Like most countries, Israel is seeing two relatively stable ideological outlooks when it comes to what action Israel should take in the Ukraine war.
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On the neoconservative side, we see mostly talk about the need to be smart, not right. This translates to preaching about keeping the Russian player a friend of Israel in the Middle East. Those who espouse this view talk about Israel as having been abandoned by the US on the Iranian nuclear issue and "thrown" to the wolves by Europe, and say it will have to swallow the Russian aggression.
They say Israel should remember that international relations are pragmatic, not empathic, and that Russia – not Ukraine – is the one allowed us to maneuver in Syrian airspace to bomb strategic targets.
From the "new Left," we are reading on Israeli and international sites that neither Israel nor European member states ("little Satan") who have followed the US (the "great Satan") have any legitimacy to condemn Putin's actions, since they are the true occupiers (globalization, capitalism, "the occupation"). They are part of the Western colonialism of which NATO is the ultimate symbol, and the ones that pushed Russia into behaving brutally, and now cannot criticize anyone who has been pushed into a corner.
The neoconservatives surprise us with their willingness to give in to Putin and urge that he not be angered. These are the same people who pressed former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to clash with former US President Barack Obama in Congress prior to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, when Israel was much more dependent on him than it is on the Russians now – that same administration gave Israel one of the most generous defense aid packages in US history. On the other hand, the people of the new Left aren't surprising anyone – they have framed many aggressors and romanticized victims of the West, from Yasser Arafat to various leaders of evil empires.
In my opinion, neither of these is a view to be adopted. Sometimes it is simply appropriate to look reality squarely in the eyes. At this time, we should recall Israel's pointless squirming on the issue of the Armenian genocide: what did Israel gain by its governments' supposedly rational avoidance of recognizing the genocide of the Armenians? Did it strengthen our relations with Turkey? Did it ensure that Turkey's Erdogan would stand by our side? Of course, it did not. In the future, for the sake of preserving our ties with Russia, will the government ban representatives from attending memorial ceremonies for those who fell in the Ukraine War, if the Ukrainian community in Israel decides to hold them? Will deputy ministers be forbidden to take part in a university panel on the war as a needless act of aggression? Will it warn the embassy in Kyiv not to place a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?
It would be good if Israel's government officials, and their colleagues throughout the world, would understand that on certain moral questions, Israel is like the child in "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a minority of cases, the right thing to do is also the wise course of action, both in terms of conduct and in terms of morality. It both liberates us from the need to weigh every step and walk on eggshells, and allows us to describe the reality as it is. This war is a criminal act of Russian aggression. We can and should say it.
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