Alex, who is not Jewish, explains that he intends to take the book with him into battle. He says his nickname is Zion, “because I am a Zionist”.

Golda Meir is very popular in Ukraine these days, with a version of her saying about Israel and Arabs still circulating on social media: “If Russia lays down its weapons, there is no war. If Ukraine lays down its weapons, there is no Ukraine.” Yet in his speech to the Knesset on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy quoted a different Meir remark: “We intend to remain alive. Our neighbours want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.”

Had Zelenskyy continued in this vein, his speech may have had a warmer reception. Israelis, even those who weren’t yet born in 1973, have a sense of what it’s like to be attacked by larger armies who think their country should not exist. The Israeli army’s ethos is largely about being a smaller, scrappier and smarter force that can successfully take on those who seek to annihilate us. So when Ukrainians quote Golda Meir’s pithy remarks, it resonates in Israel, because we understand — first-hand or through our close family members — what Ukraine is experiencing.

Israelis also see parallels between Ukraine and its current situation because, as politicians in Jerusalem often say, Israel must be able to “defend itself, by itself”. While grateful for military aid from the US, Israel never expected other countries’ soldiers to take part in its wars. Many of its politicians and pundits — myself included — watched the world do next to nothing when Russia amassed its tanks on the border, concluding it was yet further proof that Israel can and must rely on itself. Plus, as Zelenskyy could have pointed out, Russia is an ally of Iran, which is bent on Israel’s destruction.

But rather than highlight this, Zelenskyy chose to focus much of his speech on the Holocaust, a rare misstep in his video tour of parliaments. Israelis, of course, know all about the horrors of the Holocaust. They know, for instance, that it was not a war between the armies of two nations. Rather, it was Nazi Germany’s attempt to erase all Jews from the earth. It was industrial-scale genocide, with gas chambers, death marches and — as at Babyn Yar in Kyiv, which Zelenskyy mentioned — the mass execution of thousands of people lined up in front of ditches.

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By Giles Fraser

Zelenskyy referenced Righteous Among the Nations, the more than 2,600 Ukrainians documented as having saved Jews. “Ukrainians made their choice 80 years ago,” he said. “They rescued Jews. People of Israel, now you have such a choice.” But many Israelis know the role that many more Ukrainians played in the Holocaust: roughly 80,000 Ukrainians volunteered for the SS, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police rounded up Jews to be massacred at Babyn Yar, Lviv, Zhitomir and elsewhere.

None of this should be relevant to a war in which Russia invaded Ukraine and is brutally bombarding its cities. Polls show that Israelis overwhelmingly support Ukraine, and that is reflected in the Knesset, as well.

Yet many Israeli politicians expressed discomfort with Zelenskyy’s speech. “It is impossible to rewrite the terrible history of the Holocaust,” Israeli Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel said. “The war is terrible but the comparison with the horrors of the Holocaust and the Final Solution is outrageous.” Likud former cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz suggested that, had the speech not been given at wartime, people “would have it bordered on Holocaust denial”.

Still, as Soviet-born American writer Alex Zeldin has observed, Zelenskyy’s speech demonstrated a very Soviet way of speaking about the Holocaust, which is focused more on Jews who fought in the Red Army during World War Two — and therefore suffered in the same way as other Soviet people — than the Nazi goal of extermination of the Jewish people. In Israel, too, many agree that we should cut him some slack, considering his desperate situation.

For instance, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who brewed a diplomatic crisis with Poland over accusations of Holocaust distortion, sent a simple message of support for Ukraine after the speech. And when Lapid and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett were asked about Zelenskyy’s comments the following day, they both started by saying they didn’t want to judge someone fighting for his country’s survival — though they did add that his comparison was inappropriate. Hendel, who was one of the first to complain about Zelenskyy’s Holocaust remarks, said the same to me: we must also remember that he is managing a crisis.

During his speech, Zelenskyy asked the Knesset the same question that he has asked every parliament in recent weeks: why can’t Israel put more economic pressure on Russia or send weapons to Ukraine?

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What Ukraine can learn from Israel

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Israel has condemned Russia at the UN and in repeated statements since. It has sent several planes full of humanitarian aid and on Tuesday became the first country to open a field hospital in Ukraine . The main reason why Israel has not done more is that it does not want to antagonise Russia, which looms over its northern border with Syria. We should also remember that, unlike Baltic states which have an actual border with Russia, Israel is not a member of Nato.

Of course, it is still reasonable for Zelenskyy to demand more from the Knesset, considering his country is fighting for its survival. But many of his specific requests didn’t make much sense. For example, Zelenskyy strongly implied that Ukraine needs Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system, saying: “Everyone in Israel knows that your missile defence is the best. It is powerful. Everyone knows that your weapon is strong… And you can definitely help us protect our lives, the lives of Ukrainians, the lives of Ukrainian Jews.”

But the Iron Dome would have very little effect in helping Ukraine fight Russia. For starters, the rockets and UAVs that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launch at Israel from Gaza are much cruder than Russia’s ballistic missiles and other projectiles. Meanwhile, Israel barely has enough Iron Dome batteries to cover its own territory, which is a fraction of Ukraine’s size, and you can be certain that Hamas and PIJ would immediately take advantage of a situation in which Israel sent its Iron Dome elsewhere. On top of that, it would take a long time to transport an Iron Dome interceptor and make it operational, and the US Congress only just approved the $1 billion Israel needed to replenish the Iron Dome batteries used during the war with Gaza in May.

Zelenskyy surely knows all of this; his own Ambassador to Israel, Yevgen Kornichuk, said at the beginning of the war that “Russia uses completely different weapons from the Palestinians, so Iron Dome would probably not help us”. In a similar vein of asking for the irrelevant, Hendel told me that Ukraine has repeatedly requested that he ban Moscow’s official news stations, on the grounds that they spread dangerous disinformation — even though the channels are not actually broadcasted in Israel.

In another section of his speech, Zelenskyy criticised Bennett’s mediation efforts between Ukraine and Russia. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle; the jury so far is out, and Bennett himself says he is not sure what impact he can have, though he is willing to try in order to end the war and save lives.

But Zelenskyy’s sharp remarks that “indifference kills” belie the fact that it is Zelenskyy himself who drew Bennett into the role of intermediary. Zelenskyy has been asking Israel to mediate between Ukraine and Russia since February 2021, citing Jerusalem’s good ties with Moscow. How could Bennett do this while also showing as much support as the West?

Despite this, some Right-wing American pundits have speculated that the speech was, in fact, the Biden administration using Zelenskyy as a way to pressure Israel to get in line with the West. My sources in Washington have told me this is not true, but that US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and others did warn Bennett that assuming the role of a mediator may put him in the line of diplomatic and rhetorical fire.

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It’s striking that after his speech to the Knesset, Zelenskyy somewhat backtracked in a video message on his Telegram channel: “Of course, Israel has its interests, strategy to protect its citizens. We understand all of it. The prime minister of Israel, Mr Bennett, is trying to find a way of holding talks, and we are grateful for this. We are grateful for his efforts so that sooner or later we will begin to have talks with Russia, possibly in Jerusalem. That’s the right place to find peace. If possible.” Whatever the motivation or strategy behind Zelenskyy’s zigging in the Knesset and zagging on Telegram, it seems he is aware that, contrary to his speeches in Washington, London and Brussels, his instincts or advice were off when it came to Jerusalem.

One suspects that, had he not made crude Holocaust comparisons and impractical demands, there may have been public pressure in Israel for the government to do more to help Ukraine. That being said, the misstep doesn’t seem to be hurting him much in Israel. Bennett is still willing to mediate between Russia and Ukraine and even said he would visit Kyiv if there is progress in the talks. Meanwhile. a public opinion poll taken before the speech showed 76% of Israelis supported Ukraine in the war and only 10% supported Russia.

It remains unclear whether those figures have shifted since Zelenskyy’s speech. But Israelis surely can understand his situation, even if the speech didn’t land. As Ukraine’s favourite Israeli Golda Meir once said: “If we have a choice between being dead and pitied and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.”

I have no idea how someone can have that much courage and emotional wherewithal at such a tender age. Miraculously, both survived. The Red Army finally liberated the city, in 1944, after which Luba made aliya to Israel where she became a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. She was a formidable woman.

Putin also imagines himself a liberator, his soldiers being some sort of new Red Army freeing Ukraine from latter day Nazis. For years, Russian state-controlled media has repeatedly cast the Ukrainians as neo-Nazis, never fully freed from the wickedness of anti-Semitism. “Mojem povtorit” the Russians say. We can do it again. We can defeat Nazism again.

Putin wants to recruit Jewish suffering — the suffering of my wife’s family, among millions of others — as some sort of ghastly pretext for his wicked war on the Ukrainian people.

Yes, there is a small far-Right element to Ukrainian politics. But the same could be said of modern-day Poland and Hungary, even in France or Germany. And I won’t dignify Putin’s narrative of liberation by arguing with it. You don’t rain down bombs upon innocent civilians if you want to liberate them. And you don’t bomb the holocaust memorial site at Babi Yar if you are intent on freeing the country from “Nazis”. And let’s not forget that the current and elected president of Ukraine is Jewish.

What is particularly disappointing, however, is that various Israeli leaders have allowed themselves to be manipulated in the service of Putin’s dangerous historical revisionism. In 2018, the then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood next to Putin in Moscow’s Red Square, watching Russian tanks roll past, commemorating the 73^rd anniversary of the Russian victory over the Nazis.

It helps Putin’s anti-Nazi narrative to be filmed being close to Israeli prime ministers, so it is no coincidence that one of the only world leaders to have met Putin over the past two weeks of the war has been the new Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Israel may have voted to condemn the Russian invasion at the United Nations, but you can be pretty sure that all Russian TV will show is the Russian and Israeli leaders shaking hands and smiling at each other. The message is clear: the Jews approve of what we are doing. But both Netanyahu and Bennett were always being played.

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They probably knew it too. But both had domestic reasons for being there. First, Israeli voters like to see their leaders fraternising with big players on the world stage, and 1.2 million of them are originally from Russia. Also Israel, like London, is the home to several serious Russian oligarchs, such as Roman Abramovich, with billions invested. But most important is the fact that Russia has been an important ally in the fight against Isis in Syria —and Israeli politicians hope that Russia may even be persuaded to block any new nuclear deal that the Americans want to revive with Iran.

It is because of the politics of the Middle East that Israeli politicians are prepared to stand grinning beside Putin. “It is necessary to ensure the continued security coordination between the Russian army and the Israel Defence Forces,” Netanyahu said, before he flew out to admire Putin’s tanks. Which is why, when the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014, the Israelis said nothing. So despite the fact that Ukraine was for centuries the absolute centre of world Judaism (which is why, for the ultra-Orthodox especially, it contains a number of important pilgrimage sites – such as the birthplace of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov), modern Jews don’t really see this part of the world as particularly important. The Pale of Settlement is the old Jewish world; Israel the new one. The Russian invasion is not our fight.

But it should be. Not only for obvious humanitarian reasons. But also, as a recent editorial in the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz rightly claimed: “Putin’s attempt to liken the invading Russian army to the Red Army that liberated East Europe and the extermination camps from Nazi Germany borders on Holocaust denial.” To requisition the mass murder of Jews as justification for the present invasion of Ukraine is a perversion of history so vast that it threatens to undermine the very purpose for which the state of Israel was established.

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What Ukraine can learn from Israel

By David Patrikarakos

Last week, my two youngest children received their Israeli passports in the post. I felt a sense of relief that I find difficult to explain. “Home is the place where they have to let you in,” as Rabbi Sacks once explained it to me. His point was that whatever happens in the world, having an Israeli passport guarantees Jews a safe place if ever they need it. I want this option for my boys. Their great great grandparents, Luba’s Mum and Dad, were murdered by genocidal Nazis in Lviv. They are remembered at Yad Vashem in the Hall of Names alongside so many others whose blood was spilt in Ukraine.

The memory of their deaths is profoundly disrespected by Putin’s cynical exploitation. Israeli leaders have allowed themselves to become stooges in some sordid Russian conspiracy where they are forced to play act the narratives of the second world war for a gullible TV audience. And Putin has taken the memories of dead Jews and used them as an excuse to conduct a war of aggression against a civilian population and to target their Jewish leader for assassination.

Uncovering and maintaining the truth of what happened during the holocaust is quite properly a modern Jewish commandment — both a sacred and a secular mitzvah. “Though shalt not grant Hitler posthumous victories”, was how Emil Fackenheim described it. Putin’s manipulation of the history of the Jews to deliver a patently fraudulent casus belli is a lie that must be kept a million miles away from the story of the Jewish people during the holocaust. Russian propaganda is an insult to their memory.

Once again in Europe millions of people are on the move, terrified families, women and children fleeing violent men in uniforms, elderly people hiding in freezing basements, cities reduced rubble. It looks like history, but it is today. Dressing up as liberators, the Russians have come as the aggressor. They have now become the very thing that they say they hate. And there is a special place in hell for people such as this.

The act, shocking and brazen even in this bare description, set in motion the series of events culminating in widespread riots inside Israel and a recurrence of the armed conflict with Hamas in Gaza. Disconnecting the loudspeakers was a way to show who the real rulers are, not only in Jerusalem but in the Temple Mount itself. By making it clear that Jewish voices should take precedence, it was a way to put Muslims and Arabs in their proper place.

For a long time, the leading religious authorities in Israel ruled that Jews should not enter the gates of the Mount. There is no way for Jews to purify themselves to enter the sacred square, no way to rebuild the Temple, which is a task best left to God. He alone can send the Messiah, in a future for which the faithful should wait and pray. Shortly after the passage of the Protection of Holy Places Law in 1967, Israel’s then religious affairs minister Zerach Warhaftig said that the Third Temple has to be built by God. The Temple Mount was the property of Israel by biblical right, but the Muslim sites would be preserved. “This makes me happy,” he added, “because we can avoid a conflict with the Muslim religion.”

Unless, as Gershom Gorenberg once put it, the future is now. Unless the waiting is over; unless history is drawing to its climax. The events of 15 April show that the question can no longer be evaded. Jewish sovereignty is now everywhere visible on the Temple Mount.

The road to the Mount has an iron logic and it remains unclear what force could stop it. Liberalism, perhaps, since its strictures separating politics from religion could preserve the religious realm as a purely spiritual aspiration. But liberalism is something that Israel has defeated. It is hardly a coincidence that illiberal thinkers such as Leo Strauss learned their political philosophy in the school of Zionism, since every line of Theodor Herzl is proof of the fact that liberalism failed to solve the Jewish question in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The liberal state could not promise European Jews anything resembling safety or dignity, it failed at the most basic task of ensuring their physical survival — but Herzl went much farther. Liberalism meant for the Jews the very real danger of spiritual no less than physical death. Only in an independent Jewish state could the Jews fully pursue the paths opened by Judaism; only in Israel could they regain their inner wholeness, their own character, free of the fear of making oneself different. Here we can detect the germ of the idea of Israel as a civilisation state, even if Herzl was on this point a very imperfect guide.

The stopping point on the route to a temple and a monarchical government — the restoration of the House of David — remains elusive. If the tradition of the halakha, the body of religious laws, expressed an attitude of distance and sanctity towards the Temple Mount, ethnic nationalism stands for a markedly different goal: the holy site as a totem expressing the ultimate sovereignty over the Land of Israel.

And, as Tomer Persico wrote, who better than Naftali Bennett to serve as a salient model for the shift of the centre of gravity of the Zionist movement from halakha to sovereignty? This probable new prime minister represents a hardline nationalism that leaves religion a few steps behind. “We will consult with rabbis, but we make the decisions in the political arena,” he declared soon after taking over conservative political party The Jewish Home.

History is the struggle to realise a myth in reality, but we now know that the world remains polytheistic. There are many opposing myths struggling for realisation and therefore many opposing ends to history.For the Jewish people, sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and not liberalism, is the logical conclusion to its collective history. At the same time, that moment is also an end, the end of Jewish history, and it is in this context that the many strictures against bringing it about must be understood. In an essay first published in 1959, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism”, Gershom Scholem worried whether Jewish history would be able to endure the entry into the concrete realm of power without perishing in the crisis of its Messianic claim.

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For the Israeli radical right, the inability or unwillingness to take complete control over the Temple Mount is an obvious symptom of a diminished or mutilated sovereignty. Commentators such as Yair Wallach unwittingly add fuel to the fire when they stress that the Muslim sites and the ongoing Palestinian presence above the Western Wall constitute a challenge far more significant than the secular power of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. The latter also has a clear understanding of these facts and does not miss any opportunity to associate itself with the defence of the Islamic sites on the Haram, as happened again in the latest Gaza war.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that liberals, both in Israel and outside, prefer to appeal to the Jewish tradition of sanctity and distance as a vaguely Rawlsian argument by which to get Jewish conservatives to agree to a general framework of religious tolerance and coexistence. For Rawls, the political conception of justice was the great overlap between different ways of life, but each group has its own reasons to support that conception. A religious group may support the principles of freedom and equality because they are dictated by religious doctrine, while artists and intellectuals arrive at them from the point of view of the eccentric individual. Similarly, liberal commentators have argued that Israel should stop short of bringing the Jewish state back to life for reasons intrinsic to the Jewish tradition itself.

Whether this strategy can succeed is, to avoid all pieties, rather doubtful. As Jewish religious conservatives will readily point out, there is no reason why the Jewish tradition should be made to fit with liberalism rather than the other way around. After all, Judaism is thousands of years old, while liberalism dates back at most two or three centuries.

The contemporary alternatives to liberalism are quite limited in number. There is the Chinese tradition of imperial power. There is Hinduism, the long adventure of Hindu thought, which no one should take for a strictly religious affair. There is Turkey and the bright lights of Turkic, Ottoman and Islamic history woven together in an impossible whole. And there is, of course, Israel and Judaism. These are the best candidates to be considered civilisation-states in our time.

The concept has little to do with size: Israel is small, but Judaism is old and it has grown both inside and outside liberalism, learning from it while remaining fundamentally unconvinced of its final truth. Nor does the civilisation state have anything to do with race or ethnicity, for civilisation is a concept born of the attempt to rise above these biological realities. The civilisation state is an affair of the mind and the heart, the two together. What distinguishes a civilisation-state is its ability to provide an overarching framework for social and political life and therefore a viable or plausible alternative to liberalism, the general framework we are most familiar with.

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Now, when people talk about Israel as a civilisation-state they usually mean that the Israeli state represents a specific people and does not aspire to the kind of universality that is common with Western democracies: Israel is the state of the Jewish people. Yoram Hazony wrote a whole book decrying the attempt to transform Israel into a neutral state representing universal values. What he defended instead was a national state, a state representing the Jewish nation, yet a national state is a close cousin of the liberal state. The freedom and autonomy of the individual needs to be guaranteed not only against internal but also external threats, and in the latter sphere, this relies on organising the powers of the nation against other nations. The liberal and national states exist on the same plane. One is turned inward, the other outward. The civilisation-state is a different creature altogether.

If Israel were to become a civilisation-state, its anchor would be the long and manifold Jewish tradition. It would be the state which today represented that tradition in all its aspects. Such a state might well have a territory and a people, but it would not be defined by them. Its essence or core would be the civilisation or way of life it had been tasked to preserve and develop. And of course, Israel as a civilisation state would in my view be able to free itself from the logic of an existential conflict with its Arab citizens or the Palestinians outside its borders. These groups may appear as a threat to the idea of Israel as a nation. They would not be a threat to the historical project of carrying Jewish civilisation into the future. A civilisation state, as opposed to a national state, should be comfortable with the existence of many different cultures and peoples in its midst. Civilisations can learn even from different and opposing civilisations.

Is it surprising that religious Zionism ended up as a hostage to nationalism? Hazony struggled against the drift towards a liberal state in Israel, and he certainly can rejoice in contributing to the demise of liberal ideas in Israel over the last two decades, but what he replaced them with was the typical European nationalism of the 19th century, to which Herzl had already succumbed. Was anything gained with the exchange? The result is the same subordination to foreign intellectual fashions which so enrages Hazony.

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According to Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the Land of Israel is one unity, an organic entity connected with the Jewish people, so that the people and the land are in complete oneness as a sovereign historical actor — concepts proper to European nationalism. Amid the growing crisis before the 1967 war, Kook addressed his students in a famous speech: “Where is each and every clod of earth? Every last bit, every four cubits of the Land of Israel? Can we forgo even one millimeter of them? God forbid!”

Hazony is correct on one point. The state of the Law of Return, whose flag includes representations of the Star of David and the traditional Jewish prayer shawl is not and will never become a liberal state. There will be no addition of a crescent moon to the Israeli flag and Arab citizens will never feel that the state belongs equally to them. There will be no new constitutional doctrine whereby the state gets reinterpreted at the highest level of abstraction so that it becomes identical with universal dictates of freedom and democracy.

The new coalition government — implausibly spanning the secular far left, a religious Muslim party and religious Jewish parties — cannot change these realities. But the national state is not the only alternative to liberalism. Ben-Gurion once asked: “Can we become a chosen people? Can we become a light unto nations? Is the redemption possible?” Those would seem to be the commandments of a civilisation-state, a state both sustained by and committed to the flowering of a civilisation.