Ukraine is not Gaza, Israel is not Russia

Artists from Ukraine are also spreading anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propaganda around the world. They are falling for a narrative that goes back to Stalin's USSR.

Published in German in FAZ, (the original German version)

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Illustration from the Soviet Ukrainian-language magazine Perets, 1981

Some days ago, an initiative of Ukrainian artists, intellectuals and activists published a so-called letter of solidarity with Palestinian people. Like all appeals of this kind, the Ukrainian one also contains the framing of the entire conflict as Israel's sole responsibility. What distinguishes the Ukrainian letter from others and makes it interesting is that Palestine is identified with Ukraine and Israel with Russia.

On the one hand, it is particularly absurd, because in one case it is an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state, in the other it is a protracted conflict between several parties in which there was a lot of mutual violence and injustice. And yet the anti-Israeli and anti-Ukrainian propaganda are very similar because they fuel and reproduce each other and have a common origin - in Stalin's USSR. The Ukrainian appeal contains the four main elements of this propaganda.

1. Delegitimisation through fictional alternative histories and "red herrings" - endlessly repeated baseless accusations. In the case of Israel, this is mainly a formula of “colonial settlement, genocide and apartheid”. In comparison, Ukraine is portrayed as an artificial invention (e.g. by Lenin); in addition, there are accusations of discrimination against Russians and also of genocide, as grotesque as they may be. Putin accused Ukraine of genocide against the Russian people with the argument that if the Ukrainians no longer wanted to call themselves Russians, then the Russian people would become several million people smaller. This also includes the juggling of names: Ukraine as the periphery, "Okraina", Palestine as the whole territory "from the river to the sea".

2. Istrumentalisation of dark pages of history in order to delegitimise the modern state. In the case of Israel, for example: the participation of the far-right in the Zionist movement, violence against the Arab population during the creation of Israel and the First Arab-Israeli war, terrorism as part of the struggle for independence. In the case of Ukraine: Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Waffen-SS unit, the massacre of Poles in Volhynia.

3. Instrumentalisation of internal criticism (both conventional opposition and media criticism and marginal radical criticism) to delegitimise the state.

4. The use of disinformation and manipulation to frame contemporary events and shift responsibility from the aggressor to the victim.

The most basic element of the defamation of Israel is that it is a "colonial imperial settlement project". Yet Jews have been living continuously in the territory of modern Israel for several thousand years. Jerusalem was built by Jews as the capital of a Jewish state. Even after the expulsion, a few thousand Jews remained in Jerusalem - with Jerusalem becoming a small city by the 19th century.

It was the colonising empires that expelled the Jews from their land, but a significant number of Jews remained in the region - tens of thousands living until recently in Egypt and modern-day Syria and Lebanon, while others were scattered throughout the Middle East and far beyond their historic homeland. All the while, they have been subjected to persecution, discrimination, expulsion and physical violence (albeit with varying intensity in different regions and at different times), and nowhere have they received adequate protection from the states in which they lived.

Zionism emerged in the 19th century as one of many national movements - such as the Czech, Ukrainian, Latvian, and so on. The essential difference was that the European national movements were seeking the emancipation of their peoples in their territories and their liberation from the empires - Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, and German - while the Jews first had to resettle in their historic homeland. Which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. To this end, the Jews began to buy land there - openly, legally and without hiding why they were doing so. The mass return of Jews to their historic homeland (aliyah) was triggered by pogroms, which began in the Russian Empire in the 19th century but became particularly violent in the early 20th century. At that time there was also a much more massive emigration to America, which was almost the only relatively safe place for Jews in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

After World War I, the Ottoman Empire lost its colonies and the region called Palestine was placed under the administration (Mandate) of the British Empire by the then newly formed League of Nations. One of the aims of the Mandate was to administer the territory until the creation of a "national home for the Jewish people". The Zionist leadership in British-ruled Palestine was largely left-wing. From the beginning, different projects of peaceful coexistence with the Arabs were considered. The idea that they should be expelled was only held by marginal right-wing groups with little influence.

At the same time, Arab nationalism and the pan-Arab movement developed, both of which sought to dominate the region. This is one of the reasons why, when in 1947 the UN adopted a plan for the partition of the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, and Israel declared independence in 1948, a coalition of Arab countries attacked it the very next day.

At the time, Israel was weak. Nevertheless, it managed to repel the attack and defend its independence. Israel annexed some of the territories that the UN had allocated to the Arab state, Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt occupied Gaza. And so it remained until the Six Day War in 1967. The letter, like many such texts, claims that the people of Palestine have been under Israeli occupation for 75 years. This is factually untrue. Furthermore, Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The wording of the letter implies that the mere fact that Israel exists constitutes an occupation of Palestine.

During the First Arab-Israeli war there was a mass exodus of the Arab population from Israel, called the Nakba, the catastrophe. However, it is not correct to say that all Arabs were expelled. The Zionist leadership had no plans to expel the Arabs, this is not supported by any serious historical research. On the contrary, declassified government records show that Ben-Gurion condemned terror against the Arab population by individual units. There were several reasons for the exodus. There was obviously violence on the part of the Israelis, but there was also fear, and calls from Arab countries for Arabs to leave the war zone temporarily. The aggressors assumed that they would win quickly and that the Arabs would be able to return home when the war was over. Those Arabs who stayed became citizens of Israel and have the same rights as all other citizens of Israel. There is no "apartheid" in Israel.

Another consequence of the creation of Israel was the exodus of Jews from the Middle East, comparable in numbers to the Arab exodus from Israel and Palestine. Again, several factors were at work, both violence, expulsion and the attraction of Israel as a home for all Jews. In some countries, the Jewish population went from tens and hundreds of thousands to zero. Population shifts resulting from the collapse of empires and wars were commonplace in the 20th century. Population "exchanges" between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria affected millions of people; after the Second World War, some 12 to 14 million Germans were expelled from Central and Eastern Europe; up to 1.7 million were killed or died in the process of deportation and flight. The USSR expelled Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and other populations from annexed territories that are now part of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and so on. Millions were displaced in the process of creating India and Pakistan.

In all these cases, those who were expelled or fled were accepted as citizens by the nation-states in which they found themselves. The only exception to this worldwide practice was for Arabs from Palestine, for whom the UN created a special status of hereditary refugees, and most Arab countries in which Palestinian refugees found themselves refused to naturalise them, weaponising their fate against Israel and thus deliberately prolonging the conflict.

The USSR was largely behind these decisions. At first, the USSR supported the creation of Israel because the Zionist movement was dominated by the left and Stalin thought he was getting another puppet ally. Then, when Israel became an ally of the USA, the USSR began to actively fight it - diplomatically, by providing military aid to Arab countries, by supporting Palestinian terrorist organisations and by means of propaganda. It is this propaganda that resonates in so many letters of solidarity with Palestine today.