Palestinian victims of the Ukraine war

By Denijal Jegic

Projecting the future of Ukraine after the current war with Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected “liberal, European” concepts and instead identified the idea of a “big Israel” as his vision for Ukraine.

“We will become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face,” Zelensky proclaimed. Commending the Israeli regime’s militarization in Palestine, he added, “We will not be surprised if we have representatives of the Armed Forces or the National Guard in cinemas, supermarkets, and people with weapons. I am confident that the question of security will be the issue number one for the next ten years.”

This question of so-called security has indeed shaped the existential angst of the Zionist colony and has translated into a brutal apartheid regime that the colonizer exercises in order to control the colonized.

Why would Ukraine choose to replicate structures of the Israeli regime?

In fact, the Zionist colony has long been exalted as a successful example of a militarized society. Palestine has been used as a testing ground for weapons, military techniques and surveillance technology. Because of its decades-long brutal oppression of Palestinians and its sophisticated methods of population containment, the Israeli regime has been viewed as a model for many authoritarian regimes, far-right movements and white supremacists, in particular in the Euro-American sphere. The idea of Israel indeed represents a successful realization of racist fantasies.

This is hardly surprising given the historical connection between antisemitism and Zionism. Supporters of Israel have helped whitewash Nazism, including in Ukraine, when it has helped advance the goals of the colony.

Zelensky’s choice of Israel as a concept to follow is not merely about weapons and militarism. Not only has the Ukrainian president repeatedly expressed his admiration for the colony in the last weeks, in its recent history, Ukraine has been central to the Zionist colonial movement that uprooted Palestinians from their indigenous home.

Today, Palestinians are being rhetorically abused and located at the evil end of Zelensky’s civilizational dichotomies.

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky has talked to numerous Western leaders and governments. In clever rhetoric, the Ukrainian president used metaphors of so-called Western values when addressing his Western audiences. In order to secure moral and military support, he continued to present dichotomies of the free Western world and Russian tyranny.

In his address to the US Congress, Zelensky positioned Ukraine at the center of a struggle between good and evil. He claimed that “the Ukrainian people are defending not only Ukraine” but were “fighting for the values of Europe and the world,” and “sacrificing” their “lives in the name of the future.” He further claimed that Russia had not attacked not only Ukrainian land, but also basic human values. Russia “threw tanks and planes against our freedom, against our right to live freely in our own country, choosing our own future, against our desire for happiness, against our national dreams, just like the same dreams you have, you Americans”, Zelensky said when addressing his US audience.

Zelensky’s rhetoric is in line with the exhaustively applied discourse about Western civilization and values that has long been used by his Western allies to create consent for military action. Apparently, Zelensky sees these values embodied in the Zionist project.

In his speech to the Israeli Knesset, Zelensky made a strong effort to frame “Ukrainian and Jewish communities” as intimately “intertwined” in their struggles and compared Ukraine’s current situation to the extermination faced by Jews under the fascist German Nazi regime. Zelensky even used the Holocaust as a moral reference to ask the Zionist regime for help. Ukrainians had “rescued Jews” 80 years ago and now it is the “people of Israel” who “have such a choice.”

Zelensky praised and quoted “words of a great woman from Kyiv”, Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister and ardent ethnic cleansing enthusiast who even denied the existence of the Palestinian people: “We intend to remain alive. Our neighbors want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.”

Zelensky thus validated the abusive Zionist vilification of Palestinians and constructed his plea for foreign support on anti-Palestinian violence. Indeed, what connects Ukraine with the Israeli colony, according to Zelensky, is the same imminent threat, i.e. “the total destruction of the people, state, culture. And even of the names: Ukraine, Israel.”

Palestinians are represented as terrorists and seen as the existential threat to the Zionist project as the colonization is based upon the dispossession of Palestinians whose continued survival interferes with the colonization process. In Zelensky’s uncritical adoption of Israeli concepts, Palestinians become a metaphor of evil.

Repeatedly addressing the “people of Israel” directly, Zelensky pleaded for military support. He praised the Israeli “missile defense” and its significance for protecting “the lives of Ukrainians, the lives of Ukrainian Jews.” Given his rhetoric of civilization and freedom, Zelensky’s speech is deeply rooted in European colonialism. Palestinians become victims of Ukrainian political violence. They are positioned as the antipode to Zelensky’s “basic human values”.

At the same time, the Israeli regime has accommodated numerous Ukrainian refugees in Palestine. Perpetually anxious about losing a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine, the colony has stepped up its efforts to promote Jewish immigration from Ukraine. Thousands have promptly arrived in Palestine, where the Israeli regime provides housing and citizenship to Ukrainian Jews that indigenous Palestinians are deprived of. The refugees have thus become active participants in the colonization process.

Eventually, Palestinians become victims of an ongoing war in Europe that they themselves are not directly involved in. Zelensky’s glorification of Israel, like the historic significance of Ukraine for the development of the racist Zionist movement, are nothing but an example of the transnational dimensions of anti-Palestinian violence and reveal how colonial thought intent on oppressing Palestinians continues to be created in Europe.

Denijal Jegic is a writer and researcher currently based in Beirut, Lebanon. He holds a PhD in American Studies.

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