Saying ‘Not This’: Self-exile and political dissent - Livnat Konopny-Decleve

Join us for this seminar, joint-hosted with the Centre for Jewish Studies .

Compared with the extensive body of literature and research on Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine and the state of Israel, relatively little has been written about the reverse movement of emigration from Israel-Palestine. Moreover, the research that does exist tends to focus on economic motivations for leaving, while neglecting political reasons. This talk explores the meaning and implications of leaving the state in political dissent, examining two moments of political emigration from Israel: the emigration of 1973 war veterans in the aftermath of the war and that of radical-left Jewish activists who left Israel and moved abroad from the 1990s until 2019. Juxtaposing 1973 veterans' emigration with the younger generation's self-exile highlights the structural inability to exercise citizenship and dissent in settler-colonial settings. The talk explores self-exile as a particular form of political dissent. It is an act of political abandonment, shaped by socio-political settings that instil despair and alter individuals' perceptions of ‘being political.’ The talk concludes by comparing this act of self-exile from Israel with historical cases of dissidents’ self-exile from Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa to reflect on the potentiality and possible future of dissent.

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Livnat Konopny-Decleve is a British Academy International Fellow at The School of Social and Political Science at The University of Edinburgh. She is a political anthropologist researching the Jewish radical left and alternative political imagination in Israel/Palestine and beyond. Livnat received her PhD from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University (2022) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2023). She is a former co-convenor of APeCS – Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security, a network of EASA. In 2025, together with Adi Liraz and Na’ama Landau, Livnat produced the film ‘The Rose of Ioannina’, based on her research and funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Accounts (IAA). Her research has been published in journals including the Journal of Borderlands Studies, Israel Studies, Visual Studies, and Mafte'akh – Lexical Review of Political Thought.