Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Petr Akopov
[RIA] Even just ten days after the start of a new escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we can already talk about the lessons that Russia has learned from it for itself. All of them relate to Israel, which for many years has been presented to us as an example to follow. We were offered to “learn from Israel”, to do as he did in several directions at once.
The first myth: Israel successfully fights terrorists, any threat to its security, destroying those it deems necessary almost anywhere in the world. That's why they fear him and he will win.
The reality turns out to be completely different. Israel decides completely arbitrarily who is a terrorist and who is not: now everyone could be convinced that not only the Israeli leadership, but also the majority of Israeli society considers the entire population of Gaza of 2.5 million “terrorist accomplices” and is preparing for genocide, that is to the destruction and occupation of the region, accompanied by the eviction of most of the inhabitants of the sector, which was under blockade for a decade and a half.
The methods of action of the Israeli intelligence services and armed settlers (who are occupiers both for the Palestinians and from the point of view of international law) towards the Palestinian population also cannot be called anything other than provoking terror with a subsequent disproportionate response. Just look at the statistics of casualties in previous conflicts (intifadas, that is, Palestinian uprisings, operations against the Gaza Strip or invasions of Lebanon ) - everywhere the ratio will be 1:30, 1:50 in favor of Israel.
The entire territory of former British Palestine is home to 14 million people, half of whom are Jews and half are Arabs. And only two out of seven million Arabs have Israeli citizenship; all the rest are humiliatingly dependent (in terms of human rights, economics, etc.) on Israel.
What Israel calls “the fight against terrorism” is very often a fight against guerrillas, against desperate people resisting decades of occupation, and only partly a real fight against terror. Moreover, the methods of this struggle - and its absolutely arbitrary interpretation - do not reduce the threat to Israel, but only increase it in the future. The Israeli fight against terror, along with Israel's refusal to create a Palestinian state, are perhaps the main sources of so-called Islamic terrorism.
If Russia imitated Israel, then we should have simply destroyed Chechnya, liquidating it as a subject of the Federation and evicting all Chechens. Naturally, Russia never intended to do this, and in the fight against terrorists hiding behind Islam, we never stooped to Islamophobia. Although this is exactly what we were pushed towards by those who called for us to follow the example of Israel, talking about “not only the anti-Jewish, but also anti-Christian, anti-European orientation inherent in Islam.” Russia is home to many peoples who profess Islam, and imitating Israel would be suicidal for us.
Just like the Israeli manner of launching missile attacks on Arab countries (now they are striking Syria and Lebanon, and in the 80s they bombed nuclear facilities in Iraq ), killing Iranian nuclear physicists and conducting targeted “retaliation operations” against the Palestinian leadership (naturally, declared terrorist) around the world can seem effective only to those who do not think about the future.
The balance of power between Israel and the Arab countries will not always be in favor of the Jewish state - and it’s not even that the absolute support of Tel Aviv from the United States is not guaranteed. The Arab world is now divided and divided, but its score against Israel is only growing, as is the score of the entire Islamic world of 1.5 billion. Only a madman can hope that it will never be presented for payment.
If Russia behaved with its neighbors in the same way as Israel, we would have already carried out more than one special operation in Ukraine (which is our homeland, simply lost and has become a toy in the hands of external forces), but would have ruined relations with all our neighbors in East and South . This does not mean that Russia should not defend its interests more firmly in the post-Soviet space, but we consider ourselves responsible for it, unlike Israel, which views itself as a besieged fortress in a hostile environment, but at the same time endlessly provokes its neighbors (taking advantage of the presence of the American " roof").
Second myth: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, in which they are the real master, have all the rights and protection, and are governed by a patriotic and nationally oriented elite. And Russia needs to take an example: we must become a state of the Russian people - with Russian culture, way of life and elite.
The reality is that Israeli laws and the atmosphere in society (if we take only its Jewish part) are indeed extremely nationalistic, it would be more correct to even say chauvinistic. The cult of superiority (racial, cultural, intellectual, etc.) of Jews over Arabs permeates it from top to bottom - and is only partly explained by the need to oust from the national memory the injustice that was shown to the Palestinians expelled from their lands. The feeling of one’s own chosenness, the right to “this land” and other ultra-chauvinistic attitudes are not considered something reprehensible in Israel - on the contrary, the entire ideology of this state is built on this.
Moreover, it is the main bond of the entire Jewish society, which is split in most other positions (Sephardim and Ashkenazim, religious Jews and the huge LGBT community are just the brightest poles of this split). Moreover, this conviction in God’s own chosenness, in messianism, is the main problem of Israel, because it is not just its weak point, but also a sure guarantee of its doom to defeat. After all, the entire existence of the current model of Israel (which denies the right of the Palestinians to create their own state and does not want to create “one state of two peoples”) depends on the existence of another messianic state - the United States (created by Puritan-Calvinists as a new “promised land”). The states lay claim to world dominance, and in the course of the collapse of their ambitions, their junior partner (including in “messiahism”), Israel, will inevitably suffer.
In Russia, the Russian people are not just state-forming: our state itself is the form of existence of the Russian people. At the same time, the country is truly multinational, and after the collapse of the USSR , the rights of Russians were not only not properly secured: the “privatization” of state property and the change in the economic structure played into the hands of representatives of various national minorities, among whom, by the way, Jews occupied an impressive percentage. Russians really felt slighted, insulted and humiliated, but when in 2000 Putin proclaimed “Glory to Russia!” (words previously unimaginable in the mouth of the country’s leader), the situation began to change.
Yes, we had a huge bias in the cultural and educational sphere, in business, in favor of not even non-Russians, but “people without nationality”, who considered patriotism, love for their people, pride in their history to be wrong and almost shameful, but this is gradually being corrected.
Russia is finding itself, and with all the problems with the birth rate, with legal and illegal migration, the Russian spirit increasingly determines the direction of the country. At the same time, he has that same “worldwide responsiveness,” that is, he does not put himself above other peoples, including those whose homeland is in Russia. Russians value their history, blood, culture, civilization, but do not turn into chauvinists, do not consider other peoples living side by side with them to be beasts or underdeveloped. The blossoming complexity of Russian civilization cannot be compared with the primitive chauvinism of the Jewish state, not to mention the prospects that Russia has and which, through its own fault, Israel does not have. We do not need to imitate anyone, especially since our own rich historical experience gives us a wide variety of examples of mistakes and achievements, falls and breakthroughs. From them we will learn to live on our land.
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