Israel can’t stay neutral in Ukraine’s battle between good and evil

April 13, 2022

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The Russo-Ukraine war is a battle between good and evil. It is inconceivable that any liberal democracy could fail to take Ukraine’s side. Yet Israel is disgracefully hedging its bets for fear of offending the war criminals in the Kremlin.

Israel, to be sure, is not as bad as India, Brazil and South Africa, which abstained, along with America’s Arab allies, on a motion in the United Nations General Assembly on April 7 to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council. Israel supported the resolution, just as it supported an earlier motion to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Israel can be proud of the humanitarian aid it has provided Ukraine, including sending a field hospital, and it can be proud of all of the Ukrainian refugees — many of them not Jewish — that it is taking in.

But Israel refuses to send arms to Ukraine or impose sanctions on Russia. Israel provides Arab dictatorships with its powerful Pegasus spyware but refuses to sell it to Ukraine, an embattled fellow democracy. Israel also won’t send Ukraine its Iron Dome missile-defense system or sufficiently crack down on Russian oligarchs, many of whom have ties to the Jewish state.

After the Bucha massacre was revealed, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid finally accused Russia of committing war crimes, but Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wouldn’t go that far. “We are shocked by what we see in Bucha, horrible images, and we condemn them,” Bennett said, without noting who had carried out these atrocities.

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Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman, a native of what is now Moldova and longtime fan of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin who leads a party of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, is even worse. Engaging in the slimiest moral equivalence imaginable, he said, “Russia is blaming Ukraine, and Ukraine is blaming Russia,” as if the two sides were equally culpable for the horrors in Bucha and beyond.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is himself Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust, expressed frustration with Israel’s stance in a March 20 speech to the Knesset. “One can keep asking why we can’t get weapons from you. Or why Israel has not imposed strong sanctions against Russia,” he said, while arguing that “indifference kills.”

But rather than rallying to Zelensky’s side, Israeli politicians were offended that he had dared to compare Ukraine’s suffering to the Holocaust while ignoring the participation of some Ukrainians in the genocide against the Jews. “The war is terrible,” Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel tweeted, “but comparison to the horrors of the Holocaust and the final solution is outrageous.”

In the weeks since Zelensky spoke, evidence of Russian war crimes has emerged along with the genocidal intent behind them, leading many experts to conclude that Russia is indeed perpetrating genocide. You would think that Israelis would be more offended by Russian crimes than by Ukrainian rhetoric about the Holocaust, but alas, there seems to be no rethinking going on.

Israel has a variety of reasons for turning its back on Ukraine. The fig leaf offered by Bennett is that he must stay neutral so as to mediate between Moscow and Kyiv; he even traveled to Russia to meet with Putin last month. Yet peace talks are going nowhere fast — and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been more active as a facilitator.

The real reason Israel refuses to offend Russia is that former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached a deal with Putin, whose air force controls Syrian airspace, to allow Israeli aircraft to carry out airstrikes against Iranian operations in Syria. Israel now admits to having carried out 400 airstrikes in Syria since 2017 in what its leaders call “the war between the wars.” Israel and Russia operate a “deconfliction” hotline to ensure that Israeli airstrikes don’t cause Russian casualties, and Russian jets and air defenses, in turn, don’t fire on Israeli warplanes.

But let’s get real. The dismal combat performance of the Russian military in Ukraine makes clear that Russia isn’t doing Israel any favors. If the Russians did target Israeli aircraft, the Israeli Air Force would make short work of the attackers. Indeed, it already has. In 1970, the Soviets were providing Egypt, then a client state, with surface-to-air missiles and even MiG-21s flown by Soviet pilots. After the Soviets downed several Israeli aircraft during the “War of Attrition” between Egypt and Israel, the Israeli Air Force responded by ambushing and shooting down five Soviet warplanes without losing a single one of their own aircraft. Moscow did nothing in response.

One of the few prominent Israeli politicians who dissents from its amoral approach to Ukraine is former Soviet prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky. He told my colleague Josh Rogin: “Zelensky is right when saying that this is not just a struggle for the Ukrainians, but a struggle for the entire free world. We have to do everything that we can to help them.”

Israel should heed Sharansky’s principled words. The Jewish state has long prided itself on being a “light unto the nations,” but it is flirting with darkness in Ukraine.