8 | AUGUST 4 • 2022
PURELY COMMENTARY
opinion
Is Russian Threat to the
Jewish Agency a Return
to Soviet Oppression?
I
f you’re old enough to
remember the darkest
days of the movement to
free Soviet Jewry, the news
a few weeks ago that the
Russian Justice Ministry has
asked a court
to close down
the operations
of the Jewish
Agency in Israel
in that country
seems ominously
familiar. In the
Soviet era, the
Communist regime wasn’t just
preventing Jews from leaving.
It was, as had been the case
since the Bolshevik coup in
1917, openly antisemitic.
Indeed, the Communists were
even more oppressive than
their czarist predecessors in
terms of suppressing Jewish life
and the practice of Judaism.
The Russian move against
the Jewish Agency would
make it much harder for
those Jews who want to leave
a country that has become
an international pariah due
to its invasion of Ukraine. It
also could be a harbinger of a
return to the Jew-hatred that
was so much a feature of life in
the Eastern European monolith
prior to the breakup of the
Soviet Union.
The reason for this seems
to be an effort to get Israel to
return to a stance of neutrality
in the war Russia launched
on Ukraine in late February.
That’s a position the Jewish
state changed after pressure
from Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky, the West
and many Israeli citizens, who
all thought that Israel needed
to side with the victims.
These worries about Russia
and antisemitism were
supposed to be buried in the
past.
After the collapse of the
Soviet Union, those Jews who
remained were in a country
that embraced an authoritarian
government led by Vladimir
Putin, an ex-KGB agent. Putin
was a thug determined to crush
anyone who opposed him and
his corrupt regime. He was also
obsessed with reversing the
verdict of history — whereby
Russia had been demoted
to the status of a second-
rate power — and sought to
recreate the old Soviet and
czarist empires.
Yet, unlike the Communists
and the czars, Putin was
seemingly immune to the virus
of antisemitism. Jewish life
in his Russia was allowed to
thrive with synagogues, schools
and community centers, many
of which opened and were built
brand-new under his watch.
Equally important, Russia
has generally good, albeit
complicated, relations with
the State of Israel. On the one
hand, Putin was happy to
cultivate Israeli leaders and
to regard the vast number of
Israelis with ties to Russia as
part of his country’s diaspora,
rather than despised émigrés.
Though Putin’s Russia
was not the engine driving
anti-Zionism and anti-Israel
terrorism in the Third World
the way the Communist
government had been, it also
regarded some of the Jewish
state’s worst enemies, such as
Iran and Syria, as allies. His
equivocal stance on the Iranian
nuclear threat, which may have
had more to do with his desire
to annoy the United States
whenever possible, was also
problematic.
Russian intervention in the
more than decade-long Syrian
Civil War on behalf of the
brutal Bashar Assad regime
also turned Russia into one of
Israel’s neighbors. The Russian
military occupation of parts
of Syria, and its close ties with
Assad and Iran, became a
crucial factor in Israeli defense
policy.
There again, rather than
aiding Iran’s efforts to wage
a proxy war on Israel, Putin’s
allowing Israel to attack Iranian
and Hezbollah terrorists
in Syria demonstrated that
whatever his other grievous
faults, he was not an implacable
foe of Israel and the Jews.
THE RUSSIAN WAR
ON UKRAINE
But his decision this year to
launch a brutal invasion of
Ukraine throws all previous
assumptions about him into
doubt.
To date, the justified horror
of international opinion
about the toll of suffering
his ambitions regarding land
grabs of Ukraine have exacted
has isolated Russia. Contrary
to expectations, it doesn’t
seem to have put him or his
regime in danger. Despite
setbacks in the opening
months of the war due to
fierce Ukrainian resistance,
the Russians are still holding
onto occupied territory and
Collage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Russian
President Vladimir Putin in the background.
ROKAS TENYS/SHUTTERSTOCK
Jonathan S.
Tobin