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Israel and Russia: Crimea seems a helpful distraction | The Economist
Mar 18th 2014, 21:58 by N.P. | JERUSALEM
MIGHT Russia’s occupation of the Crimea have won Israel a reprieve from American pressure to end its own occupation of Palestine? Set against the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, the shuttle diplomacy between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators that has entangled John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, for nine months seems suddenly almost irrelevant. After meeting Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, in Washington on March 17th, Barack Obama seemed distracted. These days he needs to be embroiled in the Middle East peace process like a loch in kop, Yiddish for “hole in the head”, wrote Chemi Shalev, Washington correspondent of Haaretz, Israel’s main liberal newspaper.
America’s inability to prevent Russia’s occupation of the Crimea may give succour to Israelis keen to hold on to the West Bank, the chunk of a would-be Palestinian state with about the same population as Crimea’s. “The situation in Crimea is giving many people here ideas,” says an Israeli former diplomat. A senior defence official noted Russia’s historic claims to the peninsula, while also hailing General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s overthrow of Egypt’s elected Islamist
government last July as a miracle sent from heaven. In both cases, he noted, America was unable to reverse the situation.
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, himself a former Soviet citizen, issued an anodyne statement of concern about Ukraine before meeting Mr Kerry. But officials privately and commentators publicly are rallying to Mr Putin’s cause, contrasting his donning of a yarmulka at the Jewish holy site of Jerusalem’s Western (“Wailing”) Wall with the alleged fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies of his Ukrainian adversaries. “It is in our national interest, without being under any idealistic illusions, to nurture ties with a Russia whose leader seems to have dramatically broken with centuries of Tsarist and Bolshevik anti-Semitism and now displays friendship towards the Jewish people,” wrote Isi Leibler, a right-wing Australian-born activist on March 16th in Israel HaYom, the country’s most widely read newspaper. Israel’s wooing of Russia is not mere flirtation. Israel’s upwardly-mobile 1m-strong citizens of Soviet background further cement ties. Several key ministries, including foreign affairs, are headed by Russian-speakers who left the Soviet Union.
Israeli officials also sense that Russia may be filling a vacuum, as America’s reach in the Middle East shortens. Mr Putin, it is noted, may have turned a foreign-policy disaster—support for Bashar Assad, a dictator steeped in blood—into a foreign-policy success, by fending off America’s threats of military action and keeping his Syrian ally in power. “After a series of setbacks, Putin has one success after another, and America is losing every battle,” says Alon Liel, a former director-general of the foreign ministry. “The world detects a chronic American weakness and reluctance to pull the trigger. No one is afraid of Obama.”
Israel may feel freer, too, to flex its own muscle. Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s defence minister, is again threatening that Israel may go it alone to stop Iran’s nuclear programme. “We had thought the ones who should lead the campaign against Iran were the US,” he told students in Tel Aviv on March 17th. “But on this matter we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.”
(Picture credit: AFP)
Mar 18th 2014, 21:58 by N.P. | JERUSALEM
MIGHT Russia’s occupation of the Crimea have won Israel a reprieve from American pressure to end its own occupation of Palestine? Set against the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, the shuttle diplomacy between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators that has entangled John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, for nine months seems suddenly almost irrelevant. After meeting Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, in Washington on March 17th, Barack Obama seemed distracted. These days he needs to be embroiled in the Middle East peace process like a loch in kop, Yiddish for “hole in the head”, wrote Chemi Shalev, Washington correspondent of Haaretz, Israel’s main liberal newspaper.
America’s inability to prevent Russia’s occupation of the Crimea may give succour to Israelis keen to hold on to the West Bank, the chunk of a would-be Palestinian state with about the same population as Crimea’s. “The situation in Crimea is giving many people here ideas,” says an Israeli former diplomat. A senior defence official noted Russia’s historic claims to the peninsula, while also hailing General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s overthrow of Egypt’s elected Islamist
government last July as a miracle sent from heaven. In both cases, he noted, America was unable to reverse the situation.
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, himself a former Soviet citizen, issued an anodyne statement of concern about Ukraine before meeting Mr Kerry. But officials privately and commentators publicly are rallying to Mr Putin’s cause, contrasting his donning of a yarmulka at the Jewish holy site of Jerusalem’s Western (“Wailing”) Wall with the alleged fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies of his Ukrainian adversaries. “It is in our national interest, without being under any idealistic illusions, to nurture ties with a Russia whose leader seems to have dramatically broken with centuries of Tsarist and Bolshevik anti-Semitism and now displays friendship towards the Jewish people,” wrote Isi Leibler, a right-wing Australian-born activist on March 16th in Israel HaYom, the country’s most widely read newspaper. Israel’s wooing of Russia is not mere flirtation. Israel’s upwardly-mobile 1m-strong citizens of Soviet background further cement ties. Several key ministries, including foreign affairs, are headed by Russian-speakers who left the Soviet Union.
Israeli officials also sense that Russia may be filling a vacuum, as America’s reach in the Middle East shortens. Mr Putin, it is noted, may have turned a foreign-policy disaster—support for Bashar Assad, a dictator steeped in blood—into a foreign-policy success, by fending off America’s threats of military action and keeping his Syrian ally in power. “After a series of setbacks, Putin has one success after another, and America is losing every battle,” says Alon Liel, a former director-general of the foreign ministry. “The world detects a chronic American weakness and reluctance to pull the trigger. No one is afraid of Obama.”
Israel may feel freer, too, to flex its own muscle. Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s defence minister, is again threatening that Israel may go it alone to stop Iran’s nuclear programme. “We had thought the ones who should lead the campaign against Iran were the US,” he told students in Tel Aviv on March 17th. “But on this matter we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.”
(Picture credit: AFP)
