For several years, the Israeli government has been playing “the Russian card”, including adopting the Russian discourse on the Second World War, non-participation in Western sanctions, the sale of advanced technologies, and so on. Is a new relationship between Ukraine and Israel possible since the victory of the Jewish State over Hamas and Hezbollah, and the overthrow of the Syrian regime?
Ukraine’s history implies a very strong link, a priori, between the country and Israel. As Volodymyr Zelensky put it, “The histories of Jews and Ukrainians are intertwined”. The territory of contemporary Ukraine is marked by the presence of diverse Jewish communities for more than 2,000 years. Before the Second World War, there were 2.5 million Jews in Ukraine, forming the second largest Jewish community in Europe before it was largely wiped out by the Holocaust, followed by departures to Israel from the 1970s onward. The number of Jews living in Ukraine is estimated at between 50,000 and 300,000. Despite this bloodletting, today’s Ukraine appears to be the most open country in Central and Eastern Europe to Jews, according to the 2018 PEW Research Center survey. Ukraine boasts the world’s largest community center in Dnipro. Also worth mentioning is the town of Uman, an annual pilgrimage site for tens of thousands of Israelis and other ultra-Orthodox Jews who come to pay their respects at the tomb of Nachman of Breslov.
On the other hand, we can understand the deep unease that many Israelis still feel today – as do many Jews in other countries – about countries such as Ukraine, but also Poland, Russia, Belarus, and the Baltic states, those “lands of blood” in which Jewish communities were the prime targets of massacres with the passivity, complicity, or participation of not inconsiderable parts of the populations of these countries.
It is therefore understandable that Israelis, who have been preoccupied for decades with conflicts with their direct neighbors in the Middle East, have so far remained deaf to the Ukrainian request for massive Israeli aid, if possible military aid.
All the more so since they cannot help but remember the implacable continuity of the massacres of the Jews of Ukraine: the pogroms of the 17th Century perpetrated by Cossacks and Crimean Tatars, the terrible pogrom in Odesa in 1905, and finally, the pogroms committed after the Bolshevik coup of 1917 by all the armed groups including the White Army, various Ukrainian nationalist troops, the Red Army, etc. throughout Ukrainian territory. Nor do they forget the role played by Ukrainian auxiliaries in the “Holocaust by bullets”, that first wave of Nazi genocide, organized and perpetrated by “Einsatzgruppen” from the summer of 1941.
Yet it’s not the Israeli population that has been reluctant to accept Ukraine’s requests for aid. Rather, it is successive Israeli governments – led almost continuously since 2009, i.e. for 15 years now, by Benyamin Netanyahu, chairman of the Likud party – that have so far systematically turned down Ukraine’s insistent requests for military aid from Israel.
Ukraine’s setbacks came early: in the wake of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, Israel, so as not to jeopardize its relations with Russia, was one of 58 countries to abstain from voting on the UN General Assembly resolution of March 27, 2014 stressing the illegality of the referendum in Crimea and the attachment of the peninsula to Russia.
But Israel, walking the tightrope between Russia and Ukraine, did not adopt the economic sanctions imposed on Russia and Russian oligarchs by the USA, the EU, and the UK, even though a number of Israeli firms, particularly technology firms, then abandoned their commercial operations in Russia. Israel confined itself to putting in place measures to prevent “this country becoming a place for circumvention”. As for supplying arms to Ukraine, there is no question of this.
Zelensky’s pleadings
On March 20, 2022, three weeks after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Zelensky appeared online before the Knesset. But that day, in contrast to the enthusiastic welcome that many other national parliaments had given the Ukrainian president, the chamber was half-empty, as the Israeli members of parliament had not wished to give up their parliamentary vacations.
Zelensky was all the more scathing in his direct appeal for Israel’s help, echoing Golda Meir’s warning: “We intend to stay alive, our neighbors want to see us dead. This is not an issue that leaves much room for compromise.”
Finally, Zelensky confronted Israel directly with the responsibilities he believes it should assume: “We can always ask why we don’t get weapons from you, why Israel doesn’t impose tough sanctions on Russia, why it doesn’t put pressure on Russian companies. But the answer is always the same. It’s your choice, dear brothers and sisters. And you will have to live with that answer, people of Israel.”
A year later, on February 17, 2023, Volodymyr Zelensky returned to the Munich Security Conference, again requesting military assistance from Israel, and, at the , very least, to benefit from Israel’s air defense system, the David’s Slingshot, capable of intercepting rockets and missiles, at a range of up to 300 kilometers.
Also in February 2023, at a time when Ukraine had become a systematic target of Iranian “Shahed” suicide drones, delivered to Moscow in large quantities from the summer of 2022, Ukraine offered Israel military and technological cooperation. But here again, Israel rejected these overtures, despite the interest shown by Tsahal in the technical specifics of these weapons on the Ukrainian front (designed to paralyze Ukraine’s energy infrastructure).
In October 2023, the Ukrainian president reiterated his appeal to Israel, whose government he solemnly asked to “choose sides” in view of the now obvious alliance between Russia and Iran, Israel’s main enemy.
In the aftermath of the explosion of an Iranian drone fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon on October 13, 2024 on an Israeli military base – killing four soldiers and wounding dozens more – Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Evhen Korniytchouk was astonished by Israel’s refusal to accept Kyiv’s past offers to collaborate in the fight against Iranian-made drones.
More recently, in an interview broadcast on Fox News on November 19, 2024, Volodymyr Zelensky had forgotten nothing of these repeated rebuffs: as soon as Ukraine was invaded, he said, “I asked Israeli leaders to help and support us, but they were afraid of [Vladimir] Putin, the Russian president. (….) I think Israel made a mistake politically,” adding that he had at the same time urged Western leaders to “ask Israel for help and assistance.”
But Israel was careful to remain neutral, rejecting Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated requests for weapons, not least because of the presence of the Russian army deployed in Syria.
The first Israeli official to step out of concerted reserve was Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who accused Russia of war crimes for the first time in early April 2022 following the Bucha massacre.
Journalist and writer Vladislav Davidzon noted that “Israel has paid a heavy diplomatic price with many allies for its neutrality since the beginning of the Russian invasion,” noting that “Many people in the world (including prominent Israelis such as former refusenik leader and former Israeli Minister Natan Sharansky) considered that this arrangement placed Israel on the wrong side of a historic conflagration”.
Right from the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Israeli historian Elie Barnavi denounced the Israeli government’s desire to spare the Russian “ally” and not denounce Russian aggression: “The European Union reacted well to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, but Israel was too cautious (…) This is bad raison d’état, even though Vladimir Putin is our direct northern neighbor in Syria and allows us to strike at arms convoys arriving from Iran for Hezbollah” (Times of Israel, 03/30/2022).
A few months later, the Belgian political scientist Joël Kotek clarified the fatal consequences, particularly ethical, of the “neutrality pact” assumed by the Israeli government:
“Ukraine’s defeat will inevitably mean a regression that could be fatal for us. It is a pity that Israeli leaders, unlike European leaders, have not understood this. Their casual attitude toward Ukraine is a matter of concern. The Israelis are turning a blind eye, as “the Nations” once did in the face of the Holocaust: minimum service in the name of well-understood national interests. Is this ethically justifiable? Israel’s refusal to deliver offensive weapons to Ukraine is understandable in the context of Russian blackmail in Syria, but what about the Iron Dome, a purely defensive weapons system? It’s about time Israel learned the lessons of the Holocaust, or stopped taking the world for a ride” (CCLJ magazine Regards n° 1091 , 12/10/2022).
Finally, Joël Kotek was not afraid to hit the nail on the head when describing the “realpolitik” chosen by the Israeli authorities: “This strict political realism also explains why the Holocaust survivors state has still not recognized the Armenian genocide, but has been supplying offensive weapons to Azerbaijan for years. In the name of what values?”
Why is Israel holding back so much from Ukraine?
Until the fall of Bashar al-Assad on December 8, 2024, the main strategic reason given for Israel’s restraint toward Ukraine, to spare Moscow, seems to have been the desire to strictly respect the joint de-escalation mechanism agreed between Israel and Russia, which since 2015 has enabled Tsahal’s air force to regularly bomb the positions, arms depots, convoys, and supply routes of Iran and its affiliate Hezbollah located on Syrian soil, without risking clashes or escalation with Russian military aviation, with Russian air defense systems in Syria temporarily de-energized, against the backdrop of Russia’s massive military presence in Syria, including its naval base at Tartus and its air base at Hmeimim, southeast of Latakia. Syrian airspace had been fully monitored by Russia since 2015, preventing Iran from establishing a military presence on Israel’s northern border and avoiding the opening of a new front against the Jewish State in addition to those in Gaza and Lebanon. Netanyahu claimed he wanted to avoid any “military confrontation with Russia”.
To explain the Israeli government’s ambivalent attitude toward Ukraine and conciliatory attitude toward Russia, we might also mention the scale of Russian investment in Israel. It , and are A number of extreme right-wingers in Israel are in no way hostile to the official Russian ideology in favor of any form of autocratic or even dictatorial regime, which they find perhaps more reassuring than Ukrainian democracy (one example of this right-wing approach is former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, champion of a so-called “more balanced” policy and close friend of Belarusian ruler Lukashenko). Finally, Israel could be tempted to protect the remaining Jewish minorities in Russia and Belarus in a context that is likely to become increasingly difficult for these minorities.
Some commentators have also sought to lend credence to the theory that Netanyahu’s government, aware of Vladimir Putin’s often-used lever of Russian-speaking populations to be “protected” outside Russia’s borders, wanted to avoid any risk of Russian blackmail on the 20% or so Russian-speaking Israelis, i.e. a million people from Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics. But this explanation is unconvincing, given that Israel’s Russian-speaking population is almost unanimously hostile to the invasion of Ukraine (Joseph Confavreux in Mediapart, 07/13/2022).
The strange complicity between Netanyahu and Putin
As early as 2016, Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist and expert on security and intelligence issues, warned of Benyamin Netanyahu’s very close relationship – not to say deceptive friendship, if not dubious complicity – with Vladimir Putin, which prompted the Israeli prime minister early on to spare his Russian counterpart.
Between August 2015 and August 2016 alone, Netanyahu met four times with Putin in Moscow – compared with just once, in November 2015, with the president of the great historic American ally, Barack Obama, who was nonetheless gratifying Israel with $3.5 billion a year.
Not only has the Israeli Prime Minister never provided any explanation of the content of his talks with Putin, but it would appear that he made some astonishing concessions to his Russian counterpart from the outset: licenses granted by Israel to Moscow for advanced technologies, authorization given to Moscow for the production of Israeli-designed drones, lack of Israeli reaction to hostile actions such as spying missions by Russian fighters and drones over Israeli territory, astonishing silence from Israel’s leaders following Iran’s deployment of Russian-built S-300 air defense systems near the secret Fordo nuclear enrichment plant, etc.
Whether or not the affinities between Benyamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin are reinforced by their “open contempt for the fundamental norms of humanitarian law,” as Jean-Pierre Filiu put it, it remains plausible in the end that his lordship in the Kremlin was able to manipulate his Israeli counterpart more than the other way around.
Israel’s limited support for Ukraine: mainly humanitarian aid
By the end of 2023, over 45,000 Ukrainians had sought refuge in Israel after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and Aid Groups. The difference in treatment between Jewish refugees arriving as part of their “aliah” and non-Jewish refugees receiving only minimum service (a temporary residence permit and accommodation, for example), soon sparked a lively debate in Israel between on the one hand left-wing and centrist Israelis in favor of a generous welcome for all, and, on the other, right-wing Israelis. The famous writer David Grossman reminded everyone that “the experience of refugee status is consubstantial with us”.
All in all, the humanitarian aid provided to Ukraine to date has not been negligible. For example, on March 22, 2022, Israel set up the first foreign field hospital on Ukrainian soil, called “Kohav Meir”, near Lviv. Dedicated to emergencies, internally displaced persons, civilian victims and children, it functioned with some 200 carers for six weeks, at a cost of $6.5 million.
By May 1st 2022, Israel sent 100 tons of humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and the amount of assistance provided over the whole of 2022 to Ukraine totalled 80 million shekels.
The Ukrainian President asked Israeli Foreign Minister Elie Cohen, visiting Kiev on February 16, 2023, to increase the number of wounded soldiers allowed to seek medical treatment in Israel, and to issue work permits to 15,000 Ukrainian refugees in the Jewish state.
Elie Cohen suggested new support measures, including a $200 million loan guarantee for civil and health infrastructure and the development of an advanced airborne early warning system, to be delivered within six months, as well as reconstruction and water supply projects within three to four months.
Failure of Moscow-Jerusalem “partnership” forces Israel to reconsider its strategy
It is admittedly difficult to date the stages that gradually led Israel to show increasing support for Ukrainians.
In April 2022, Israel’s Defense Minister had still limited himself to announcing the supply of helmets and bulletproof jackets to Ukraine, which was very little – refusing to sell it the defensive military equipment it had requested, such as the “Iron Dome” anti-aircraft defense system.
But military ties seemed to be gradually and discreetly forged between Israel and Ukraine: at the end of November 2022, a Ukrainian military delegation visited Israel. Around a hundred former Israeli soldiers trained Ukrainians in urban combat. Israel provided intelligence on Iranian drones and satellite photos of Russian positions. Finally, the Americans took 150,000 rounds of ammunition from their stockpile in Israel and gave them to Ukraine.
On the occasion of his meeting with President Emmanuel Macron on February 2, 2023, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu said for the first time on LCI that he was “thinking about” the possibility of supplying at least defensive weapons to Ukraine, including the famous Iron Dome missile defense system, and he also seemed to be distancing himself somewhat from Vladimir Putin. He was immediately called to order by Moscow: “Any attempt – realized or even unrealized, but announced – to deliver additional, new, or other armaments, leads and will lead to an escalation of this crisis. Everyone needs to realize this. All countries delivering weapons need to understand that we will consider these weapons as legitimate targets for Russian armed forces,” threatened Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
On February 16, 2023, Israeli Foreign Minister Elie Cohen, visiting Kyiv, stressed that the Jewish state “supports the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine”.
But it is Iran’s growing military involvement alongside the Russians in the war taking place in Ukraine, and therefore in Europe, that brought about inga major strategic turning point. Moscow, whose army was stalling in Ukraine, and which was increasingly deprived of weapons systems, ammunition and electronic chips by Western sanctions, enlisted the help of its Iranian allies, whose drones delivered to Moscow rained down on Ukraine.
Then, on October 7, 2023, a murderous attack on Israel by Iran’s Hamas, against the backdrop of an increasingly visible rapprochement between Moscow and Iran, led Israel to recognize the miscalculation, if not the failure, of the partnership with Moscow on which it had banked until then, and to change course.
Putin’s confused reactions to this massacre revealed that the Russian “partner” of the day before was in fact more than ever a friend and accomplice of the Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah axis, and therefore an enemy of the Jewish state.
Referring to the close ties between Russia and Iran, Ukrainian ambassador to Israel Evhen Korniytchouk said: “It’s been clear to me for a long time that we’re fighting the same enemy (…) I can say that after the attack on October 7 [2023], Israel woke up, but there’s still a long way to go.”
Barely three weeks after the Sderot pogrom, Hamas representatives arrived in Moscow on October 26, 2023, to discuss the ongoing war against Israel with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and Ali Bagheri Kani, Deputy Foreign Minister of Iran, Hamas’s main sponsor.
Russian-Iranian relations thus posed a new threat to Israel, and created a kind of community, even solidarity, with Ukraine.
In early 2024, the Financial Times reported that the USA (still under the Biden administration), Israel, and Ukraine were finally in talks to supply Kyiv with up to eight Patriot air defense systems, hitherto held and used by Israel.
At the beginning of 2025, a senior Israeli official who wished to remain anonymous spoke of a possible change in Israel’s position toward Ukraine, following the radical weakening of Russia’s position in Syria, while remaining cautious pending the directions that the new Trump administration in the United States would adopt.
It’s true that, following the brutal fall of the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad, supported at arm’s length by Moscow, and the equally sudden and radical disappearance of any Russian and Iranian military presence on Syrian soil, Israel no longer has any reason to fear a Russian air force that has now disappeared, nor to spare the Kremlin any more.
In principle, Israel no longer has any reason to refuse Ukraine the active support it has so far systematically denied it.
The slow maturation that could lead to Israel’s distancing itself from Moscow and a change of course toward Ukraine could also be explained by the intensification and recurrence of anti-Israeli rhetoric and outright anti-Semitic excesses on the Russian side.
From the outset of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine in 2022, Russian propaganda had equated all Ukrainians with “Nazis” to justify the aggression. In the spring of 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said with the utmost seriousness that Adolf Hitler “had Jewish blood”.
LRussia has regularly criticized Israel since the pogrom perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023 in southern Israel, including at the United Nations Security Council. And Putin himself, at his annual press conference in December 2024, railed against the “ethnic Jews” who allegedly hold the reins of the Ukrainian government, which allegedly persecutes the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.
The masks are finally coming off, and we’re a long way from the pro-semitic attitude that Putin wanted to portray, and which a good part of Israeli opinion had been willing to believe in.
Is it possible to dream of a true alliance between Ukraine and Israel?
At a time when support for Ukraine from EU countries and the United States is becoming more uncertain, and Israel seems to have a freer hand in a totally new context (Russia has been forced to pack up in Syria, Iran is weakened by the blows Israel has dealt it, Hezbollah and Hamas in 2024, and the prospect of an agreement on the Iranian nuclear issue is no longer on the agenda), can we dream of Israel becoming a new partner for Ukraine, finally providing it with much-needed aid, including military aid?
Some observers (like Richard Herzinger, in Tyzhden on 22/01/2025) firmly believe this, pointing out the commonalities between these two countries: two democracies each threatened by totalitarian ideologies, two countries whose right to exist remains systematically contested by their respective neighbors, two countries exposed from time immemorial to the violence of war.
They also argue that a Russian military defeat in Ukraine would, in turn, deal a fatal blow to Iran, one of its closest allies, and would therefore be in the best interests of both Ukraine and now Israel.
They therefore urge the Jewish state in particular to help Ukraine, in the name of its own strategic interests and insofar as it is economically and militarily able, by supplying as a matter of priority the valuable technologies that Ukraine needs to ensure its air defense.
Finally, they believe that by clearly siding with Ukraine against the Russian autocracy, Israel would at the same time be doing its own democratic values the greatest service, by combatting the ideology of a certain Israeli right wing which is tempted to weaken the rule of law and which, moreover, is not without sympathy for Putin’s regime .
They therefore appeal to all political and social forces in Israel to put pressure on Benyamin Netanyahu’s government to achieve this double objective: support for Ukraine, support for democracy. Will they be heard?
A German teacher, Marc Villain has devoted his career to international, European and cultural relations.
