Ukraine Is Like the West Bank, Not Like Israel

UKRAINE IS LIKE THE WEST BANK, NOT LIKE ISRAEL

Over a decade ago my son and I were eating lunch at a large table when I asked him if he could pass me the salt. He responded, “Of course I can,” and did nothing. When I repeated my request, he snapped back with childish impudence: “You asked me if I can do it, and I answered. You didn’t tell me that I should really do it!”

Who, in this situation, was more free: me or my son? If freedom is understood as freedom of choice, then my son was more free—he had the additional choice of how to understand my question, either literally (am I able to do it) or in the usual everyday sense (a request posed as a question out of politeness). Imagine a world where most people acted like my son: We would never know for sure what someone wanted to say, and we would lose immense amounts of time trying to interpret it.

Have we not been facing a similar situation in our political lives for the last few decades? Even when Donald Trump and his alt-Right populists do not violate explicit laws, they ignore the unwritten rules and customs. Two years ago, in Slovenia, my own country, there was a conflict concerning the nomination of Slovene members of the European court. The Rightist government took its purely formal function literally and acted as if it had to decide and make a choice—like my son who took my request for him to pass the salt literally and didn’t do it.

Trump’s Republicans are doing something similar in the U.S. The American legal system stipulates that if the outcome of a state’s elections is not clear, that state’s congress can directly nominate electors. The Republican interpretation of this is that if a Republican-dominated congress does not like an electoral result, it can directly nominate electors. One of the conditions of political democracy is that all political agents speak the same language—meaning there is a common understanding of electoral rules so that electoral outcomes are accepted. If not, we find ourselves close to a civil war, as is now the case in the U.S.

The same holds for international politics: All parties are expected to speak the same language when it comes to freedom and occupation. Today’s extreme case is, of course, Russia—claiming its invasion of Ukraine is decolonization. Unfortunately, Ukraine fell into the same trap. In his speech before the Israeli Knesset on March 22, 2022, Zelensky said: “We are in different countries and in completely different conditions. But the threat is the same: for both us and you, the total destruction of the people, state, culture. And even of the names: Ukraine, Israel.”

I fully agree with political scientist Asad Ghanem, who claims that this speech was:

… a disgrace when it comes to global struggles for freedom and liberation, particularly of the Palestinian people. You reversed the roles of occupier and occupied. You missed another opportunity to demonstrate the justice of your cause and the broader cause of freedom. I am angry and sad that Russia is seeking to occupy your country and to crush the rights of the Ukrainian people to self-determination and freedom, and I believe that every possible support must be given to Ukrainians as they resist this barbaric aggression.13

Again, I fully agree with Ghanem that “every possible support must be given to Ukrainians.” Western help to Ukraine was not a failure, it stopped the Russian advance—without it, Ukraine would be fully occupied by Russia. But, unfortunately, Zelensky’s Knesset speech was not a singular event: Ukraine regularly takes public positions in support of Israeli occupation. In 2020, it opted to quit the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, a body tasked with supporting Palestinian rights.14 On August 7, 2022, the Ukrainian ambassador to Israel, Yevgen Korniychuk, expressed his full support for Tel Aviv: “As a Ukrainian whose country is under a very brutal attack by its neighbor, I feel great sympathy towards the Israeli public.”15

This comparison between Israel and Ukraine is misplaced. If there is a parallel, it is between Ukrainians and West Bank Palestinians. Similar to how Russians treat Ukrainians, Israel denies Palestinians are a nation, they are dismissed as part of the Arabs. The difference is that both Israel and Palestine admit to each other’s otherness, whereas Russia claims Ukrainians don’t exist—they are part of Russia and their autonomy is a fiction attributed to Lenin and Nazis. Like Israel, Russia is a military superpower colonizing a smaller and weaker entity (the West Bank and Ukraine, respectively). Like Russia in occupied Ukraine, Israel is practicing a politics of apartheid that reduces Palestinians to second-class citizens.

To add insult to injury, Israel hasn’t returned the favor and supported Ukraine. It oscillates between Russia and Ukraine, with a tilt toward Russia for strategic reasons: Israel needs Russia, the patron of Syria, to tolerate its attacks on parts of Syria. Plus, Israel is suspicious of anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Why, then, does Ukraine support Israel? For ideological reasons (and also for winning the West’s favor), Ukraine presents its struggle as a defense of Europe and European civilization, and against the barbaric-totalitarian East.

It ignores the dark side of Europe, which is marked by modern slavery, colonialism, and Fascism, to name a few. It is absolutely crucial to formulate the defense of Ukraine in universal terms. If we reduce the Ukrainian struggle to the defense of Europe, we are speaking the language of Putin’s court philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin, who opposes Russian and European truths. This has catastrophic implications: It directly serves Russia’s global propaganda, which presents its attack on Ukraine as Ukraine’s decolonization, as the struggle against Western neoliberal domination, and as a step toward a multipolar world.

Europe and Russia are not speaking the same language. Russia is enforcing new “freedoms” that justify brutal neo-feudal domination. Ukraine is not doing the same. However, by perceiving Israel’s colonization of the West Bank as a defensive struggle for freedom, Ukraine is putting its own justified struggle for freedom in the same category as another country’s aggression. Sooner or later, Ukraine will have to decide whether it will be truly European, participating in the universal emancipatory project that defines Europe, or part of the neoconservative populist wave.

Back to the anecdote about my son and salt. When Ukraine asked the West, “Can you help me and pass me some arms?” the West replied correctly, offering help instead of the cynical quip, “Yes, I can!” followed by nothing. West Bank Palestinians are also asking for help, but are getting close to nothing, mostly empty statements of solidarity—and sometimes not even that, and instead, solidarity with their oppressor. They ask for the salt, and it’s given to their opponent.