Israel’s refusal to back Ukraine is a moral stain

For decades, the hardline Arab objective has been to reverse the tide of history, to turn the clock back to a mythical previous era when they supposedly ran “Palestine” — similar in many ways to Putin’s outpourings that deny that Ukraine has any legitimacy as a state.

Allowing a dictator to vitiate past international agreements also opens the door to enemies of Israel who say the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations mandate for “a Jewish state in Palestine” can and should be cancelled. Israel should join the world’s other democracies in helping Ukraine to survive. And as Israel has had to become a world leader in defensive weaponry to shoot down incoming rockets and missiles, it has a vital asset that needs to be deployed immediately. Without such anti-missile defences Russia has every incentive to keep terrorising the citizens of Ukraine and making any Ukrainian battlefield advances temporary.

There is, of course, the argument that Israel needs to keep Russia sweet, to allow Israeli jets to continue bombing Hezbollah convoys and bases inside wartorn Syria. But in the cold light of day, Israel has every interest in seriously weakening Russia’s ability and desire to prop up the Assad regime.

Look at where this would lead. As Ukraine starts to prevail, Russia would need to pull its arms and troops back and would have to focus on its military needs along or near its own borders, not on a foreign escapade.

That, in turn, could make it easier for Israel to carry out military operations against Hezbollah and Iran’s convoys and bases in Syria, providing freedom to operate with much-reduced Russian counter-actions.

In any case, as exemplified this week in Kherson, Russia is now being shown up as something of a paper tiger when it tries to act militarily outside its borders.

To explain its actions in supporting Ukraine’s defence, Israel only needs to say it is protecting Ukraine from bombardment, not specifically helping Ukraine to counter-attack. There is no justification for harping back to Ukraine’s dubious record in protecting Jews during the Second World War. Most Ukrainians did not engage in mass murder of Jews — but in any case, as Natan Sharanksy pointed out during my interview with him in last week’s JC on his recent visit to Ukraine, Israel has close relationships with countries where much worse things happened, such as Germany and France.

Another false argument is that Ukrainians are in some ways still secretly anti-Jewish. This myth stems from a couple of military regiments that started off with a form of fascist ideology — but was not fundamentally anti-Jewish.

The current defence of the coastal city of Mariupol was conducted with enormous bravery by the Azov Brigade, pounded and starved by relentless Russian rocket fire. Its founders used some Nazi symbolism, but most of its members were regular Ukrainians, assigned to that unit. In any case, its headquarters in Kyiv are closed.

All Ukrainians I met seemed genuinely pro-Jewish. And on a shelf inside embattled Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko’s office I noticed a Chanukah menorah and candles. The Klitschko brothers, former world boxing champions, are proud of having some Jewish ancestry.
Natan Sharansky, who was born in Ukraine, told me that it’s much safer to walk around the streets of Ukraine wearing a kippah than it is in Paris or even parts of London.

British Jews with any influence should not just support the UK government’s backing of Ukraine, but also should seek to influence the new Israeli government under Mr Netanyahu to pull itself out of its moral morass.