Over the last month, it seems that not a week has passed by without Russia going out of its way to demonstrate its hostility towards Israel, on many occasions gift wrapping this in antisemitism or downplaying the Holocaust.
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Three weeks ago, it was Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who referred to the US aid to Ukraine as "an attempt to reach the final solution to the Russian question" (and he was consequently lambasted for making such a comparison); only a few days later, Russia admonished Germany for standing by Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague; on Saturday night the foreign ministry in Moscow published a message ridiculing Israel's difficulty in releasing hostages; and yesterday was the turn of Simona Halperin, the ambassador of the State of Israel to the Russian Federation, to gain first-hand experience of the thuggery of the (not-so) diplomatic service from Moscow's Smolensk Square.
Halperin was summoned to the Stalinist skyscraper for a dressing down "due to public statements that distort Russia's foreign policy and the historical reality." According to Russian news agency TASS, the foreign ministry "was especially resentful of the fact that Israel's ambassador spoke in a disrespectful manner regarding the efforts that Russia has been investing to assist in the release of the hostages."
But what exactly did the ambassador actually say? In an interview to the Russian daily Kommersant, Halperin dared to state a number of plain facts: Russia refrained from condemning the October 7 massacre for a long period of time, not even referring to it as a "terrorist attack", constantly hosting Hamas and "embracing the organization's heads," claiming that it is engaged in talks to release the hostages yet "people have remained in captivity for four months already," and in general does not voice even one word of criticism against Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
But according to the announcement made by the Russians, it was Halperin's references to the Holocaust that "particularly angered" them. "Unfortunately, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is not officially commemorated in the Russian Federation's official calendar," stated the ambassador. "I just cannot understand why Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov downplays the significance of this monstrous event [the Holocaust]. Yes, many nations suffered tremendously heavy losses, the Russian people paid the price of the victory over the Nazis with millions of lives. And we do remember this. But all the same, the world has never known such an absolute and systematically planned destruction of people based on their national identity. Only the Jewish people have undergone such a fate."
So, why did this quote of all infuriate the Russians to such an extent? In recent years, the more that President Putin's regime has tried to increasingly present Russia as the adversary of the West and the heir-successor of the Soviet Union, so vintage Soviet motifs have begun to pop up again in the public discourse – including the attitude to the Holocaust. Although more than 1.2 million Jews were exterminated across Soviet territory, the official Soviet historiography prohibited relating to it as a separate, distinct event, and the Jews, despite the clear difference in the Nazi approach to them, were simply swallowed up in the broad definition of the "victims of the Soviet nation in the war against fascism." The insistence on the unique nature of the Holocaust goes heavily against the old-new narrative in Moscow, and also undermines the free use that the Kremlin makes of the tragedy for its own purposes – for example, to portray the democratic West as the "new Nazis", and Russia – as the "Jews" being persecuted by it.
The deterioration in the relations between Russia and Israel since October 7 – the delay in Moscow's condemnation of Hamas, the anti-Israeli propaganda, diminishing the importance of the Holocaust, as well as a whole bag of dirty tricks – is posing a thorny challenge to Israeli diplomacy. Against this background, in retrospect, this merely serves to bolster the impression of just how dubious it was for Israel to provide Putin with such generous helpings of legitimacy following the invasion of Ukraine – commencing with the attendance of senior figures and officials at the official receptions held by the ambassador at the Russian Embassy, via concessions for the future opening of the consulate in Jerusalem and culminating in the rather bizarre agreement for cooperation in the field of cinema.
However hard Israel tried to toe the line of neutrality, when Russia decided to do so – it labeled Jerusalem as part of the West and had no qualms about throwing it under the bus. And perhaps this is the basic historical lesson to be learned: apart from very short periods of time, Moscow was and still remains part of the camp that is hostile towards Israel, and when the going gets tough, it will not hesitate to turn its back on the Jewish state and might even stick a knife in its back, to boot.
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