Opinion | Israel Owes the Ukrainians Nothing

Protesters marching at a rally in support of Ukraine, in front of the Russian embassy in Tel-Aviv, on Thursday.Credit: Tomer Applebaum

When Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is criticized for his indecisive policy on the issue of accepting Ukrainian refugees, when Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked is crucified for her “nationalist” remarks and fear for the purity of the Jewish state, what exactly is the problem?

 
Is it the betrayal of Jewish values, or a personal complaint? It’s particularly hard to explain the naïveté of the bleeding hearts who think that because the Jewish people was the greatest victim in human history, it owes something to someone. The Israeli government, as its representative on earth, they scream, must immediately bridge the gap between its status as professional victim and its overlooking of other victims.

Excuse me, says the government, no one can teach us about suffering, persecution and being refugees. We have a lot to say about selection, too. Not only because of the Holocaust. We well remember Amalek and the Chmielnicki (Khmelnytskyi) pogroms. Who helped us then? Do we now have to commit national suicide because of the suffering of others?

It’s not clear where the idea that the victim should understand and help other victims came from. Anyway, the victims themselves are largely to blame for their situation. After all, for decades Israelis accused Shoah victims of going like sheep to the slaughter, and only many years later did they attach the adjective “heroic” to the Holocaust.

 
Israelis hurl a similar accusation at the Palestinian refugees – they are to blame that they became refugees. It’s not Israel’s fault that the Ukrainians are not willing to die for their country. Not only does the Jewish people clearly understand its unique status of victimhood, its state also knows what it is to be surrounded by enemies. But that’s the way it is with history. Only the strong survive. In short, go jump in the lake. Any Ukrainian, Eritrean, Sudanese or Vietnamese national who comes here is one too many, and they should say thank you.

 
The most annoying performance is put on by those who ask Israel to abandon the Jewish values in favor of universal values in order to rescue the refugees. Presumably they don’t recognize the contradiction in which they’re trapped. How can a people that sees itself as a light unto the nations adopt their values? And following from this, the state of the chosen people must not defile its chosenness by absorbing foreign values.

 
This is similar to the inherent contradiction in defining Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Israel is not a universalist state, its values rest on Scripture and its interpretation by the sages. It has a ruling race whose characteristics are not ethnic but rather one variety of Judaism – Orthodox.

Even more puzzling is how the universal-liberal flag bearers, those leftists with little sense of history, don’t realize that in the same breath in which they call Israel a Jewish apartheid state, they demand that it embrace other races. All it needs right now is to take in a few thousand non-Jewish Ukrainians to crush its image as a discriminatory state.

 
And we haven’t yet even mentioned the absurdity of demanding that a state whose identity is wrapped up in occupation condemn the Russian occupier. That’s not only hypocritical (Europe and the United States can’t teach us what hypocrisy is, see under “Holocaust”), but acceding to the demand means relinquishing the roots that guarantee the state’s continued existence. A Jew who condemns Russia today will demand tomorrow, heaven forfend, Israel’s withdrawal from the territories.

 
Israel must identify not with the wretched people who are fleeing from their homeland, but rather with the superpower that gives it the ideological justification for taking over a region that it has always seen as its property. Anyone who is upset by the number of the dead, refugees and orphans should immediately repeat that Russia is not an occupier of Ukraine, it is a liberator and redeemer of its own lands. Kyiv is Hebron, Kharkiv is Ofra, the Crimean Peninsula is Samaria. Immediate relief of guilt is assured.