Another week —more wrenching, searing moments and visuals of tragedy, of fleeing refugees, of war torn Ukraine, of a world.
Little Amelia, whose inspirational singing of the Disney song “Frozen” in a bomb shelter to the grownups around her not only raised everyone’s spirits in that squished damp place, but brought her and her angelic voice to the world, as she sweetly sang the Ukrainian national anthem before tens of thousands at a benefit concert in Poland.
One-hundred-and-nine empty strollers and car seats lined the front of Lviv’s city hall, memorializing the babies and children killed in this unprovoked war. An indelible image, so powerful and so painful it leaves one mute.
A destroyed, blown-out apartment building in the background, but in the foreground, a striking red swing set left intact, a little girl swinging on it, as she surveys the damage.
Another facet of this war: This week, President Zelensky, who has been leading his country so courageously, spoke to the Israeli parliament. Among his remarks, some pretty disturbing and chillingly wrong and consequential inaccuracies were expressed.
I don’t judge him personally, for he is living in the terrifying desperate hour of a man speaking as ranks close in on him and he is fighting for his sheer survival, his family’s survival and the survival of his country.
Nonetheless, there is a limit to inaccurate rhetoric, and it must be called out. To be sure, it was deeply offensive, too. But it’s the historical revisionism that demands attention.
His remarks do not change my support for the tragedy of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their war-torn country.
The tragedy is indeed colossal. And as this particular conflict involves a world nuclear power, the consequences can potentially ripple out to impact and destabilize the entire world.
But a Holocaust, it is not.
Not only is it wrong to distort the facts of history or of the Holocaust, but doing so trivializes its horrific uniqueness.
It’s hard to explain to an outsider the legacy of the Holocaust we carry and the space it inhabits in our collective Jewish identity. Zelensky is Jewish, though. In fact, his own grandfather fought the Nazis and tragically lost his three brothers to them. Which is why Zelensky’s remarks were genuinely perplexing,
Yet, Zelensky’s approach was to compare his country’s current border war with the Jewish genocide of WW II. He went so far as to refer to his country’s fate using the particular Nazi rhetoric and goal in wiping the Jewish people off the face of the earth — the infamous “final solution.” While every war, including the current one in Ukraine, is a horror, not every war is a Holocaust.
Ukraine is fighting back with its military, with its ammunition; and its refugees are being embraced by bordering countries. In fact, it seems nearly the entire world is, justifiably, rooting for Ukraine in this war of borders. Ukrainians are not being targeted for their “race.”
The Holocaust is not a brand that can just be casually usurped for every terrible conflict in the world. The “final solution,” this is not. In WW II, on a policy level, exhibited by every country, it was the complete abandonment of the Jewish people.
Still more puzzling, in context of expressing his disappointment in Israel for not doing more for Ukraine, Zelensky also invoked Ukraine’s positive role in WW II, but in reverse of the way that is true. He berated Israel and challenged Israel as if from a morally superior place of history. He said that Israel would have to answer to some difficult questions and would have to live with these answers, in contrast to Ukraine which made the choice 80 years ago to answer by helping the Jewish people, as is evidenced by the righteous gentiles who chose to save Jews.
Now, these righteous gentiles, as these saviors are formally known, were nothing short of angels on this earth. They stand in a place of honor at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, as well as in the collective consciousness of the Jewish people, be they Polish, Dutch, the entire country of Denmark, as well as the couple of thousand of Ukranianians, and others. Humans who in an act of true nobility and selflessness risked their own lives to save those hounded Jews.
Unfortunately, though, these angels were the exceptions who proved the rule.
Ukraine’s all too enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis in slaughtering Jews —it might be best not to stir that cauldron, not to bring up Ukraine’s gruesome past in the context of the Jewish people.
Not to mention, Israel can point out how Ukraine has repeatedly voted against it at the UN. But this is not the space to begin the long list of Ukrainian pogroms and carnage that shaped Jewish fate over the course of centuries — entire Jewish communities brutally annihilated. To name just a couple of examples, though, look up “Lviv pogrom”or “Kiev pogrom.”
Re-shaping an entire narrative to suit a current conflict, as desperate as it may be, is nothing short of historic revisionism.
Yes, I believe we absolutely must help Ukrainian refugees! Not because of Ukraine’s past behavior toward the Jewish people, but because it is our humanitarian duty, in the present.
And so, I am proud that here is Israel, an itty-bitty country, barely a blip on the map, and certainly not adjacent to Ukraine, yet deeply caring and sending outsize humanitarian missions to Europe, its humanitarian presence a large one among the many around the world, helping to alleviate the wretched plight of these displaced Ukrainians.
As justified as Zelensky’s anger is, Israel should not be scapegoated or condemned. Ukraine was abandoned. But not by Israel.
Rather, Ukraine was abandoned under the Budapest Memorandum. The UK, US and Russia had Ukraine undergo a complete denuclearization. In 1993, international relations professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago asserted that this move would be dangerous for Ukraine and make it vulnerable to attack from Russia. His warning was dismissed. Moreover, Zelensky surely knows that, for all intents and purposes, Israel, in effect, shares a border with Russia.
I don’t know what the answers are. I know my heart aches for this staggering humanitarian disaster. I certainly lament the horrendous situation Zelensky and his country find themselves in.
I know right now in this cruel world, the day is far from the prophetic vision expressed in Isaiah 2:4, in which “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up swords against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
Yet, this is still the vision and the hope I carry in my heart. A world where there is no place for false comparisons or distortions made from the agony of desperation, no reframing the Holocaust— a world where there are not no monstrous wars at all. For each war, in its way, is exactly that — monstrous.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
