Ten years ago, Offir Gutelzon could never have imagined himself as one of the most prominent figures in Israel’s pro-democracy movement — especially from 7,400 miles away.
A native of Kiryat Motzkin near Haifa, he was a tech entrepreneur in Israel who sold one of his early startups in 2011 and moved with his wife and two young sons first to New York and then, in 2014, to Palo Alto, where he continued working in the tech world.
Today Gutelzon, 50, is a co-founder and the lead organizer of UnXeptable, the global movement that loudly and actively advocates for the preservation of Israeli democracy — and the ouster of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Created in 2020 by a tight group of Israeli expats in Silicon Valley after Netanyahu was indicted on corruption charges, UnXeptable now has volunteers and branches throughout North America and across the world that hold demonstrations, run Zoom webinars, keep in touch on WhatsApp groups and build bridges to their diaspora Jewish communities.
The name is a reference to “unacceptable,” as in “it’s unacceptable to have a leader who is indicted for corruption,” the website explains.
The group’s pro-democracy protests in the Bay Area peaked in September 2023 when Netanyahu traveled here to meet with tech giant Elon Musk. UnXeptable dogged Netanyahu across the region, dubbing him “crime minister.”
Less than three weeks later, Hamas invaded Israel, massacred 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, sparking the ongoing war. UnXeptable immediately shifted its focus to supporting Israeli civilians and soldiers and to bringing home the hostages.
UnXeptable does all this, including its campaign against Netanyahu, out of love for Israel, Gutelzon said.
“Israel is home. It’s a great place to be proud of,” he told J.
To those American Jews who say that any public criticism of Israel only gives fuel to Israel’s enemies, Gutelzon responds that UnXeptable comes from a Zionist position of wanting Israel to be the best it can be.
“We have always been ambassadors of Israel, no matter where we are living,” he said of his fellow expats in the high-tech world. “I mean, we have family in Israel. We have business ties in Israel. We have so many reasons to care about Israel. And when you live outside of Israel, you understand that this is the homeland of the whole Jewish people, and you as an Israeli expat have a role to work to make sure that the country’s not just working for Israelis, but for the Jewish community as well.”
Wherever UnXeptable raises its banners, you see Gutelzon. He’s always at the center of the action, speaking to a crowd, schmoozing with participants, running around to make sure everything goes as planned.
Behind the scenes, he is the group’s communication and organizational hub, staying up till all hours, making phone calls and last-minute preparations, advising other Israelis looking to start their own groups and keeping in touch “with our brothers and sisters protesting in Israel,” as he puts it.
He is, say those who know him, a talented and unique leader.
“Offir is the most passionate Israeli patriot, who loves his country,” said Yair Bar-On, a tech entrepreneur in Israel who has known Gutelzon for years. “Like the Yehuda Halevi poem, he has his heart in the East even when he is in the West. He has a huge heart and is doing so much to help his homeland.”
Neri Life-Choma, an UnXeptable co-founder, concurs.
“He has such a warm and enthusiastic and positive personality,” said Life-Choma, 60, who lives in Campbell. “You always want to be around him, which is a good characteristic in a leader.”
Unlike many leaders, she said, Gutelzon is not didactic; he surrounds himself with people he can learn from.
“That’s so unique,” she told J. “He’s committed to the kind of self-growth that leads to a wider understanding. I’ve never seen him lose patience with those who don’t share his perspective. He’s always up for another conversation, and another, and another. It’s phenomenal.”
Palo Alto resident Daryl Messinger, longtime chair of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, describes him as “very determined and very focused.”
“He brings a lot of the skills of an entrepreneur to this,” added Messinger, who has worked with Gutelzon on several projects. “He networks extensively. He was willing to share leadership early on.”
Gutelzon’s first foray into activism came in 2019 when he helped organize hundreds of Israeli expats to fly home to vote amid corruption allegations against Netanyahu.
“To us, it was, how could we have a prime minister who was indicted?” he said.
UnXeptable itself emerged in July 2020, when a small group of local Israelis held a protest near the Golden Gate Bridge in solidarity with the “bridge protests” in Israel that called for Netanyahu to step down.
The Israeli media covered the event as “those crazy Israelis protesting at the Golden Gate Bridge,” he said, but expats in other cities began calling him for advice on how to create similar groups in New York, Seattle and Los Angeles and then in Mexico, Argentina, Australia and elsewhere.
However, he said, there was never the intention to create a movement, or any kind of ongoing activism. That happened “organically,” he said.
When Netanyahu’s government fell in 2021, UnXeptable ceased its activities. The group resumed in early 2023 when Netanyahu, once more in power, announced plans for a judicial overhaul that would take power away from the country’s High Court.
Almost immediately, large-scale weekly protests against what many Israelis saw as an erosion of democratic safeguards began taking place every Saturday night in towns and cities across the Jewish state. At their peak, the protests attracted hundreds of thousands of Israelis. UnXeptable held similar rallies across North America, again in solidarity with those inside Israel.
What was different this time, Gutelzon said, is that his organization began actively reaching out beyond the Israeli community to engage American Jews. This was something that few Israeli expat groups had attempted before.
It made sense, he told J. “Before, we didn’t really have an understanding of how to bring Jewish Americans to join us. But when we saw the coalition documents, even before the judicial overhaul [plans], one of the things was clearly an ultra-nationalist Orthodox [agenda] that would prevent many Jewish Americans from making aliyah. That’s when Jewish Americans understood that this is going to affect them as well.”
Noting that UnXeptable events are conducted in English rather than Hebrew, Messinger told J. that Gutelzon has been “willing to reach out to the diaspora, the American Jewish community. He’s been smart to build alliances where they didn’t exist before. We haven’t seen many expat Israeli movements reaching out to the American Jewish community.”
This is an important point for Gutelzon. A dual citizen since 2018, he considers himself an Israeli American, but one who is an indelible part of the American Jewish community.
Israeli expats “are the untapped resource of the American Jewish community,” he said.
While he’d always felt a connection to American Jews, it wasn’t because of his religious observance. Like many secular Israelis, he didn’t attend synagogue growing up, didn’t keep kosher and only marked the major Jewish holidays.
But as the years passed in America, he encountered a Judaism beyond the Orthodox stereotypes he grew up with. He took part in the Gvanim program through the Israeli Cultural Connection at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto that encourages Israelis to explore their Jewish identity. Both of his sons, now 18 and 14, celebrated their bar mitzvahs in Israel, with Reform rabbis. The family does not belong to a synagogue but joins the expat community every year for Yom Kippur services at the OFJCC, complete with music by Arik Einstein and Leonard Cohen.
“I learned that I could reinvent my Judaism, and that’s OK,” he said.
In America he also came into close contact with Arab Israelis for the first time, when he got involved in urging Israeli citizens to fly home to vote against Netanyahu.
“At that point, I realized how important it is to drive the Israeli Arab community to vote, and I also realized I didn’t have any Arab friends, someone I could ask to translate Hebrew to Arabic for me,” he said. “I honestly found out how much I grew up in a segregated way.”
Gutelzon quickly organized what he calls the “shared backyard” group, which brought together Israelis in Silicon Valley, both Jews and Arabs, to get to know each other.
Those efforts broke down after Oct. 7, 2023, however. Immediately after the Hamas attack on southern Israel, UnXeptable pivoted from street protests to enlisting its huge volunteer network in service of Israeli soldiers, Israeli civilians directly impacted by the attack and those displaced from their homes throughout the country. Food and supplies were collected in North America and flown to Israel; host families were found to house Israelis stranded abroad when flights were canceled.
In the Bay Area, the group used its experience to organize rallies calling for the release of the hostages. Those rallies, unlike the ones in 2020 and 2021, were run jointly with American Jewish groups like the Federations and Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area.
Today, a year and a half later, with the war continuing and 59 hostages still held in Gaza, UnXeptable continues to work on multiple fronts: demanding the immediate release of the hostages, calling for an end to the war and seeking to replace Netanyahu as prime minister, along with what Gutelzon calls his “extremist right-wing government.”
“Unlike other organizations, our messaging has not changed” since Oct. 7, he said. “It’s still ‘bring them home’ about the hostages — and ‘send them home’ about the government.”
While in America, calls for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war quickly became part of anti-Israel protests and were seen as suspect by many American Jews, that is not so in Israel, he said, where most Israelis support a deal to end the war in exchange for the release of all remaining hostages. That’s why an important aspect of UnXeptable’s work is spreading information about Israeli democracy, society and politics, he said.
“What we are focusing on is raising awareness, making sure that Jewish Americans and Israeli Americans know it’s important to work together,” Gutelzon said. “We are the majority, as liberal Jews, both here and in Israel. Israel is the Jewish state, the Jewish homeland, but it should be Jewish and democratic. We need to work together on that.”
Gutelzon basically works full time on UnXeptable activities but doesn’t take a salary. He continues to do tech consulting, mainly helping other Israeli entrepreneurs.
He doesn’t envision giving up the fight for Israeli democracy any time soon.
“Living in Israel it’s not like we read the Declaration of Independence every day. We took it for granted. We never really thought about what it meant,” he said.
“Growing up in Israel, I was just part of the flow. Like, you go to school, you go to university, you go to the army. Israel is something I always took for granted. I never really thought that I would need to fight for the country, because I was worried that it won’t stay the way it was.”
“I thought it was perfect,” he added. “And it was never perfect, by the way. It took time for me to figure that out. We have a lot of things to fix.”