The immediate reason for this essay is the dispute that erupted after Ukraine reburied Colonel Andriy Melnyk, one of the historical leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The ceremony in Ukraine drew criticism from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Yad Vashem, because for Israel the history of the OUN, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the memory of the victims of Nazism remain deeply sensitive subjects.

Ukraine has now officially responded to that criticism and proposed moving the sharp public dispute into a professional format: a joint Ukrainian-Israeli dialogue of historians, archival research, and the work of an expert commission.

This is not only about one ceremony in Ukraine.

For Israel, any discussion of nationalist movements in Eastern Europe during the Second World War immediately touches the memory of the Holocaust, collaboration, persecution, and the murder of Jews. These are not abstract historical questions. They are part of Israel’s national trauma, family memory, and state identity.

For Ukraine, which has been fighting Russia’s full-scale aggression since 2022, the question of a national pantheon and the return of historical figures has also become part of a broader politics of memory. Ukraine is trying to reassess its history after decades of Soviet and Russian narratives that often reduced the Ukrainian struggle for independence to hostile propaganda formulas.

It is exactly at this intersection of two traumatic histories that a new diplomatic nerve has been exposed.

The joint statement on........

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