated against, compared with only 31 per cent of Jewish Israelis who thought the same.
Having amassed a large online following under the name Andrey X, Khrzhanovsky’s time is now spent producing a documentary about Ras al-A’uja, a Palestinian hamlet in the West Bank under threat from settlers attacking their water supply and livestock. “I started essentially as a protective presence activist and filmed everything because when settlers or soldiers are being filmed they’re much less aggressive,” he says. However, “Sometimes they’re being filmed and they will still attack you,” he adds.
Khrzhanovsky says he is motivated by “a deep belief that knowledge and education and freedom of information is the foundation of change”. He believes that the Israeli occupation in the West Bank will not end without international pressure and sanctions that reduce funding for the Israeli government – “and that can only happen if the international public is informed”.
Like many independent journalists, Khrzhanovsky’s work is supported by online subscribers via his Patreon account, which has allowed him to maintain an apartment in Israel, as well as hire a film crew and security while they are working in the West Bank.
In December 2022, Khrzhanovsky was arrested for several days after posting a video placing a “Free Palestine” sticker on a memorial to an Israeli soldier in Sderot, near the Gaza border. He says he was beaten and denied food and water before eventually being released on bail – “if I was a Palestinian I would be in jail now”. More recently, Shimon Atia, a settler in the West Bank, has sued Khrzhanovsky for more than €40,000, alleging defamation.
Khrzhanovsky says he faces 13 lawsuits, with Israel’s minister of housing and construction, Yitzhak Goldknopf saying that his actions “constitute a blatant violation of the law and public order in the State of Israel”.
“All of the cases will be heard in Israeli courts, since I’m an Israeli citizen,” says Khrzhanovsky, “as opposed to Palestinians, who would be tried in military courts, even when we do the exact same stuff and live in the exact same place.”
Khrzhanovsky says he supports a one-state solution for Israel-Palestine without special privileges for Jewish people. When questioned on how that aligns with his own personal benefit of Israeli citizenship he says: “I benefit from a lot of things. I benefit from the patriarchy, for instance, but I don’t think that that‘s a good reason to defend it.”
