’Israelis Are More Genocidal Than People Think’: Meet Andrey X, the ’Counter #Hasbara' TikToker - Israel News
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-05-25/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israelis-are-more-genocidal-than-you-think-the-counter-hasbara-of-andrey-x/0000019e-44cb-d637-a99f-66fbc6cd0000
Khrzhanovskiy – a native of Saint Petersburg, Russia – didn’t arrive in Israel in 2022 with the intention of staying and becoming an activist. On the day he was supposed to fly back to Russia after visiting his grandparents in Tel Aviv, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. So he stayed in Israel, because it “was the easiest passport for me to get,” and he has not returned since.
“I’m afraid to go back and sit in prison for about 20 years,” Khrzhanovskiy says. “In Russia, after the invasion, the pace of repression against any kind of opposition sped up. If you go to Russia, you need to shut up. And I find myself unable to shut up.”
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However, he says, his political journey “resulted in a big disappointment in the Russian liberal opposition,” seeing their reaction to “the genocide in Gaza.”
“All these people who were talking about human rights and repression in Russia suddenly started saying, and I quote, ’Israel has the right to dissolve all the Palestinians in acid.’”
During his first year in Israel as a new immigrant, Khrzhanovskiy began to understand how entrenched militarism and casual anti-Palestinian racism are in everyday life. “A million new things that you learn throw you for a loop when you’re not from here, because here, a lot of stuff is normalized,” he says.
“When I was looking for an apartment for my grandparents in Netanya,” a coastal city not far from Tel Aviv, “I was taken around by this realtor. And I’m driving with her, and she turns to me and says, ’You know, Netanya is a very good place to live in, because the mayor doesn’t let Arabs rent apartments here.’ That threw me for a loop, not even the fact that you can do that, but also the fact that you can say this to a person that you don’t know and expect that to be okay,” he says.
In his videos – all of which are in English – Khrzhanovskiy rarely addresses an Israeli audience. “Why would they listen to me?” he asks. “I didn’t grow up here, I wasn’t born here. I think it’s more useful to talk to the outside world, because trying to change Israeli society is, at least in this stage, not possible.”
While he initially felt that he was integrating into Israeli society, Khrzhanovskiy says that that is no longer the case. “I left that society. I live in the West Bank, and I hang out with Palestinians. So I don’t think I would consider myself Israeli.”
“Israeli society is more genocidal than people on the outside think,” Khrzhanovskiy continues. “If you sit at a hipster café in Tel Aviv and start talking to a random person, 20 minutes later, this person, drinking a matcha latte and speaking perfect English, will start explaining to you that ’those [Palestinian] children will grow up to be terrorists, so it’s okay to kill them.’”
