From the Intercept:
“Why Israel Refused to Help
Ukraine Defend Itself From Russian Missiles”
Israel not only refused to sell
its Iron Dome missile defense system to Ukraine, but it also blocked the U.S.
from sending Iron Dome batteries owned by the U.S. Army to Kyiv. AS RUSSIA’S
BRUTAL assault on Ukraine continues, officials in Kyiv appear to be losing
patience with the mediation efforts of Israel’s prime minister, Naftali
Bennett, who has tried and failed to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin
to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for talks in Jerusalem.
Zelenskyy made his frustration
clear in a virtual address to Israel’s parliament on Sunday, when he asked why
the country had blocked the transfer of Iron Dome missile defense batteries to
Ukraine before the Russian attack and then refused to impose strong sanctions
on Russia after it. Zelenskyy shredded the official excuse offered by Bennett,
that Israel has to remain neutral to act as a mediator. “Mediation,” Zelenskyy
told the lawmakers on a Zoom call from Kyiv, his embattled capital, “can be
between states, not between good and evil.”
Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine,
Michael Brodsky, seemed to confirm the next day that the country had asked to
purchase the Iron Dome missile defense system last year and was turned down. As
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, Brodsky told Israel’s Army Radio on
Monday that “to the best of my knowledge, the issue also came up before the
war. It was made clear to the Ukrainian side that this was impossible, and they
still insist on raising it.”
Rather than offering to help
Ukraine protect itself from Russian missiles, Israel’s prime minister has
embraced the role of mediator between Zelenskyy and Putin. Given that Israel
has not managed to broker a peace agreement with Palestine more than five
decades after it seized through warfare the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza,
and the Golan Heights, and given that it rules over millions of people who are
deprived of political or civil rights in those occupied territories — and still
has no clearly defined borders of its own — the country might seem ill-placed
to help Ukraine and Russia settle their conflict. Still, Zelenskyy had
reportedly been asking Bennett to intercede with Putin on Ukraine’s behalf for
at least a year before the invasion. “I don’t think it would be right at this
point to meet in Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus. These aren’t places in which we
could reach any understandings on stopping the war,” the Ukrainian president
told an Israeli reporter in Kyiv this month. “I believe Israel could serve as
such a meeting place, especially in Jerusalem.” But Ukrainian officials have
expressed doubts about the usefulness of Bennett’s efforts now that more than
two weeks have passed since he traveled to Moscow for a three-hour meeting with
Putin, accompanied by Ze’ev Elkin, Israel’s housing minister, who was born and
raised in Kharkiv, a largely Russian-speaking Ukrainian city that has endured
fierce bombardment from Russian forces. One shell fired at a residential
building in Kharkiv last week took the life of Boris Romantschenko, a
96-year-old Ukrainian who survived four Nazi concentration camps, including
Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, only to be killed in a Russian campaign
officially dedicated to “denazification.”
After Bennett’s trip to Moscow,
an unidentified senior Ukrainian official told Barak Ravid, a diplomatic
correspondent for Walla News in Israel and Axios in Washington, that the
Israeli prime minister had phoned Zelenskyy and urged him to accept Putin’s
demands to end the fighting. “If I were you, I would think about the lives of
my people and take the offer,” the official said Bennett told Zelenskyy.
“Bennett is basically telling us to surrender, and we have no intention of
doing that,” the Ukrainian official said. Bennett’s office denied that he had
pressed Zelenskyy to accept any offer from Putin and said he had merely been
acting as a messenger. But given what Putin has said in public about why regime
change is necessary in Kyiv — the lie that Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, leads a
government of drug-addled Nazis who must be demilitarized to stop a fictional
genocide against ethnic Russians in Ukraine — it is not hard to see why
Ukrainian officials might have been offended to hear his terms described as
anything but delusional. Agreeing to give up its military and its elected
government and redrawing its borders to suit Russia would make Ukraine into a
de facto colony of its larger neighbor, ruled from Moscow by a repressive
autocrat, as it was in the Soviet era.
If the idea that Ukrainians
should simply give up their independence and accept an offer of limited
autonomy on terms dictated by a neighboring country with a stronger military
sounded reasonable to Bennett, it might be because Israel has been pressing
Palestinians to accept similar terms of surrender disguised as a peace deal for
decades. Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, who is also Jewish,
joined the criticism of Israel a week after Bennett’s Moscow visit seemed to
bear no fruit. In a video message to fans of the Soviet-era game show “What?
Where? When?” — which is still played as a competitive board game in Ukraine,
Russia, Belarus, and Israel — Reznikov said that Israel’s “inexplicable
detachment and unwillingness to choose sides” would cause Ukrainians to
mistrust the country in the future. And, he added, Ukrainians will have a
future, “because we will stand tall, have no doubt — with or without you. Israeli
officials said Monday that Ukraine has asked Bennett to come to Kyiv to meet
Zelenskyy in person if he senses any progress in the talks about talks. Bennett
told the Jerusalem Post that he got the sense that Russia might be willing to
let Zelenskyy stay in office and settle for something less than the complete
demilitarization of the country, but Ukraine is hardly likely to see either as
a concession.
In the meantime, Zelenskyy and
his aides are reportedly wondering if Bennett’s offer to mediate between the
sides might have been motivated less by any real hope of brokering a peace deal
than by his desire to remain neutral so he can avoid alienating Putin. “His
initiative looks like an excuse for why he is not speaking out against Russia,
not providing weapons to Ukraine, and not sanctioning Russia,” a Ukrainian
official told Ravid. Since 2015, when Russia’s military intervened in the
Syrian civil war to keep President Bashar al-Assad from defeat, Russian forces
have controlled the skies over Syria. That’s important to Israel because the
Russian military command in Syria has been willing to allow Israeli jets to
enter Syrian airspace to carry out airstrikes on Iranian-backed forces crossing
through Syrian territory. As a result, Israel’s leaders seem to be wary of
offering any support to Ukraine that might anger Russia. “His initiative looks
like an excuse for why he is not speaking out against Russia, not providing
weapons to Ukraine, and not sanctioning Russia.” Two weeks ago, Russian
soldiers patrolling Syria’s contested border with Israel in the Golan Heights
were reportedly spotted driving vehicles marked with the letter Z — the
mysterious coded symbol of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
As Bernard Avishai pointed out in
the New Yorker last week, Israel not only refrained from joining the U.S. and
European Union in sanctioning Russia, but it also “continues to provide a
residence and tax haven for Russian-Jewish oligarchs, some of whom have funded
campaigns and projects of Israeli ministers.” The Israeli prime minister’s
efforts to bring peace to Ukraine also drew some sarcastic comments from
Israeli critics of his failure to even try to achieve that at home. “I tip my
cap to the prime minister’s mediation efforts in Ukraine,” Uri Zaki, a leader
of the liberal Zionist Meretz party, tweeted Tuesday. “If Bennett believes he
can bridge such conflicting positions, why is he giving up in advance on
negotiations with the Palestinians and the opportunity to reach an agreement
that will save Israel?!” Others mocked Bennett’s refusal to arm Ukraine with
weapons Israel has sold to repressive states. “It’s only in Israel that selling
arms to dictators is cool, but selling arms to a democracy that was attacked by
a dictator is complicated and sensitive,” lawyer Itai Leshem observed.
There has been pointed criticism
too from some American lawmakers. When Zelenskyy sharply asked Israel’s
parliament why Ukraine was unable to buy missile defense systems to “help us
protect our lives, the lives of Ukrainians, the lives of Ukrainian Jews,” Rep.
Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, tweeted: “Israel’s reaction to #Ukraine
will have bearing on future aid from the US to #Israel. Pay it forward.” Last
summer, the Jerusalem Post reported that officials in the now-ruined Ukrainian
city of Mariupol wanted to purchase an Iron Dome missile defense system from
Israel to protect their airport, but the sale never went through because of
Israel’s concerns about upsetting its relationship with Russia. For the same
reason, Israel also refused to allow the U.S. Army to send two Iron Dome
batteries it had purchased but couldn’t use to Ukraine. Since the system was
developed jointly by the U.S. and Israel, both countries reserve the right to
veto sales to third countries.
After that disappointment,
Ukraine appears to have made another diplomatic effort to get military support
from Israel: The Ukrainian ambassador to Israel told the Times of Israel that
Zelenskyy was ready to recognize Jerusalem as the country’s “one and only capital”
and move Ukraine’s embassy there within months if “certain preconditions in the
security and defense relationship between the countries” could be met. That
apparent willingness to ignore the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem — which
Israel occupied in 1967 before annexing in violation of international law — in
exchange for weapons distressed some Palestinians who otherwise sympathized
with him. “I admire Zelensky and stand with Ukrainians in their struggle
against Putin’s aggression, but it surely can’t be lost on him that Israel
itself has occupied Palestinians for decades, violating global norms and
rejecting persistent appeals,” Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University
of Maryland, observed on Twitter about the Ukrainian president’s address to
Israel’s parliament. “Palestinians empathize with the people of Ukraine who are
fleeing and resisting Russia’s military invasion and occupation,” the nonprofit
Institute for Middle East Understanding tweeted. “Palestinians know all too
well that pain and have been enduring it for decades. But let’s be clear:
Zelensky has it backwards when it comes to Israel and its military. Ukrainians
are fleeing and resisting oppression like Palestinians. Russia is violently
advancing a military occupation and invasion like Israel.”
^ I have long supported a country’s
right to existence and to defend itself. I have done that with Israel and I do
that with Ukraine. That is why I can not understand why Israel refuses to help
Ukraine now. I have been to both Israel and Ukraine (as well as Russia) and
know about each country’s history, struggles, politics, etc.
I have also studied Genocides like
the Holocaust. I know that Putin has said Ukraine has no right to exist as a
country and that the Ukrainian People aren’t really people. That is the same terminology
that Hitler used against the Jews in the 1930s-1940s and the same terminology that
Hamas uses against Israel and the Israelis today. And yet Israel refuses to do
anything to help Ukraine – preferring to support both sides instead.
Sadly, I believe Israel is wrong in
this instance. They have not shown any progress in their Diplomacy - the only
times an Arab/Muslim Country recognizes Israel is when the United States steps
in as we have with Egypt (1979), the United Arab Emirates (2020), Bahrain
(2020), Sudan (2011) and Morocco (2020.)
Israel is trying to keep Putin happy at the
expense of doing what is right and just – helping Ukraine – and that will be a
dark mark on Israel’s History forever. Anyone who doesn’t help Ukraine or
stand-up to Putin is only supporting a murderous Dictator who wants to destroy
a whole group of people. There is no neutrality or playing-both-sides in this
case. There is only doing what is right and just – helping Ukraine or doing
what is wrong and evil – supporting Putin. ^
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