[LINK] The times are a-changing (Israel and Russia)

[rfmcdonald]

In his Open Democracy article "Russia and the middle east: post-Soviet flux", Zygmunt Dzieciolowski takes a look at how Russian-Israeli relations are starting to be transformed at the popular level by post-Soviet immigration and the threat of terrorism.

Divisions over how Russians view the war mirror divisions in Russian society. While "official" Moscow has talked about the urgent need to stop the gunfire and blamed Israel for its disproportionate response to Hizbollah’s initial operation on 12 July, "unofficial" anti-Kremlin Russia has a far more nuanced response to the fighting. It sees events through the tint of history, and with Soviet-Israeli relations as their backdrop.

Thus, the Kremlin-controlled television channels have concentrated in the past month on bloody scenes from Lebanese towns and villages; but unofficial Russia has called for a show of solidarity with the 1-million-plus Jews who emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union (they included Anatole [later Natan] Sharansky, the legendary dissident who went on to form Yisra'el Ba'aliya [a political party representing Russians in Israel] and becoming a government minister and author of The Case for Democracy).

When the foreign and emergency-situations ministries in Moscow were busy in the early stages of the war arranging a rescue operation for 1,407 citizens of Russia and neighbouring countries trapped in Lebanon, unofficial Russia was more concerned about the safety of more than 250,000 Russian citizens living in Israel.

Volodia Dolin, a journalist at the Moscow news station City Radio, says that 5-6 million Russians have relatives or friends in Israel. They believe, he says, that Russia should side with Israel and the United States, fighting terrorists and defending democracy.

This concern is easy to understand. Direct flights now connect Israel with a number of provincial Russian towns. Artists from Moscow and St Petersburg are keen to perform in Israel to Russian-speaking audiences. Russian-born Israeli businessmen are investing in their old motherland.