Two Jewish Heads of State and an Important Lesson About Russia
Two Jews. Both descendants of victims of Nazi atrocities. Both Ashkenazi Jews. Both leaders of their nation. Both focused on Russia, but with very different strategies.
Zelensky and Netanyahu.
The first man leads a war time government for the lives of 45 million Ukrainians against a ruthless terrorist state in Moscow. The second man fights for his nation in a now-declared war against the Iran-backed terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
When Zelensky assumed the presidency, Ukraine had a president and a prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, who were both Jewish. At that time, Ukraine and Israel were the only two nations in the world where both the heads of state and the government leaders were Jewish.
At a meeting between the two leaders on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, President Zelensky offered this story about a family of four brothers to Prime Minister Netanyahu:
“Three of them, their parents and their families became victims of the Holocaust. All of them were shot by German occupiers who invaded Ukraine,” he said. “The fourth brother survived. … Two years after the war, he had a son, and in 31 years, he had a grandson. In 40 more years, that grandson became president, and he is standing before you today, Mr. Prime Minister.”
Fast forward two years. The war which Russia began in 2014 with the assault on East Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea goes full throttle as Putin invades on February 24, 2022, seeking to destroy the government and occupy the country. The “special operation” is an assault on national sovereignty and territorial integrity and is replete with war crimes not seen by a global power on this scale since WWII, including the mass targeting of civilians.
But during the darkest days of terror in Ukraine, Netanyahu led Israel to take a tepid response to the defense of Ukraine. He refrained from outright condemnation of the Russian atrocities and invasion, declined to send military aid, and even offered to fund Russian artists, much too the chagrin of Kyiv which lamented that Israeli dollars might be used to fund Russian propaganda. Netanyahu and his representatives presented themselves as unaligned, meeting with both sides in the war. They offered moderate support for Ukraine, while trying to keep relations warm with Moscow.
Putin No Friend to the Jewish Community
That Putin is no friend to the Jewish people was a point made this week by Pinchas Goldschmidt, the former chief rabbi of Moscow. Tension over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and rising state-sponsored antisemitism caused him to leave Russia and call for the Russian Jewish community to do the same. This week he told the press that “Putin’s lack of show of support of Russia for Israel is an ominous sign of deteriorating relations between those countries.”
Putin’s ill-intent to the Jewish people seems clear In this defining moment of modern history for Jewish people all over the world — clear from his treatment of Jews in Russia, clear from his partnership with Iran, his de facto support for Hamas, and his denunciation of Israel. It is also clear from his abusive use of the term Nazi. It is the definition of projection to accuse those you seek to subjugate, of the very crimes you are committing yourself.
But it should have been clear to everyone long ago.
There is a long, unfortunate history of Russian leaders taking aim at the children of Abraham. It was true under the Czars, then under the Soviets, and now under Putin’s Soviet revivalism.
Early in the war Putin’s men sent a message to Zelensky by bombing Babi Yar, one of the most sacred Holocaust massacre memorials in the word. The Nazis used Babi Yar to execute and cover up more than 100,00 Jews and Ukrainian political prisoners.
It is one of the many ironies of the war that Putin’s missiles fired on a Holocaust memorial, in a campaign to “denazify” an Ukraine whose Jewish president had family members murdered by Nazis. Whether he specifically meant to target Babi Yar, or it was simply that Russian generals aiming to knock out a TV tower in Kyiv took little consideration for a campaign filled with reckless actions, is less important than the Russian response to the episode. Following the bombing, Putin’s ministers of disinformation made sure to first deny and then to mitigate the attack.
Zelensky responded to the attack by writing on Twitter: “To the world: What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar? … History repeating …”
In her brilliant commentary published in the New York Times, “Who Will Remember the Horrors of Ukraine,” Linda Kinstler writes:
“Genocide is a crime of negation. It is not merely the mass murder of a people; it is also the systematic erasure of their history and culture, the bombing of archives, the burning of artworks. Genocide does everything it can to deprive its victims of justice. It swallows up testimony the moment it is uttered and tries to mobilize it for the purposes of denial. This is what Russian forces have done all over Ukraine.”
Zelensky communicated a similar theme by appealing to "all the Jews of the world.”
“Don’t you see what is happening?… it is important that you, millions of Jews, do not remain silent right now, because Nazism is born in silence. So shout about killing civilians, shout about killing Ukrainians."
Finding Clarity
One of Zelensky’s great strengths as President of Ukraine is clarity. He has been unequivocal about the stakes on the table and theresolve of the people of Ukraine. Importantly. Importantly, he has been unequivocal about Russia - their tactics, disinformation and commitment to terror against civilians.
Netanyahu’s public lack of clarity is not an omission, but a strategic decision enabling him to court both sides and remain unaligned. The goal was to prevent the war in Ukraine from interfering with Russo-Israeli friendship, without inadvertently alienating its principle ally, the United States.
Did Netanyahu’s gamble pay off?
It appears not.
Presently there is only circumstantial evidence of Russian involvement in the attack on Israel. That evidence can be summarized: Warm relations between Hamas and Putin, including three meetings in Moscow between Hamas and Putin’s men, most recently about four weeks ago; Russia exchanging money and intelligence with Iran in exchange for Iranian missiles to bomb the citizens of Kyiv, coupled with Iran’s direct role orchestrating the assault on Israel.
Russia is using the strike to give cover to Hamas and criticize Israel. In the days following the terrorist invasion of Israel by Islamic Jihad and Hamas, Russia declined to condemn the atrocities or the invasion. Their focus has been blaming the United States and criticizing Israel. On October 13, in a pot calling the kettle black moment of proportion, Putin accused Israel of unprecedented “cruelty.” He went on to compare Israeli efforts to block the Gaza port as being on par with “the siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany during WWII.”
So much for Putin remaining neutral to Israel and Hamas, as Netanyahu’s government remained neutral to Ukraine and Russia.
The Rejection of Territorial Integrity and Specific Targeting of Non Combatants
Like Hamas, Moscow’s moral compass is fundamentally different from the West. Until this is understood, Americans will remain in shock and disbelief at unfolding events. Nor will they be able to effectively respond to aggressors they do not understand.
The modern world emerged in part from decisions made by Western nations in the days concluding the Second World War. The global horror of genocide and territorial expansion modeled by the Third Reich could not be repeated. Despite errors like Yalta which opened the door for the Soviet subjugation of war torn Eastern Europe, there was a consensus among nations that certain minimal thresholds of conduct were necessary for civilizations to co-exist. This consensus took the form of treaties, criminal prosecutions at Nurerenburg, and international conventions. The United Nations replaced the failed League of Nations with the goal of reinforcing a rules-based approach to warfare.
Fundamental to this rules based order were two points: First, national sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected. Second, the specific targeting of non-combatants for torture, rape, kidnapping, mutilation and killing , along with campaigns of genocide, will be treated as war crimes and opposed by the civilized nations of the world.
On these two points, Hamas, Isis, Iran, and other proponents of Jihad are outside the pale. But so is Moscow under the command of Vladimir Putin. Both Hamas and Moscow use terror and cruelty against noncombatants as a strategy. It is deeply rooted in their military cultures and approached as a means to the end. Disregard for the territorial integrity of sovereign nations like Israel or Ukraine is also a non-issue. Hamas is committed to the end of the Israeli state. Putin has made it clear that he believes that the sovereignty of Ukraine and the very concept of a Ukranian cultural identity distinct from Russia are fictions.
The unimaginable barbarism of Hamas on October 7, 2023, stunned the world. The execution of babies and young boys in Be’eeri on the high Jewish holiday was immediately reminiscent of Pharoah’s genocide of the first born of Israel. Not recorded in the book of Exodus, however, are decapitations, burning the elderly alive and killing children in front of their parents who are subsequently forced to be hostages — all this and more perpetrated by Hamas.
They soldiers of Hamas might as well have been taking their queues from the Russian occupiers of Ukraine. For the citizens of Bucha, Ukraine, the presence of invading Russian soldiers shouting about finding “Nazis” meant that their mothers and daughter would be raped in front of brothers and fathers who were then taken into their back yards and executed at point blank range. There were body mutilations, burnings, executions of the elderly walking the streets as if they were targets in a video game. Similar practices by Russians have repeated with a staggering casualty rate elsewhere in Ukraine including mass kidnappings of children, torture, specific targeting of schools and hospitals.
Every death is in war is a non-reversible tragedy. A horror. But there will always remain a fundamental ethical difference between the specific targeting of civilians for warcrimes, and the tragedy of collateral damage. The inability to understand this difference drives much of the moral equivalency arguments and pro-Hamas and pro-Putin propaganda populating social media today.
In short, both Hamas and Moscow speak a different language when it comes to humanity and the modern world. Their rejection of a rules based approach to the modern world, replete with devastating disregard for territorial integrity and deliberate atrocities against civilians, may constitute the single greatest threat to global peace in the 21st century.
Zelensky understands this. Netanyahu should have understood it.
Both men share a common ancestry of family opposition to the terror regime of the 30s and 40s. Both men represent countries today which birthed from the totalitarian oppression of invaders who embraced an institutional commitment to the use of terror and genocide to advance national interests.”
What Next?
But here we are. What now?
Will Israel clarify their resolve against all terror and assaults on territorial integrity? Or only those acts of terrorism which murder Israeli civilians? The question is not about priorities. The Hamas crisis is paramount. But the terrorist assault on Israel is part of a more fundamental problem highlighted in bold in Ukraine.
We now live in a world in which one global power (Russia) and one global movement (radical Islam) have made terrorism standard operating procedure. They have reintroduced the world at a scale not seen since WWII, the deliberate targeting of civilians as the new normal. That makes Israel’s stance on Ukraine an issue of integrity, not merely international diplomacy:
Before them are questions. Will Israel firmly oppose the specific targeting of all noncombatants, whether it comes from Iranian missiles aimed by Russia at citizens of Kyiv, or similar missiles aimed at at Tel Aviv. Will they speak unequivocally about massacres of civilians in Bucha, as well as Be’eri? Importantly, will Israel recognize that is does not pay to party with the Devil, whether he headquarters in Gaza or Moscow?
DW Phillips writes for Ukraine Story. He is an attorney and filmmaker whose Jewish great grandfather from Lviv, Ukraine escaped Russians to build a new life in the USA.
