The New Neo

It’s complicated:

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky declared Tuesday that, when the war is finally over, Ukraine would emerge from the rubble a “big Israel.”

He meant that the war would never really be over, that Ukraine would be on a permanent war footing, just as the Jewish state is. He meant that it would view its neighbors the way Israel has long viewed its own: As enemies waiting to pounce. Most importantly, he meant that Ukraine would never again rely on anyone else for its security: not the West, not the international community, not the so-called liberal order. It would be, like Israel, a nation apart, answering to no one but its people, in control of its own destiny.

The article then goes into the fact that Israel, despite being temperamentally and emotionally aligned with Ukraine in this fight, has diplomatically taken a less-aligned stance. The author adds:

How did Israel end up walking this tightrope? In part, it’s because Israel exists to be a safe haven for Jews everywhere, and there are still nearly half a million in Ukraine and Russia…

But the bigger reason is waning American hegemony. America’s post-Iraq war exhaustion with the Middle East led Israel to begin to see what Ukraine has just discovered: That it cannot rely on the assurances of an America that has turned inward—and away from the rest of the world. As the United States backed away from its “red line” in Syria and pursued a nuclear deal widely viewed in Israel as an existential threat, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu shifted Israel away from relying on the vaunted special relationship, forging new ones with China, India, and Russia, among others. Israel’s position in the Ukraine war has brought the Jewish state’s new geopolitical reality into stark relief.

I would amend that and say that all of the listed actions – backing away from the red line, and pursuing the Iran deal – do not represent the US as a whole pulling away. They represent the position of the US left, which is in power right now even though the majority of the US population is against such policies. I’d add that even the majority of Congress is probably against such policies, if truth be told. It is the executive branch, and very specifically Obama and then Biden (or the people who dictate the positions Biden takes) who are implementing those policies. They have been able to do it because of the power of the president in the US to set foreign policy.

But in a certain way the author is correct, because quite a few people on the right have also turned away from foreign “entanglements.” Those people, however, do not favor the Iran deal at all – which is a sort of foreign entanglement all its own. Nor do they agree that once President Obama drew a red line he should have abandoned it. President Trump probably exemplified the present foreign policy aims of the majority on the right: economic pressure, consistency, know who our enemies are, and carry a big stick as a deterrent.

In addition, there used to be a bipartisan consensus on certain elements of US foreign policy, with only slight variations. For example, both parties held similar attitudes towards Israel, and also towards Iran, and therefore there was a certain basic reliability to US foreign policy that countries could rely on. That ended with Obama. I realized at the time that even if a successor were to reverse his policies, the world was on notice that the US was now unreliable, in the same way the South Vietnamese learned it in the 1970s.

This was part of Obama’s plan, I believe: to weaken the US on the world stage. As for Biden, whether he’s in control of his own presidency or not, remember that Biden was Obama’s VP prior to his more recent cognitive decline and he was fully onboard back then with what Obama did.

NOTE: Ukraine, by the way, along with Poland, was once the country in Europe with the highest percentage Jewish population. It lost the majority of its Jews during World War II.

Half of all the Jews murdered during WWII were from Poland:

Approximately 98 percent of Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust were killed. About 350,000 Polish Jews survived the war; most survivors never lived in Nazi-occupied Poland, but lived in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland during 1939 and 1940, and fled or were evacuated by the Soviets further east to avoid the German advance in 1941.

Of over 3,000,000 Polish Jews deported to Nazi concentration camps, only about 50,000 survived.

It was indeed The Final Solution for the Jews of Poland:

Prior to World War II, there were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland, living mainly in cities: about 10% of the general population.

This was the pre-WWII situation in Ukraine:

On the eve of the invasion in 1941, the territory of Ukraine in its current internationally recognized borders was home to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. The fate of those Jews depended on many factors, including the local occupying authority and whether they were among the very few evacuated to the interior of the Soviet Union ahead of the invading forces. While scholars are still researching the scale of the Holocaust in Ukraine, they estimate at least one and a half million Jews were killed there…

Most Jews in Ukraine were shot to death close to where they lived, not deported to distant camps. Their executioners were German but also Ukrainian, Russian, and other local collaborators.

More history here:

The history of the Jews in Ukraine dates back over a thousand years; Jewish communities have existed in the territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus’ (late 9th to mid-13th century). Some of the most important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, rose either fully or to an extensive degree in the territory of modern Ukraine. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes the third-largest in Europe and the fifth-largest in the world.

That last figure refers to recently. I had not known there were still that many Jews in Ukraine, although the percentage remains far far smaller than it once was:

Whilst at times it flourished, at other times the Jewish community faced periods of persecution and antisemitic discrimination…

During the conflicts of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Russian Civil War, an estimated 31,071 Jews were killed between 1918 and 1920. During the establishment of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917–21), pogroms continued to be perpetrated on Ukrainian territory. In Ukraine, the number of civilian Jews killed during the period was estimated at between 35,000 and 50,000…

In 1959 Ukraine had 840,000 Jews, a decrease of almost 70% from 1941 totals (within Ukraine’s current borders). Ukraine’s Jewish population continued to decline significantly during the Cold War. In 1989, Ukraine’s Jewish population was only slightly more than half of what it was thirty years earlier (in 1959). During and after the collapse of Communism in the 1990s, the majority of the Jews who remained in Ukraine in 1989 left the country and moved abroad (mostly to Israel).

Israel is getting ready to absorb a lot more of them.

Here’s an article on the Jewish population of Ukraine in recent, post-Soviet years.