After nine years, B’Tselem’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad, is stepping down. Yuli Novak was chosen by B’Tselem Board to serve as the new executive director.
Amid political turmoil, and against a growing consensus in Jewish Israeli society, El-Ad led a steadfast line of resistance to the occupation and worked to keep it on the political and public agenda. During his tenure, B’Tselem stopped referring complaints to the military law enforcement system, which serves as a whitewashing mechanism for violence against Palestinians by security forces. B’Tselem also called on snipers to refuse orders to use live fire against Palestinian protesters on the other side of the Gaza perimeter fence and insisted on the need for the international community to step in in defense of Palestinians’ human rights. Under El-Ad’s leadership, B’Tselem challenged the common misconception that Israel is a democracy that maintains alongside a temporary regime of occupation and unflinchingly exposed reality: the regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is an apartheid regime that promotes Jewish supremacy in the entire area under its control.
Adv. Yuli Novak served as the executive director of Breaking the Silence between 2012 and 2017, a time when the attack the Israeli government and right-wing organizations waged against Israeli human rights organizations reached new heights. Novak led the fight against this campaign to delegitimize the organizations and their work and wrote about this time and the political insights she gained in a personal-political memoir entitled “Who do you think you are?” published last year. In the past few years, Novak has founded and run a project designed to help Israeli and Palestinian social justice and political activists hone their strategic skills.
“I’m grateful to Hagai El-Ad for years of courageous, principled leadership at B’Tselem,” Novak said, “As an Israeli, it is my duty and right to firmly demand an end to the occupation and the replacement of the apartheid regime with a democracy. This is the only way to ensure the human rights of everyone living in this land. More and more people, Israelis and others, understand today that democracy and occupation cannot coexist and that there is no democracy under apartheid. My commitment, our commitment, is to continue driving this understanding forward at home and abroad, with honesty, devotion and determination.”
