The onslaught launched by Russia against Ukraine intensified in recent days when President Vladimir Putin began redirecting the assault towards highly populated cities, killing hundreds of innocent civilians and displacing over 1 million others. Though the international community has expressed overwhelming support for Ukraine, radical anti-Israel activists on social media saw fit to seize the poignant show of solidarity to target Israel instead. In doing so, they used their tried-and-true tactic of hijacking solidarity from other movements or struggles.
On Twitter, countless users flooded social media with posts decrying the world’s lack of attention to the Palestinians. For example, British rapper Lowkey lamented that Google and YouTube blocked state-owned Russian news outlets, but not Israel’s. Likewise, a post by a pseudo-anonymous account called “tala” that disparaged European countries for allegedly helping Ukrainians and not Palestinians garnered almost 13,000 retweets.
The Palestinian leadership itself addressed the issue and went so far as to claim that the “international community is being hypocritical and racist by being more sympathetic towards the Ukrainians because of their color, religion and race.”
Even more nefarious than their attempts to conjure up faux western double standards, numerous activists hitched a ride on the viral #UkraineRussiaWar hashtag to promote their propaganda by attaching it to anti-Israel content utterly unrelated to the Ukraine crisis.
The selfish yet unsurprising push to co-opt the Ukrainian struggle is the standard M.O. of anti-Israel activists who struggle with the knowledge that – heaven forbid – groups of people somewhere on the planet unrelated to the Palestinian cause can suffer tragedy.
In recent years, this cohort of activists has hijacked solidarity from several other movements, notably indigenous Native Americans, the American Black community, and Blacks who lived through apartheid in South Africa.
Needless to say, there is no legitimate comparison between Palestinians and the experiences of the above communities.
Palestinians are not victims of genocide akin to Native Americans. In fact, their population has multiplied since the establishment of Israel. Nor are they victims of an institutionalized regime of racial segregation, à la South Africa or Jim Crow America, since all differences in terms of rights granted by the Israeli government stem from differences in citizenship, not ethnicity or race. Indeed, Arab Israelis enjoy equal rights as Jewish Israelis and serve at the highest levels of the country’s parliament, government, judiciary, and military.
We may never truly understand the source of their pathological need to employ such dishonest tactics. Perhaps these activists have been so profoundly corrupted by their visceral disdain for the Jewish state that they have truly lost their moral compass.
Or maybe they know deep down that the Palestinian movement does not warrant the degree of international attention it receives, and so the only way to keep it in the headlines is to piggyback off others. After all, as Seth Frantzman of the Jerusalem Post pointed out, “the eviction of one or two families in Sheikh Jarrah compared with 300,000 Ukrainians driven from their homes in five days of fighting” do not deserve equal levels of media attention, especially considering the endless sympathetic coverage Palestinians have enjoyed for over 70 years.
Whatever the case may be, the sole aim of hijacking solidarity is to unfairly tarnish Israel’s image and delegitimize it. And while that goal is despicable enough on its own, it descends to new levels of low by damaging the reputation of the very communities whose solidarity is being exploited.
Ukraine may not yet be a shining beacon of democracy. But unlike so-called Palestinians engaging in “resistance” (often used as a transparent euphemism for terror), Ukrainians have not fired indiscriminate rockets, blown up jampacked buses, or launched scores of suicide attacks against innocent civilians. Put simply, Ukrainians using guerilla warfare techniques to stave off a rogue communist dictator invading their sovereign territory is completely different from Palestinian terrorists hurling Molotov cocktails at Israeli civilians, despite what Israel-haters want the world to believe.
When Palestinians liken Ukrainian defiance to their own violent actions – including all those named above – they inadvertently paint them as terrorists too.
Obviously, the Ukrainian fighters are not terrorists, but heroes. And the heroism they display as they take up arms against the Russian thugocracy deserves the world’s attention and support. Instead, Palestinians have appropriated the solidarity as their own. We must expose this ploy and ensure that the Ukrainian struggle is not tainted by cynical political trickery.
Eitan Fischberger is an international relations and Middle East analyst focusing on Israel. His writing has appeared in National Review, NBC News THINK, New York Daily News, and more. He tweets at @EFischberger.
This op-ed is published in partnership with a coalition of organizations that fight antisemitism across the world. Read the previous article by Asaf Romirowsky.