On the war among empires and spheres of influence, the long Jewish history has crossed civilizations and bears witness to this. In high politics, the armies, covert diplomacy and secret agreements dictate the rules. These rules are not dictated by what is broadcast on television, which generally only serves to propaganda and entertain journalists and commentators, who inevitably never manage to explain what is happening without contradicting themselves the following week.
Donald Trump, characterized by Benjamin Netanyahu as “the best friend of Israel and the Jewish people” does not differ much from his predecessors, although he has a more intense and exaggerated profile. One of the keys to the success of the great nation on the other side of the Atlantic has always been gratitude to the Jews. The United States of America is the country of Haim Solomon and George Washington. Israel recognizes this fact, and uses diplomatic power in its favor, without this preventing it from having cooperative relations with the other powers of the world, whatever their political models.
Xi Jinping is perhaps the most powerful man on the face of the Earth, a sort of world banker. China, the imperial giant of commerce, nurtures relations with the Jewish state that go far beyond the dynamics around the port of Haifa. Also Vladimir Putin, the big bad wolf of Europe, has never been seen that way in Israel. At different times, Naftali Bennett and Ariel Sharon defined the president of the Russian Federation as “a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people”; and he himself repeatedly stated that “Israel is part of the cultural world of Russia, with 1.5 million Russian speakers”.
In the hostage crisis in Gaza, almost all the captives had dual or even triple nationality, including American, Russian and Portuguese. Citizens of 50 countries were direct victims of the October 7 massacre. The Jewish world is the whole world.
With its world headquarters in New York but founded in Lubavitch, Russia, Chabad is the strongest Jewish organization in religious terms. The movement has more than 5000 emissaries spread around the world, including Shanghai, Hong Kong and Moscow, with large families that essentially intermarry, which has resulted in a body of tens of thousands of people who in most cases descend from Rabbi Portugali.
Every year, thousands of Israeli and American Jews join Moscow’s Jewish community, supported largely by Jewish billionaires with Russian, Israeli and American nationality, which has contributed to ensuring that local Jewish life is lacking. Not infrequently, Jewish tourists are astonished when visiting certain areas of the capital of the Eurasian giant, as they come across masses of Jews from New York or Jerusalem and a huge set of Jewish institutions of a very high level.
The same is true, albeit on a smaller scale, in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, where Jewish life also thrives thanks to the generosity of prosperous ex-Soviet Jews and under the baton of Chabad Lubavitch rabbis such as Jonathan Markovich, Avraham Wolff and Yeshaya Cohen. The excellent worldwide reputation of the Chabad movement, the trust placed in it by Jewish business and local authorities, and the economic, technological, and political relations of the governments of these nations with the state of Israel, are factors that have greatly benefited the local Jewish communities.
In 2022, a senior Russian official, drunk with the dynamics of the war, publicly called Chabad representatives installed in Ukraine “a sect”; and soon the rabbis of the Moscow community demanded his removal from office, which the Kremlin soon carried out. The following year, hundreds of young radical Muslims from Dagestan rioted at the capital’s airport over a flight carrying Israelis who wanted to visit their families there. The regime’s severe repression of the perpetrators of the riots and of the local authorities themselves was not long in coming.
After the massacre of October 7, 2023, many apologists for the advanced doctrines of wokism and neonationalism began to call for Russia and China to lead a coalition of forces from the “Global South” against Zionism, which they associated with “imperialism”, to achieve a rapid reconfiguration of the Near East to the detriment of the Jewish state or even its destruction. The enemy they once claimed to hate for having invaded Ukraine, became their hidden love, so that Israel would be forced to direct military confrontation with the nuclear power whose belligerence allowed it to win two hundred wars and to pay a high price for the “genocide” it would have supposedly committed without concern for the number of civilians affected.
The times seemed favorable for those who longed for Israel’s doom. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and others were sold to the public as invincible forces. Russia’s rhetorical statements at the UN against the military actions that the State of Israel considered necessary to stop its enemies did not differ much from the declarations once proclaimed by the USSR, which guaranteed it enormous popularity among Arab and Muslim countries, as well as among those who idolize the Palestinian cause. However, the premises from which those who wished the Russian Federation to lead an alliance of nations against Israel were not sufficient to make this aspiration viable.
The relationship between Israel and Russia has been intrinsically linked to the Jewish presence since the collapse of the USSR, when hundreds of thousands of Jews emigrated to Israel, while others became multimillionaires in that icy country, even before the current Russian president came to power. In addition, the personal ties of this leader, since his youth, with Jewish families known for their generosity, contributed to encouraging the return of Jews of Russian origin to the country, especially from Israel and the USA, where the largest Jewish communities in the world were concentrated.
Although Russia is not aligned with Israel’s territorial and security project, there is cooperation between the two states, crystallized in the connection of the Jewish communities of those nations and the direct line between the Russian president and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Both have been in power for more than two decades in nations that have not been shaken by deep splits, successive changes of governments and unfinished projects. “Poisonings”, “the Bucha massacre”, “reconstruction of Ukraine”, to all this Israel responded without pointing the finger at Russia, which brings together half a million Jews, most of whom are Israelis and Americans.
The State of Israel sponsored trilateral security meetings with the US and Russia, did not apply international sanctions to the powerful Eurasian regime, and did not provide lethal weapons to the government of Volodymyr Zelensky (which Bennett, as Israeli Prime Minister, asked the Kremlin not to kill). It benefited from the green light from Moscow to repress threats from Syrian territory, as long as such repression did not affect Russian military bases, Russian-trained Syrian forces and other strategic interests of the Russian Federation. The coordination team for these movements in Syria used the Russian language to communicate with Israelis of Russian origin and officers of Jewish origin on the part of Russia. Even when Israel accidentally shot down a Russian plane full of high-ranking officers, the matter was resolved politically.
The press only becomes aware of what the chancelleries decide to disclose, as a rule vague statements, and apparently no one has any interest in dismantling great certainties and models of absolute truth that, in fact, are immersed in blindness. Relations between states, restricted, and which can change overnight, are affirmed by facts, even if not well known, never by ideologized propaganda machines. The very entry of the Russian military into Syria was justified by the Kremlin as an important factor for the protection of “hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens in Israel” against various radical Islamist adversaries. In Israeli power offices, the Russian presence in Syria was called “our northern neighbor”, while the Russians even stated that “there would be no more threats in the Golan Heights”.
Israel’s stance toward Russia and China are even deeper. It has its explanation in a Jewish history of millennia, which teaches how to maintain the possible balances and equidistance in relation to great conflicts and great contenders. The complex geopolitical and geostrategic game of the world, where the largest military empires always confront or articulate, is nothing that the Jews have not already witnessed many times. It is enough to recall the tensions between the Assyrians and the Babylonians, which led to the conquest of Israel by the former and Judah by the latter. Where are these empires? They died, while the people of Israel survived, through a rational coherence of historical events. The oldest peoples are the Jews and the Chinese.
Israel’s interests are Jewish interests and there is something that has been largely disregarded. At least for the next few years, the ideological destiny of the planet seems to be mapped out on a very different basis from the one it has governed until now. The world powers in the West and Asia may wage war over oil and spheres of influence, but if they agree on certain axiological principles, it is inevitable that the corresponding trends will be imposed on everyone. It means that the ideology known as wokism has seen better days. The presidents of the world’s major military and territorial powers are ostensibly against any slogans about sexual minorities and pub talk.
In each era, politics is reconfigured by those who have the power, whatever the models implemented and the words of the legal texts. The rhetoric and the notions of right or wrong do not matter. The dissatisfied submit.
