“I just had a two-hour call with the children of Umm al-Khair,” she wrote, adding that she was “horrified at the way they have been treated.”

She detailed the recent events for her five million followers, explaining that Israeli settlers “put up a barbed-wire fence blocking the village’s main road, keeping children from safely reaching their school,” and that the children’s peaceful protest faced “tear gas and rifles from soldiers protecting the illegal fence.”

The first image in the post is of one of the children she video-chatted with: a Palestinian boy, clutching an Arabic grammar book as he looks back at the barbed wire that blocks his way to school. His gaze is met by three masked IDF soldiers guarding the fence.

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.”

Khrzhanovskiy says that the sphere of Russian intelligentsia he grew up in came with “inevitable liberalism” – his father is the well-known Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, and his grandfather, whose name he shares, is the only Soviet animator to ever be censored by Moscow. In 1968, his movie “Glass Harmonica,” which featured chaotic and often terrifying surrealist imagery, was barred from screening in the USSR and ordered to be destroyed (luckily, Khrzhanovskiy saved a copy, and it’s still available).

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.

His grandparents have since moved away from Israel, following the October 7 attacks, but Khrzhanovskiy has stuck around. He says that while his family doesn’t always agree with him politically, they respect his decision to become an activist, although his grandmother isn’t too elated with his current line of work.

“My grandmother reads my tweets, so every once in a while I will get a call or a very long message about how I need to leave, that I will get killed if I stay here.”

From Jaffa to the West Bank

In January 2023, Khrzhanovskiy started working at Café Yafa, a Palestinian-owned coffee shop and bookstore in Jaffa. When one of the owners told him that he was going to Jordan to visit family members who were expelled in 1948 and cannot visit Israel, Khrzhanovskiy felt uncomfortable immediately.

“His family, who have been living here for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, they’re not allowed to even visit,” Khrzhanovskiy says. “And I – who got a passport within three months, whose very distant family maybe lived here 3,000 years ago – am standing next to him. The injustice in that is very, very clear.”

Around the same time, he first joined Israeli activists for protective presence shifts in the West Bank. He soon started shooting, editing and posting videos documenting state-backed settler violence and the forced displacement of dozens of Palestinian communities. Before long, the videos “started blowing up.” Khrzhanovskiy started getting requests all over the West Bank to cover settler attacks; he says he rarely sleeps in the same bed for more than two days.

Do his videos really make an impact? One Israeli activist in the West Bank, who requested anonymity, said that while the videos can definitely serve as evidence in future criminal trials, the situation on the ground remains largely unchanged. Moreover, the activist explains, “there’s a limit to the media’s attention span.” Even if there are 50 more activists like Andrey, he says, the material reality of the Palestinians in the West Bank will not change.

“Thanks to social media, there is more and more understanding of the Palestinian cause,” says Shareef Safadi, 26, a Palestinian citizen of Israel based in Haifa and content creator who has worked on videos with Khrzhanovskiy. Safadi calls Andrey’s content “counter hasbara.”

“For educating and raising awareness, it is 100-percent effective,” Safadi says. “Is it effective in ending settler violence in Israel? That is a bigger question.”

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.'”

To get to Israelis, “You have to talk with empathy and understanding – ‘Yes, I understand that you want to kill all the brown children. I understand where you’re coming from. You have legitimate security concerns, I get it.'”

Speaking like this “feels horrible,” he says, “but you have to do this because otherwise nobody’s going to listen to you.”

Safadi, too, thinks that there’s little hope in pandering to the Israeli audience. “If you want to speak in Hebrew and speak to Israelis, you start compromising,” he says. “You will never stop compromising, and they will never accept you.”

Still, Khrzhanovskiy says there’s still value in him and other anti-Zionist leftists reaching mainstream media outlets in Israel.

“The thing that I can do is try to shift the Overton window to the left a little bit, just by violently invading the discourse,” he says, adding it’s important for Israelis to understand his position is a “valid one to have.” “You shift the window, and then the people who used to be radical become centrist. And then maybe they will convince someone.”

Some of the most avid consumers of Khrzhanovskiy’s content are right-wing hasbara advocacy groups. The advocacy group My Israel, co-founded by right-wing politicians Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett, dedicated a Facebook post to Khrzhanovskiy, calling him “one of the leading voices in the delegitimization campaign against Israel.”

“Israel has given [Khrzhanovskiy] shelter, but Andrey is taking advantage of that shelter and stabbing us all in the back,” the post reads.

Khrzhanovskiy’s activism has also earned him a profile on the “Radical Activists” database run by far-right group Im Tirtzu, where he is accused of spreading “theories bordering on antisemitism that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza.”

Crossing into Gaza

The two times when Khrzhanovskiy’s activity made major headlines in Israel were on both sides of the Gaza border.

In December 2024, two plain-clothes police officers came and arrested Khrzhanovskiy at a cafe in Tel Aviv for placing a “Free Palestine” sticker on an observation point in Sderot near the Gaza border. Israelis, says Khrzhanovskiy, come to the lookout to “sight-see” the bombing of Gaza.

“Before he even said a word, he just came up and threw a punch. Then, they shoved me into a police car, which was not marked; it looked like a civilian vehicle. At the beginning, I thought I was getting kidnapped.”

They drove Khrzhanovskiy to Sderot, and while one officer was filling in the paperwork another one “was beating me for about half an hour.”

He was released after four days. Khrzhanovskiy – who says he has a one-month suspended prison sentence and other standing court cases against him in Israel – added that the whole ordeal “felt very Russian.”

“You know, in Russia, people spend years in jail for stickers. And here, that wasn’t really a thing if you’re a Jewish Israeli – although there are Palestinians who spend years in jail for Facebook posts.”

A Palestinian man standing in the remains of his burnt-out family home after an Israeli settler attack in Fandaqumiya, southwest of Jenin, West Bank in March. Credit: Zain Jaafar/AFP

The second incident happened in October 2025. As the Sumud Flotilla carrying humanitarian aid sailed to break the blockade of Gaza, Khrzhanovskiy and a group of Israeli activists planned to break the military siege on the enclave by land.

They succeeded – sort of. An eight-minute video posted by Khrzhanovskiy shows how he and several activists successfully infiltrate hundreds of meters into the Gaza Strip, while the few befuddled IDF soldiers stationed there scurry to figure out how to stop them.

“It was absolutely fascinating. After that, I have no questions as to how October 7 happened, just because of the level of incompetence. I was sure that they knew [about the demonstration] and that we would immediately get arrested,” Khrzhanovskiy says. “It’s the first time anyone broke the siege successfully in that way since the start of the genocide. Well, besides settlers breaking in.”

Getting media attention was a double-edged sword, though. Khrzhanovskiy says that right after the sticker incident, he was recognized on the streets of Tel Aviv “six times in one day.”

Once, he was assaulted by someone who recognized him during a protest in December against the dispossession of Palestinians by Jewish settlers in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, just east of the Old City.

“A guy like body slams me, called me a ‘faggot,’ told me to go fuck myself and then kicked me,” he says. “The more known you are, the more of a threat you are.”

‘Obvious apartheid’

Khrzhanovskiy’s source of income, he says, comes from his viewers, through crowd-sourcing platforms like Patreon, where users can choose to send him monthly donations. “I don’t have any secret wires from Iran or Qatar,” Khrzhanovskiy says with a smile. Israel’s public broadcaster, as a matter of fact, went so far as to suggest that he’s part of a Russian influence campaign meant to destabilize the country.

Sometimes, however, Khrzhanovskiy says it is necessary to “contextualize things a little bit.” Khrzhanovskiy mentions a recent incident, where settlers were documented killing a Palestinian’s sheep by slamming them to the ground.

“That footage went around, and there were like a lot of tweets from Zionists, saying ‘everyone is just focusing on this one incident because this barely ever happens, while Israel faces so much terrorism.’ But there are like five to six physical violent attacks per day across the West Bank.”

Khrzhanovskiy recalls an incident in October when he was recently held up by the IDF with Palestinian journalists, and it became very apparent how his “Israeli passport and Jewish blood” helped him avoid arrest and harassment.

He says the IDF soldiers took everyone’s IDs but did not say they were formally detained, holding them for more than two hours. Eventually, two Palestinian journalists were arrested without explanation – including Ayman Ghraieb, who has been held in administrative detention since November 2025 and whose release is being advocated for by Amnesty International.

“They couldn’t have filmed their own oppression if an Israeli wasn’t with them,” he says, calling the situation “obvious apartheid.” If Israel is, one day, tried for its military occupation of the West Bank, videos like this will be a part of “thousands of terabytes of footage.”

When asked to comment on the incident, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said that forces came to the area after receiving reports of “Palestinians gathering” at a spring near the Israeli settlement of Maskiot. The military added that they tried to disperse the Palestinians, including journalists, “to prevent tensions and maintain the public order.” After the group refused to leave, the IDF detained them for several hours.

While many Israelis see Khrzhanovskiy as a stranger who came to Israel to air out its dirty laundry, Khrzhanovskiy says he feels a sense of responsibility for the Palestinian population, as only after immigrating to Israel did he realize he “became a part of an apartheid system.”

“I think justice is universal, and wherever you are, you need to try to strive towards it,” he says. “I did not come here as an activist; I did not come here to do this.”

“I came here with a neutral perspective,” Khrzhanovskiy adds. “The Israelis who think that it’s an outside perspective, and that they know their own country better, a lot of them have never been to the West Bank. Come to the West Bank, come see what’s going on. Maybe you’ll learn something about your country.”