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https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-06-16/ty-article-opinion/.premium/jewish-conspiracies-israeli-neo-nazis-is-it-time-to-leave-russia/00000181-6d43-d82b-a3ab-edff83150000

'Jewish Conspiracies,' 'Israeli neo-Nazis': Is It Time to Leave Russia?

It's no coincidence that state-sanctioned expressions of antisemitism are on the rise in Russia these days. The Ukraine war has revived an antique form of far-right nationalism, in which the Jews have always been the enemy

Russia’s war against Ukraine and its conflict with the West have taken a turn toward antisemitism. It has been decades since so many attacks on Jews and Israel have appeared in the Russian press, television, social media and official pronouncements. This is in part a by-product of the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish, with the Russian media seeking to smear Zelenskyy in any and all ways possible. But the roots of this upswing in public antisemitism are much deeper, and its consequences are larger.

At the top of the list of incidents is the interview that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave to an Italian television journalist in early May. Lavrov was asked how he could claim that Ukraine was governed by a Nazi regime when its president, Zelenskyy, was Jewish. Lavrov responded that “Hitler also had Jewish blood” and that “the most ardent antisemites are as a rule Jewish.” His comments drew widespread condemnation globally and sparked a brief crisis in Russian-Israeli relations. Many pointed out that blaming the Holocaust and antisemitism on Jews was itself crudely antisemitic. It took an alleged telephone apology by President Vladimir Putin to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to calm the storm.

Lavrov’s comments were not off-the-cuff improvisations. Observers had noted Zelenskyy’s Jewishness and its incongruity with the Russian claims regarding Ukraine’s supposed Nazism since the war began on February 24. The Russian Foreign Ministry had more than two months to formulate a response, and this was it. Lavrov was articulating a prepared official position.

Lavrov’s remarks strike us as bizarre only because we assume that the Russian foreign minister was addressing a Western audience. In fact, Lavrov and other Russian officials know that they have lost Western public opinion, and are not really trying to win it back. Lavrov may have been speaking with an Italian, but his remarks were intended mainly for a domestic Russian audience. They were a signal that the lexicon of the Russian far right – a motley crew of monarchists, Stalinists and imperialists who before the war languished on the margins of public life – a lexicon that includes the berating and vilifying of Jews, was now endorsed as mainstream Russian discourse.

As if to drive home this point, the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, doubled down on Lavrov’s argument. She produced a brief historical “study” intended to show that Jews had collaborated with the Nazis in perpetrating the Holocaust. It stated that the heads of the Nazi-imposed ghettoes and Jewish councils (Judenraten) had cooperated with the Germans in sending Jews to their deaths. Zakharova characterized the official Israeli condemnation of Lavrov’s remarks as “anti-historical.” She also criticized Israel for supporting “the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine,” and warned that Israeli mercenaries were fighting alongside the allegedly neo-Nazi Azov Brigade. In other words, Zelenskyy and the Israeli fighters in Ukraine were continuing the tradition of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis.

There was nothing new in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s argument. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was a staple of Soviet anti-Zionist literature to claim that Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis. Accordingly, the State of Israel was the heir to Nazi Germany. One of the classics of this genre of writing, “Fascism Under the Blue Star” (Moscow, 1971), proclaimed: “The kapos of the death camps and the special police in the ghettos were recruited by the Gestapo from among the Zionists. […] The tragedy of Babi Yar [the mass murder site outside Kyiv] will remain forever an embodiment not only of Nazi cannibalism, but also of the indelible disgrace of their accomplices and successors, the Zionists.” The Russian Foreign Ministry has revived this ugly myth from a half-century ago, with one change. It has replaced the word “Zionists” with open use of the word “Jews.”