Joining the US, Israel voted against a UN motion condemning Russia, this being the first time the country voted with Moscow and against Kyiv since 2022. This interesting development, is not so significant in itself (Israel and the US votes were subdued and the motion is largely symbolic anyway), but it does mark an interesting shift in Israeli-American relations

One may recall that Israel had been struggling to maintain a certain pragmatic neutrality with regards to the conflict in Ukraine. Back in June 2023, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview, explained why his country blocked the transfer of Iron Dome batteries to Ukraine: “we’ve expressed our sympathy [to Ukraine, but] there is a limit: limitations we have and concerns and interests that we have… our pilots are flying right next to Russian pilots over the skies of Syria in order to block the attempts of Iran to establish a second Hezbollah front in Syria.”

Despite that, the Jewish state has even thus far turned a blind eye to Ukraine’s ongoing glorification of Nazi collaborators since the 2014 Maidan revolution – which is remarkable in itself, considering how sensitive the matter is to Israelis for obvious reasons and also considering that the issue of far-right Ukrainian nationalism has even hampered Kiev’s bilateral relations with Greece and Poland, as well as other neighbours (not just Russia).

Writing for the Forward back in 2019, Lev Golinkin, for example, denounced the neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic specter haunting Ukrainian ultra-nationalism: “Maidan also had a well-organized neo-Nazi contingent which provided crucial street muscle to the uprising”. He added: “neo-Nazi gangs from Maidan grew into paramilitary formations such as the Azov Battalion, which were eventually incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard. As I and others have written in these pages, these groups have been steadily proliferating and have acted with impunity since Maidan.”

Considering the record, how can one explain Israel’s sudden shift, which broke its........

© Blitz