Watching Andor as an Israeli, or Am I Syril Karn?

As the story progresses, we realize that nothing could have changed the outcome. The resistance will be used as the justification for the slaughter. Yet even had they never resisted, the massacre would still have taken place. The Empire is too vast, too powerful, and too determined. The destruction is coming either way. Along with it comes the destruction of a culture, of a society, of a people.

* * *

At the end of the first season of Disney+’s Star Wars series Andor (2022–23), Maarva’s funeral procession becomes the moment when every narrative thread converges, and everything finally explodes. And how could you not want it to? Throughout the series, we follow Cassian Andor as he struggles to evade the oppressive Empire that has taken control of the galaxy. The Empire is already familiar to us. We have known it for almost fifty years through Star Wars: the Rebellion, the Death Star, and the long struggle against imperial rule. The series is crafted with such extraordinary care that by the time Maarva delivers her final speech – after everything the people of Ferrix have endured, everything Cassian has suffered, everything we have witnessed the Empire do in Andor and throughout the broader Star Wars universe – it seems impossible to want anything except for it all to explode.

But watching Andor in, as an Israeli, Israel is a different experience. When you are Israeli – when you served in the Israeli army as a soldier, including in the West Bank and Gaza, and years later returned as a human rights activist, standing once again opposite soldiers in the West Bank – it becomes almost impossible to hear Maarva’s final speech without feeling your stomach tighten.

But we were sleeping. I’ve been sleeping. And I’ve been turning away from the truth I wanted not to face. There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it’s here. It’s here, and it’s not visiting anymore. It wants to stay.

Up to this point, many Israelis can identify with her words. There is indeed a deep wound. There is darkness. There is rust spreading through everything around us. Institutions erode, relationships deteriorate, and the social fabric itself begins to fray. But the conclusion of the speech leaves little room for ambiguity. The source of that corruption is clear. It is the occupying Empire, whose purpose is to dominate and to remain.

The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we are asleep. It’s easy for the dead to tell you to fight, and maybe it’s true, maybe fighting is useless. Perhaps it’s too late. But I’ll tell you this: If I could do it again, I’d wake up early and be fighting those bastards from the start! Fight the Empire!

The message is unmistakable: The Empire must be fought. It simply must. We are all on the side of Luke, Han, Leia, and Cassian Andor. Of course we are. But for Israelis, that’s much too close to home – it hurts to realize that we are on the wrong side of this cinematic metaphor.

From Exodus to Vindicators 3

It was different once. Israel was something good, something admirable, something worth aspiring to. Ari Ben Canaan, Paul Newman’s character in Exodus, embodied everything an Israeli wanted to imagine himself to be: courageous, handsome, determined, committed to a cause that seemed unquestionably just – the rebuilding of a home for Holocaust survivors, the rescue of people who had endured history’s greatest catastrophe. And, of course, he wins. Despite every obstacle, he prevails.

When Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan was released, I was living in Los Angeles. The supportive Israeli community I belonged to loved the film. It is a comedy – not profound, not especially sophisticated, certainly not weighty – but its hero is, at least ostensibly, Israeli. He is heroic in an absurd way, a caricature of the larger-than-life soldier of the 1980s, an Israeli transplanted into a mid-2000s Adam Sandler comedy. Harmless enough. By the end, Israelis and Palestinians even make peace. Zohan is ridiculous and funny, certainly not Paul Newman, but he is also brave, decent, committed, and, ultimately, simply tired of fighting.

In many ways, Zohan represents a compromise. Most Israelis – or at least almost all Israelis – would prefer to imagine themselves as the underdog facing Goliath. As Aldo Raine’s band of Jewish soldiers hunting Nazis in Inglourious Basterds. Or perhaps as Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman: powerful, courageous, unexpectedly heroic. But the first Wonder Woman – the promising one – not the disappointing sequel, after which everything seemed to unravel. Gadot herself gradually lost that symbolic place. She eventually became the Evil Queen in a live-action remake that spectacularly failed. But that came later. Before that, there was the first Wonder Woman, full of promise.

I saw World War Z in Jerusalem in 2013. When the imprisoned CIA agent tells Brad Pitt, “Israel is winning,” the audience burst into applause. Someone had said it in a Hollywood film. Brad Pitt himself was starring in a project that declared Israel was winning. But then came the rest of the sentence. The full quotation is: “Israel is winning because they started building walls days before anyone else even knew what they were fighting.”

Yes, Israel is winning because it recognized the threat before everyone else. But only because it did what Israel had already become famous for: building walls. And then, of course, despite those walls, the zombies come anyway.

Slowly, however, events in Israel continued to unfold. The country I belong to; I no longer live there, yet I wake up every morning still feeling part of it. And it hurts – because of the distance but also because of what Israel is doing and what it has become. This country, my country, continued the occupation and continued refusing to pursue a political solution to the legitimate and understandable Palestinian aspiration for a state. Increasingly, Israel became a country defined by controversy and deepening division.

By 2017, Israel had already become something darker. A place that could no longer really be spoken about: There are countless examples, but one small cultural moment illustrates the shift. In the Rick and Morty episode “Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender,” first aired in August 2017, Israel appears as that unspeakable place Rick alludes to while drunk and depressed. The Vindicators, who come from another planet – or another galaxy, or perhaps simply another fictional universe – have no idea what he is talking about. Morty dismisses it as if it were an imaginary place.

Am I Syril Karn?

The first time I watched Star Wars, I naturally wanted to be Luke. Sometimes Han Solo. Sometimes Obi-Wan, or even Yoda. And now, watching Andor, I want to be Cassian Andor. His life is terrible, and even before the series begins, we already know how it ends, since almost everyone watching Andor has already seen Rogue One. Yet Cassian – apart from the fact that Diego Luna is impossibly cool – is not a saint. He is, eventually, on the side of the good. He sacrifices almost everything to remain there. That is what I wanted to be.

The truth, however, is that for many years, and on many occasions, I was actually Syril Karn.

Syril, portrayed by Kyle Soller, is one of the most fascinating characters in Andor. In fact, all of the series’ characters are constructed with extraordinary care, including those who serve the Empire. Syril wants to do his job – not merely correctly but better than expected. Better than required. He becomes so committed to doing the right thing, as he understands it, that he develops an obsession with Cassian Andor, whom he sees as nothing more than a criminal who escaped justice. He is a willing servant of the Empire. Whether he fully understands what the Empire is, or the consequences of what it does, is almost beside the point. He serves it. He begins as a local security officer and eventually becomes an imperial bureaucrat driven by an unresolved obsession.

Syril Karn is not a brilliant strategist like Dedra Meero, who later becomes his partner. He is not especially charismatic or particularly impressive. He is stubborn. He is obsessive. His mother drives him crazy – although, unlike Syril, I get along well with my own mother. Still, at one point or another, almost everyone understands what it feels like when your mother gives you advice about your job that you just lost, or the way you dress, or your relationships. Syril loses his job, moves back in with his mother, and refuses to give up.

In another world, Syril’s stubbornness might have made him admirable. His persistence, discipline, and refusal to give up are not inherently flawed. Their tragedy lies in the cause they serve. His determination is harnessed to the Empire, to its bureaucracy, its authority, and ultimately its violence. He is unwavering, but unwavering in defense of the existing order. In a world where the rebel is defined as the criminal, those who violate the law often do so not because they reject morality but because defying the law has become the only way to remain human.

This is also the world inhabited by Luke Skywalker. Skywalker, like many other protagonists, follows the pattern Joseph Campbell famously called “the hero’s journey” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).1 Heroes rarely choose this path deliberately. Cassian Andor does not. Luke Skywalker does not. Like so many others, they do not begin their stories intending to become heroes. Instead, they arrive at a moment when they have no choice but to decide – and they choose. For Luke, that moment arrives within the first half hour of Star Wars. For Cassian, it takes almost an entire season.

Campbell argued that myths and stories from remarkably different cultures nevertheless share a common narrative structure. In the 1980s, the Hollywood writer and producer Christopher Vogler adapted Campbell’s work into a twelve-stage model in The Writer’s Journey,2 a book that became enormously influential among screenwriters. The pattern begins with the hero’s ordinary world, followed by the call to adventure, an initial refusal, the appearance of a mentor, and the crossing into an unfamiliar world. It continues through trials, allies and enemies, a supreme ordeal, and a reward, before ending with the hero’s return, transformed and able to bring new insight back to the community.

George Lucas has openly acknowledged that Star Wars was consciously constructed around Campbell’s model.3 Luke leaves his farm, meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, crosses into a larger world, rescues Princess Leia, and ultimately destroys the Death Star. The story follows the hero’s journey point by point.

Syril Karn is not that hero.

He cannot be. What kind of hero could he possibly become? The diligent bureaucrat who does his job well? The employee who always goes above and beyond? There is a reason viewers of The Office admire Jim Halpert while laughing at Dwight Schrute. The devoted employee, the loyal servant of the system, cannot become the beloved protagonist. He may be ridiculous. He may even evoke sympathy. Somehow both Dwight Schrute and Syril Karn manage to do exactly that. But neither can occupy the place reserved for the hero.

Why Does He Die?

In 2002, the Israeli film Yossi & Jagger was released. It tells the story of two Israeli soldiers serving on the country’s northern border who are secretly in love. At the time, Israel was only beginning the social transformation that would gradually bring LGBTQ+ people into what might be called the Israeli mainstream. The film was widely praised, both in Israel and abroad, for the courage to portray two Israeli combat soldiers as a gay couple.

There was, however, one important criticism.

It came from the journalist Nitzan Horowitz, who argued that the couple was embraced precisely because they were soldiers – officers, combat soldiers, and, above all, Jewish. Had they been Arabs or poor Israelis, he suggested, the public response would have been very different. Horowitz himself was already a well-known journalist, openly gay, and would later become a member of the Knesset, leader of Meretz – the progressive party in Israel that has since virtually disappeared – and, for a time, Israel’s Minister of Health.

His critique addressed both the ethnic and class dimensions of the film, but it also revolved around a deceptively simple question, which became the title of his article: “Why Does He Die?”

At the end of the film, Jagger is killed. Horowitz asked why his death seemed so inevitable, why the Israeli audience accepted it almost without question, and what that revealed about the extent to which militarism had become normalized within Israeli society.

The film truly was beautiful, sensitive, and groundbreaking. Sometimes genuine progress requires precisely this kind of representation, showing a same-sex couple as entirely ordinary. But that is also exactly the problem. What counts as ordinary in Israel includes the possibility of dying in military service at the age of nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one.

As a child, I remember watching American films and television series set in high school. I found it strange that an entire generation of teenagers spent their final year thinking about which university they would attend. For me, that was never really an option. At eighteen, military service was both expected and compulsory. Three years first, longer for some people, and only afterward could one begin thinking about the rest of life.

That is the peculiar normality of Israel. The military functions as a kind of civic melting pot, the institution through which social belonging is negotiated. Even Luke Skywalker wanted to join the military as a way of escaping the isolated, dusty place where he had grown up.

Like many of us in Israel.

There is a remarkable consensus among sociologists of knowledge that what we know, how we interpret reality, and even the values we hold are profoundly shaped by the societies in which we live. They express this insight in different ways, but the conclusion is strikingly similar. Weber, Bourdieu, Foucault, and, at least until the end of the twentieth century, Latour all argue that the horizons of knowledge are socially constituted. We understand what our societies make it possible to understand. And during war, what becomes possible to know is war.

Shortly after purchasing C-3PO and R2-D2, Luke tells his uncle that he is considering applying to the Imperial Academy to become an Imperial pilot – in other words, to serve the Empire itself as a soldier. His uncle refuses, insisting that he remain on the farm. Luke is frustrated. Like countless young people growing up in remote places, he wants to leave the small, sandy, and isolated world in which he was raised. The military offers one possible path out. And if that military belongs to an occupying empire, what can you do?

Of course, the scene exists to prepare us for Luke’s eventual transformation. He does become a pilot – but for the Rebellion. He fights against the very Empire he once considered serving. Eventually, he destroys the Death Star itself, whose plans reached Princess Leia through a group of rebels.

And that, once again, brings us back to Andor.

Seeing the Empire from Within

On the morning of October 7, I had planned to go to the gym. Instead, Israel woke up in shock. The scale of the attack seemed unimaginable. Who could have expected something like this? As it turned out, a handful of junior intelligence officers who had not been taken seriously, and several surveillance soldiers – some of whom were later kidnapped – had.

At the time, we lived across from Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Israel’s national military cemetery. (It’s actually a good location, and a noisy neighborhood.) For days, funerals continued late into the night. It was impossible to sleep, not because of the noise but because of what it meant. Every quiet prayer carried through the night announced another dead soldier, another dead young woman or man.

Shock quickly turned into anger. Friends who had spent years supporting peace suddenly declared that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.” They forgot that terrorism cannot be defeated by force alone. They forgot the decades of occupation. They forgot the broader context. They were angry, wounded people whose sense of security had collapsed overnight.

From that point on, Israel changed. It went from being a militarized society with meaningful restraints to one increasingly organized around permanent war, from a democracy with serious flaws to a political system whose leaders openly sought to dismantle democratic institutions. A few weeks later, the Israeli military entered Gaza. It took time for the full scale to become visible. Still, eventually we began to understand what was happening there – the magnitude of the destruction, the killing, and what our country was doing.

I recently visited Israel after more than a year away. Many things were the same; most were not. While I was there, I tried to avoid politics. It proved impossible. Again and again, I found myself at dinner tables with people I care about, listening to conversations that refused even to acknowledge that something had gone terribly wrong, let alone to ask whether Israel bore responsibility for what it had done – and was still doing. No dinner table argument has ever changed anyone’s mind, and none of ours did. But that was never really the point. What stayed with me was shameful. Shame for what the country had become, and shame that, wherever I live, whatever I believe, I remain Israeli. That is not something I can walk away from. It is part of who I am. And lately, it has become one of the heaviest parts.

Whether I oppose these policies or not, whether I live in Israel or somewhere else, I remain Israeli. That responsibility is mine as well. It is heavy, uncomfortable, and inescapable. It is the burden of belonging to a society that has committed acts I never wanted to believe Israelis were capable of committing.

Watching Star Wars after that, I found myself recognizing not the rebels but either Syril Karn or, sometimes, simply the stormtroopers. There is nothing enjoyable about that realization. It is deeply unsettling. Perhaps this is unsurprising. The visual language of the Empire deliberately drew on twentieth-century fascist aesthetics. The resemblance to Nazi imagery was never accidental.

The Rebels

Many people have spent years trying to remove that corrosion from Israeli society – not from outside but from within, through exhausting, often thankless work. Some are Israeli, some are Palestinian, and some work together, refusing to surrender to the rust, however impossible that struggle may sometimes feel.

Those who oppose the occupation or resist the current government do so openly. Meanwhile, soldiers increasingly conceal their faces behind masks. Perhaps you have noticed this – not only in Israel but also in Ukraine and in other contemporary wars. Soldiers have begun hiding their identities, looking, in an unsettling way, like the stormtroopers of fiction.

Many of those resisting the current direction of Israeli society are profoundly alone. Alone within their own country, and often isolated internationally as well, caught between domestic majorities and international voices whose visions range from dismantling Israel altogether to denying it any legitimacy. They are tragic heroes in a film that will probably never be made.

Some spend their days in the West Bank attempting – sometimes successfully – to prevent settler violence. Others organize demonstrations against the occupation or against the government. Some campaign during elections. Others write opinion pieces or devote themselves to legal advocacy, education, or human rights work. Everyone does what they can.

It is a great deal, and at the same time, almost nothing.

But they can say, much like the marvelous monologue of Luthen in Episode 10 of the first season, that: “My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my, what is my sacrifice?” And they can also say, like Luthen said: “I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, an audience, or the light of gratitude. So, what do I sacrifice? Everything!”

And One Fate for All

In the second season of Andor, the massacre on the planet Ghorman takes place. After nearly an entire season exposing the Empire’s deliberate campaign of incitement against the planet and its people – the systematic delegitimization, the propaganda, and the dehumanization, glimpsed even in the casual remarks of Syril Karn’s mother – we come to understand the true scale of the Empire’s evil. To extract the mineral required to complete the Death Star, the ultimate machine of destruction, the Empire plans nothing less than the destruction of an entire society.

The way this story unfolds is both breathtaking and devastating. Cassian is in contact with the local resistance, while Luthen wants him to push them into action. Cassian recognizes that they are not ready. They are inexperienced, disorganized, and unprepared. But in the end, none of that matters. As the story progresses, we realize that nothing could have changed the outcome. The resistance will be used as the justification for the slaughter. Yet even had they never resisted, the massacre would still have taken place. The Empire is too vast, too powerful, and too determined. The destruction is coming either way. Along with it comes the destruction of a culture, of a society, of a people.

That is sometimes how oppressive regimes, and the social forces that sustain them, operate. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to escape. No position offers moral safety, not participation, not resistance, not standing aside. The Empire will exploit resistance. The Empire will exploit collaboration. And in the end, there is one fate for all.

The Death of Truth

How much we wish we had someone like Mon Mothma willing to say what they really think. To stand before everyone and say: “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.” And then simply to say: “What happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber!”

But there are others. There are those like Mon Mothma, who carry the light even through the darkest days and, in doing so, accept the danger, the anger, and the isolation that come with dissenting from a society determined not to see.

A New Hope

At its best – by which I mean the original Star Wars trilogy and Andor – Star Wars tells a remarkably simple story: the weak confronting the powerful. Looking back on the films decades later, George Lucas himself made that point explicit. In conversation with James Cameron, Cameron observed that the Rebels fought an organized empire through asymmetric warfare and remarked, “Today we’d call those guys terrorists.” Lucas’s answer was immediate: “When I did it, they were Viet Cong.” He went on to explain the broader idea behind Star Wars: “The little guys won. The highly technical empire – the English empire, the American empire – lost. That was the whole point.”4

Both Luke Skywalker and Cassian Andor become part of that struggle almost against their will. Luke briefly considers applying to the Imperial Academy, hoping simply to leave the isolated desert world where he has grown up. Cassian spends most of the first season trying to stay alive rather than join the Rebellion. He flees the Empire, reluctantly takes part in the raid on the Imperial garrison at Aldhani, is arrested and sentenced to prison for an unrelated encounter with Imperial authorities, escapes from Narkina 5, and only then comes to understand that there is no longer any life outside the struggle. Neither Luke nor Cassian sets out to become a revolutionary. They become rebels only after discovering that life under the Empire leaves them with no meaningful alternative.

In the end, the sacrifices of Cassian Andor and Luke Skywalker make the Death Star’s destruction possible and, eventually, the Empire’s fall. For more than three decades – from Return of the Jedi in 1983 until the sequel trilogy complicated that ending – Star Wars concluded with celebration: Luke, Leia, and Han together, and, in George Lucas’s later Special Edition, joyful celebrations spreading across worlds throughout the Empire. Luthen may have sacrificed everything, and so did countless others. Their suffering could not be undone, and those who were lost could not be brought back. But at its heart, Star Wars insists on one enduring hope: that even the most powerful empire is not eternal. Those mocked today as dreamers, dismissed as naïve, or condemned as traitors may one day simply become the people who refused to give up. That is not a prediction about history. It is a hope for a better future. These days, in Israel as elsewhere, hope can feel painfully scarce. Even so, perhaps it is still worth holding on to.

* * *

Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the series.