Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 6 March 2026
Voice against conquest – Yuli Novak
I watched this excellent interview of Simone Zimmerman with Yuli Novak. Simone was featured in the documentary “Israelism”, which told the story of her disenchantment with the Zionism that had been inculcated in her Jewish education in the United States. Yuli Novak is the present Executive Director of B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights’ center. (I served for a number of years, until 2009, on the board of B’Tselem.)
Novak has a long history of activism. From 2012 to 2017, she was the executive director of Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the Palestinian occupied territories and actively raise consciousness about what is happening under Israeli occupation. In 2022, she felt obligated to leave Israel because of threats on her life. In 2023, she returned to Israel and was appointed to her present position in B’Tselem.
In this interview, Novak tells her story – her education within Israeli society, her awakening to what was going on around her, and her engagement to bring about change. Novak has published an autobiography in Hebrew, Who Do You Think You Are? that will be released in English. (details here: https://ayinpress.org/who-do-you-think-you-are/)
Of particular interest to me as someone who grew up in South Africa is the part of the interview that focuses on Novak’s description of her interaction with South Africans in 2022. In particular, she describes how conversations with Afrikaners about the past of apartheid rule helped her understand mechanisms that are at work in Israel today.
View the interview here: