Filenews 13 October 2023 - by Andreas Kluth
Almost without exception, lawmakers and senators from both parties in the U.S. Congress are willing to give Israel anything it asks for, from missiles to dollars. And rightly so, because Israel has just fallen victim to unspeakable barbarity and now needs strong support.
In their next breath, however, some of the same American representatives of the people, mostly Republican extremists in the House of Representatives who feel politically connected to former U.S. President Donald Trump, want to deny Ukraine what this besieged country needs to survive as a nation.
These demagogues of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) current do not want to accept that Ukraine is also the victim of unimaginable – and even genocidal – aggression. Point out their inconsistency, and they will protest indignantly that the two conflicts should not be linked, because they are, as one far-right think tank puts it, "separate and distinct."
Not so special anymore
They may be distinct, but they may no longer be so special. There is a practical way in which support for Ukraine and Israel can be unified. U.S. President Joe Biden's administration is considering uniting both in one package in Congress, believing it is the only way to keep open the flow of money, ammunition and weapons to Ukraine by tying that aid to Israel's support.
If House Republicans were less chaotic at home and less Trump — more like Senate Republicans — this step wouldn't even be necessary.
But put aside the legislative tricks for a moment and ask the bigger question: Are the situations in Ukraine and Israel really connected in other ways?
Biden, as well as most Democrats and Republicans in Congress, have so far been staunch supporters of both countries. In particular, they have stood by Ukraine since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war of aggression against that nation and with Israel after what Biden called the "pure, unadulterated evil" committed by Hamas there in recent days.
In both cases, the aggressors — Putin's invasion force and Hamas, respectively — are using terrorist methods, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who happens to be Jewish and immediately expressed solidarity with Israel, has pointed out. Putin's soldiers and Hamas torture, rape, kill, maim and kidnap. Both in their own way have genocidal goals and want to eradicate one nation each – Putin the Ukrainians, Hamas the Israelis.
Those who cheer on their crimes, after all, are largely the same cast of other villains. The Iranians supply drones to Russia for use against Ukrainian civilians and also money and weapons to Hamas and other terrorists for their fight against "the Zionists." The Chinese are cynically apathetic in the face of both conflicts, calculating that their interests lie in Moscow and Tehran, whose support Beijing may need if and when it wants to become the aggressor, in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea.
Clash of freedom and tyranny
As far as the two victim nations are concerned, many things differentiate them – among other things, the history of Slavic anti-Semitism. But they also share long and bitter memories of trauma, the Holocaust and the Holodomor. Today, years of self-defense have forged both peoples into warrior nations, determined to survive in neighbourhoods teeming with mortal enemies.
Much about their situation is different. The Ukrainians face a much larger state, a former superpower that happens to have the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world and continues to threaten to use them. The Israelis, by contrast, are fighting a substate militia that could never eliminate Israel's statehood, as Egypt and Syria seemed poised to do during the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago.
Ukraine, moreover, is an independent country and member of the United Nations that defends itself against another state that has, in a perverse sense, a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and yet does not recognize Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Therefore, the defeat of Ukraine would amount to an all-round rag of the UN Charter. Israel, meanwhile, is facing an organization, Hamas, that is just one of many that claim to represent a people, the Palestinians, who do not yet have their own state.
However, it is the similarities – moral, geopolitical, conceptual – that matter most. Both Ukraine and Israel are flawed democracies, but democracies nonetheless. They are open societies that defend themselves against atavistic autocracies and theocracies. They are at the forefront of the struggle that can define our time: the conflict between freedom and tyranny, law and violence, order and chaos, light and darkness.
All these parallels make it unforgivable that some American conservatives, who should have known something more, choose to ape their powerful idol, Donald Trump, by regurgitating elements of Putin's disinformation war and misinterpreting the Ukrainian war for national survival as something that is a distant territorial and borderline indifferent dispute. In doing so, they are also sounding the alarm bells in Taiwan, which "sees its fate tied to that of Kiev."
If Ukraine and Israel don't like being grouped together in one bill, I have a better suggestion. Now that the House Republican caucus seems close to choosing the least extreme candidate as the new speaker of the chamber (following Kevin McCarthy's ouster), let them come to their senses and make such a legislative connection redundant.
Let all U.S. lawmakers and senators accept that the U.S. and its allies have interests and responsibilities on both battlefields — and must find a way to support both Israel and Ukraine until each prevails.
