Regarding antisemitism

We noted the statement by Foreign Minister of Israel Yair Lapid, which contradicts history and largely explains the policy by the current Government of Israel to support the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. The Israeli minister said, to quote him verbatim: “Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”

For some reason, the Western press, and some of our own liberals, still debate the question of whether there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, with Vladimir Zelensky’s origin cited as a substantial argument. Of course, not only does this argument not hold water, but it is also misleading. Unfortunately, history does include tragic examples of Jews collaborating with the Nazis. In fact, the Germans appointed Jewish industrialists to head the ghettos and the Jewish councils (the ‘Judenrats’) in Poland and other Eastern European countries, and some of them came to be remembered for their horrendous acts. In Warsaw, Jakub Lejkin spied on the Jews and reported everything he saw to the German occupation administration, condemning his fellow compatriots to a sure and, at times, painful death. Chaim Rumkowski went as far as to ask the Jews in Lodz to hand over their children to the Nazis to save the lives of the ghetto’s adults. Many testimonies confirm his statement to this effect.

Of course, we cannot help but agree with what Professor Havi Dreifuss from Tel Aviv University said on Jewish collaboration during the Holocaust being a ‘marginal phenomenon,’ without it, however, being a taboo subject. In fact, researchers are working on this. What makes this tragic, from a historical perspective, is that during World War II some Jews were forced to take part in perpetrating crimes, while Vladimir Zelensky has been speculating on his roots in all consciousness and quite voluntarily. He has been using his origins as a cover-up for himself, as well as for the genuine neo-Nazis who descend, both spiritually and by blood, from the executioners of their people.

The president’s Jewish roots cannot serve as a safeguard against the neo-Nazi rampage in the country. By the way, Ukraine is not alone in this situation. President of Latvia Egils Levits has Jewish roots as well, and has been equally ‘successful’ in covering up efforts to white-wash the Waffen-SS in his country.

Can it be that Lapid fails to see all this, just as he cynically ignores the epidemic to destroy and desecrate monuments to the most Righteous Among Nations – the Red Army soldiers who stopped the Holocaust and saved the Jewish world? How many times has the Israeli Foreign Ministry summoned the ambassadors from Poland, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, and Ukraine, to deliver protest notes phrased in the harshest of terms?

What Lapid fails to see is that Zelensky is simply seeking to finish a scenario once described by Martin Niemöller, a German pastor. It all started in 2014 for Ukraine: first they came for the communists, then they came for the socialists, and then the entire ‘civilised’ world remained silent when Ukraine ‘cancelled’ the Russians. Don’t you have enough imagination to understand what kind of ‘non-native’ people will follow the Russians to the gallows?

Allow us to give you a hint.

Unimaginable only recently, crass antisemitism and Roma-phobia have become rampant in Ukraine, even if we set the frenzied Russophobia and efforts to eradicate everything Russian aside.

The nationalist parties started pushing their antisemitic agenda after the USSR’s dissolution and have been especially proactive in recent years. The World Jewish Congress listed Oleg Tyagnibok’s Freedom party among neo-Nazi organisations, which did nothing to prevent it from becoming the country’s fourth major party in 2012. Antisemitism flourished in Ukraine after the 2014 coup. In his report, former Minister for Diaspora Affairs and current Prime Minister of Israel Naftali Bennett wrote that in 2017, the number of antisemitic incidents increased several times over in Ukraine, including dozens of acts of vandalism against memorials, museums, and synagogues. Ukraine led the countries of the former USSR in terms of the number of antisemitic incidents, with some articles noting that Ukraine had more incidents of this kind than all the other former Soviet countries combined.

Only recently, Eduard Dolinsky, a prominent member of Ukraine’s Jewish community, said that he feared that his organisation, the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, would be forced to cease its activity. Torch processions in Kiev with Stepan Bandera’s image and ‘Jews Get Out’ slogans, as well as the inscriptions on synagogues by vandals (‘death to the Jews’) speak for themselves.

Last year, the neo-Nazis desecrated the Kiev menorah during Hannukah celebrations, while in Nikolayev, antisemites cut the garland on the hanukkiah. They stopped at the garland, so far.

Jews are not the only ones to suffer. Quite often, the Roma are persecuted on ethnic grounds. In autumn 2021, fascists detained four Roma women in Kiev and humiliated them, painting their faces with a green solution and writing ‘Thief’ on their foreheads. An equally outrageous incident happened in the dead centre of the Ukrainian capital, where a passer-by insulted Roma women by telling them in crude language to get out of the Maidan Square. Incidents like this are reported frequently, but in Ukraine they are qualified as petty offences, at best.

Ukraine does have a law on preventing and countering antisemitism, signed by Vladimir Zelensky in 2020, but it has remained dead letter. Nothing is done to stop antisemitism in everyday life and politics. Instead, it is being encouraged. The government and the law enforcement agencies take anti-Jewish chants during Banderite marches in stride, just because the current Kiev regime is so confident in its infallibility. For a country that lost 1.5 million Jews during the Holocaust, and whose capital is home to a memorial to the victims killed at Babi Yar, ‘nation building’ along these lines is especially immoral.