Analogising Ukraine and Israel

The great legend, hero and Slovakian Christian Zionist, Miroslav Ilias, posted a TOI blog earlier today analogising the Russia/Ukraine conflict with the Israel/Palestinian conflict.

In his view, Israel is Russia, and Ukraine “could reach the position of Palestine”.

Here is an alternative view which I posted as a comment to his article, but would like to amplify in my own blog as a response, because I think the subject is important and sheds light on prevailing discourse.

Miroslav, conveying my warmest regards and total respect to you, but my feeling is you have this the wrong way round.

If we compare Russia/Ukraine from 2014, it is more like Arabs/Israel from 1948 (admittedly not perfectly, but then few analogies are..).

Ukraine/Israel is a small people (‘davids’) indigenous to the region trying to create a small space for itself among its much larger neighbour, Russia/Arabs (‘goliaths’).

However, the larger neighboring ‘goliath’ armed and mobilised a new sub-identity called Donbas Russians / Palestinian Arabs (‘new davids’) to reframe the conflict against Ukraine/Israel (‘new goliaths’).

The ‘original goliaths’ (Russia/Arabs) then used the pretext of defending the ‘new davids’ (Donbas Russians/Palestinian Arabs) to attack and try to eliminate the ‘original davids’/’new goliaths’ (Ukraine/Israel).

To mixed and different extents, certain parts of the ‘international community’ accepted this strategic reframing, and repeatedly condemned the ‘original davids’ as ‘new goliaths’, and supported the ‘original goliaths’ through their ‘new davids’.