Vladimir Zelensky, the Zionist Jew President of the Ukraine, who is also the leader of a neo-Nazi gang, took the opportunity of a speech begging for weapons from Israel to deny the Holocaust, according to Israeli news.
I don’t know why the Jews are so shocked to see that their cousin who runs the Ukraine is a Holocaust denier – after all, Zelensky hired this guy in an official government capacity:
“Holocaust denier” seems to follow logically.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s virtual tour of Western parliaments has gone off mostly without a hitch. He referenced Winston Churchill to Westminster and Martin Luther King Jr. to Capitol Hill. The Ukrainian-to-English translator in Brussels broke down in tears translating his plea for help.
Zelensky continued his practice of customizing his speeches to suit his audience when he addressed the Knesset over Zoom, taking the comparisons he had already made between his country’s situation and World War II to the next level and dedicating the lion’s share of his speech to the Holocaust.
That comparison did not have the effect Zelensky apparently had hoped for.
Rather than stir Israel’s leaders and legislators to action and solidarity, the heavy Holocaust comparisons – from saying Moscow is planning a “final solution for the Ukrainian question” to saying that Israel should save Ukrainians like Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations saved Jews – drew more focus from its audience, which criticized its inappropriateness, than Zelensky’s appeal for weapons.
“I appreciate the President of Ukraine and support the Ukrainian people in heart and deed, but it is impossible to rewrite the terrible history of the Holocaust,” Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel tweeted. “Genocide was also committed on Ukrainian soil. The war is terrible, but the comparison to the horrors of the Holocaust and the final solution is outrageous.”
Asked about the tweet, Hendel said that he did not judge Zelensky’s behavior in a time of crisis, and he accepted Zelensky’s criticism of Israel and calls for Jerusalem to send weapons, but he felt he had to set the historical record straight.
Former cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz, now a Likud MK, went so far as to say, “If Zelensky’s speech was given… in normal [non-war] times, we would have said it bordered on Holocaust denial… Every comparison between a regular war, as difficult as it may be, and the extermination of millions of Jews in gas chambers in the framework of the Final Solution, is a total distortion of history. The same is true for the claim that Ukrainians helped Jews in the Holocaust… The historic truth is that the Ukrainian people cannot be proud of its behavior in the Holocaust of the Jews.”
“None of that changes the fact that despite the outrageous use of the Holocaust, we must continue humanitarian aid to the citizens of Ukraine suffering from the war and pray for its end to come soon,” he added.
Religious Zionist MK Simcha Rothman took issue with Zelensky’s reference to Ukrainians who saved Jews and tweeted: “I don’t understand Ukrainian, but if the translation I heard is accurate, Zelensky asked us to treat the Ukrainians like they treated us 80 years ago. I’m sorry, but I think we will have to reject that request. We are, after all, a moral nation.”
Israelis know the history of the Holocaust very well. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police rounded up Jews to be massacred in Babyn Yar, Lviv and Zhytomyr. About 80,000 Ukrainians volunteered for the SS, compared with 2,600 Ukrainians documented as having saved Jews. And before that, some of the worst pogroms in Jewish history were perpetrated in what is now Ukraine.
None of that should matter in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and is brutally bombarding its civilian centers. And, in fact, Israeli public opinion is strongly in favor of Ukraine in this war despite its bloody, violent history with Jews.
But Zelensky is the one who brought up the Holocaust and struck the wrong note with the Knesset, disturbing his audience rather than inspiring solidarity.
That emphasis distracted from Zelensky’s calls for more help from Israel, to which few in the political field responded publicly.
This is all just exhausting.
Basically, it is a situation of diaspora Jews not quite understanding the sensitivities of Israeli Jews. The speech was written in Ukrainian, and I don’t think Zelensky speaks Hebrew or Yiddish. His speech writers are all Jewish, I’m certain, but they just don’t have the same kind of reference point of the Holocaust that Israelis have.
If you had to break that down, you would probably say that the alleged “Holocaust” is the foundation of the nation of Israel, whereas Jews in Eastern Europe are still basically hated by the population, so they don’t have the luxury of whining about some fake event from nearly 100 years ago.
You can see the speechwriters thinking “Israelis are big into the Holocaust, let’s write the speech around that.”
I wouldn’t say this is all “staged,” exactly. It’s not completely. Of course, Zelensky’s benefactor Igor Kolomoisky has Israeli citizenship, but I don’t think he’s lived there or understands the specificities of their culture. (I also don’t think he’s personally reviewing Zelensky’s speeches anyway, he has other Jews handling him.)
I think Kolomoisky and the other big Ukrainian Jews do want Israel to take a harder line than they have already, but they probably also understand that Israel can’t start sanctioning Russian Jews, who are currently in the process of moving all their wealth to Israel.
The underlying relationship between Jews, Israel, and Vladimir Putin is also both tenuous and complicated.
Putin has carved out a power balance between his control of the federal government, military, and intelligence agencies with the local Jewish “oligarchs” in Russia (that he didn’t have arrested or exiled). These Jews don’t necessarily have a strong connection to Israel – not the same strength of connection that American Jews have. But of course, they are still Jews, and they’re still going to flee there. (We reported previously that they are in the process of doing that.) So, there’s that issue: Israel won’t sanction Russia, because it would mean sanctioning Jews who are in the process of moving their stolen money to Israel.
But the bigger issue is the balance that has been struck between Israel and Russia in the Middle East. Russia deployed its military to fight Israeli-backed terrorists in 2015, and ended up ensuring that Bashir al-Assad, the guy who the Jews were trying to remove, stayed in power.
Beyond that, Russia has maintained good relations with most or all of Israel’s regional enemies, including Iran, who they’ve pretty consistently supplied weapons to.
Considering all of this, Israel is worried about taking an “outright enemy” stance against Russia.
Russia doesn’t have evangelical Christian Jew-lovers, and Russians tend to not be very fond of Jews in general. That is to say: there is no built-in backstop to prevent Russia and Israel from being open enemies, other than the fact that there are powerful Jews in Russia. But if Israel declared itself an enemy of Russia, and Russian Jews sided with Israel, that would give Putin an excuse to clean house.
I’m always a bit weary of narratives that involve “Jews battling with other Jews” or even “Jews having any relevant disagreements with other Jews,” as this is not in my experience something that actually happens. It is also used for kook narratives, like “the war in Ukraine is a battle between Russian Jews and Ukrainian Jews,” which, needless to say, doesn’t make any sense (a battle for what?).
That said, I am willing to believe that this situation with Israel refusing to fully commit to the Ukraine is frustrating to Ukrainian Jews.
But it doesn’t really matter much. The Ukraine already has the full support of the US and NATO. Israel isn’t really an important country in the military sense – or rather, they are, but only because they are backed 100% by America.
The bottom line is: Jews are such an utter nuisance.