The Jews “are rogues and cheats,” said Peter the Great as he explained why he would rather admit to Russia even Muslims or pagans, but not Jews. (Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1772-1844, p. 21)
Both halves of this quip – the libel and the policy – were part of the psyche of Tsarist Russia, the empire that Vladimir Putin is eager to restore.
Tsarist Russia first refused to admit Jews into its realms; then – after conquering vast lands with millions of Jews – caged them in the Pale of Settlement; and finally, as the tsars sought ways to divert attention from their own failures, they unleashed mobs on their Jews in what became known as pogroms.
Communist Russia continued this antisemitic tradition, banning Jewish education and emigration, and obstructing the practice of the Jewish faith. Post-communist Russia parted with this legacy, freeing its Jews and maintaining good relations with the Jewish state.
That is why when Russia went to war with Ukraine, this column advocated neutrality. Israel, it argued, was in no position to provoke any superpower and also had to consider Russia’s military presence in Syria, as well the Jewish communities on both sides of that war (“None of our business,” January 28, 2022).
Israeli diplomacy – under both prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett – indeed followed this advice. Jerusalem did not join the West’s sanctions against Russia, and rejected repeated Ukrainian pleas to sell Kyiv military goods. Israel was also careful not to directly condemn Russian atrocities in Ukraine.
Russia, for its part, appreciated Israel’s departure from the Western fold. Israeli and Russian generals met regularly to make sure their operations in Syria didn’t collide, and the two countries’ leaders met frequently, and fruitfully. Netanyahu and Putin even became close, with the former paying multiple visits to the Kremlin.
Now this era of good feeling comes to its end.
OUR BABIES’ blood had hardly dried on the pavements of Nahal Oz and Kibbutz Be’eri when a Hamas delegation, headed by Musa Abu Marzouk, was formally hosted in Moscow by senior officials to discuss the violence that the group itself had just torched.
Officially, the Russian move was meant to deliver the release of Russian nationals held hostage by Hamas. In practice, this was something entirely different, a thinly veiled attempt to spite Washington by biting the Jewish state.
The people whom Russia wined and dined had just unleashed the most flagrant act of terror ever waged by anyone anywhere, whether in terms of moral audacity or geographic scope. Now the blood of the 1,000 innocent civilians Hamas murdered, one by one in cold blood, is staining their Russian hosts’ hands.
What made Russia do this, and what should Israel do in response?
Russia didn’t do this because of antisemitism. Putin is not an antisemite. Had he been one, he would not have been on such good terms with the Jewish state and the Jewish people during an incumbency of nearly a quarter of a century.
Sunday’s harrowing events in the Russian region of Dagestan, where a Muslim mob stormed an airplane searching for Jews, was a case in point. An antisemitic leader would have let the mob satisfy its bloodthirst. Other types of antisemitic leaders might have actually orchestrated the attack. Putin did neither, and in fact, had police round up and arrest scores of the rioters.
So no, Putin is not driven by any emotion about the Jews. What does drive him today is his spectacular debacle in Ukraine, and his consequent hatred of the West in general, and the US in particular.
Putin’s war on Ukraine might still lag for years, but it can already be counted among Russian imperialism’s many misadventures, a political miscalculation and military fiasco on par with the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Afghanistan War.
The original plan, to swiftly overtake Russia’s neighbor and replace its government, will clearly never materialize. Instead, while suffering so far an estimated 240,000 casualties (according to the British Defense Intelligence) Russia’s army was exposed as under-motivated and poorly commanded, and its arms proved inadequate, exposing industrial corruption and administrative disarray.
Any leader would be frustrated in the face of such a colossal failure, but Putin is not any leader. His frustration is as big as his ambitions. That is why he now hates America, Germany, Britain, and France, as he tells himself that the problem with his invasion was not his plan’s immoral motivation and operational flaws, but someone else’s sabotage.
Until last week, all this bad blood was superpower business. Now it’s also about the Jews.
PUTIN MAY or may not have understood this before greenlighting – or ordering – the rendezvous with Hamas, but the fact is that the high-profile meeting legitimized our people’s butchery. It constituted an affront to the Jewish state and a personal insult to each one of the world’s 15 million Jews.
For Putin – who sees everything and everyone as pieces on the chessboard of his many plots and stratagems – we, and our feelings, are as meaningless as the multitudes of Syrians, Ukrainians, and Georgians his pilots have killed.
Maybe he doesn’t even realize the absurdity of a man with his record “strongly condemning all violence and hostilities directed against civilians,” as his representative just did at the UN. Even more absurd is his repudiation of the US as the cause of the violence in the Middle East. Wow.
The US brokered five Middle Eastern peace deals. How many did you, Vladimir? Soon, when you watch Ukraine unload Israeli-made missiles, cannons, and rockets, maybe you’ll for once ask yourself where you went wrong; where the word pogrom came from; what it means to every Jew; and what happened to the tsarists who thought Jews could be murdered for free.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.