So before it starts, there will be all sorts of people saying that the Israeli Prime Minister flying to Putin is a demonstration of support. Don't believe them. Naftali Bennett has literally been asked by Zelenskyy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine. An Israeli Prime Minister who takes a side on this issue will lose his election right away. 20% of Israel is former Soviet citizens, and their preponderantly right wing authoritarian views are its own problem, but on this issue, it's much more divided because many of them are from Ukraine.
No Jew should have warm feelings for either Russia or Ukraine. Just the thought of putting the Ukrainian flag up is enough to make me feel slimy. The great hero of Ukrainian nationalist history is Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who in the 17th century supervised the annihilation of all Jews in Ukraine and nearly succeeded. There is a fifty foot monument to him in Kyiv and unlike controversial statues here, nobody ever objects. We did so much more for both countries than they ever did for us, but both Russia and Ukraine are indissoluble in our history, but both are indissoluble in our history, and even if Jews formed their identities in opposition from those cultures, most of what we identify as Jewish culture still comes from living in the Pale of Settlement for well over 300 years.
Jews are part of this conflict, whether we like it or not, and we get the issues at stake in the kishkes, because for centuries, Cossacks were our biggest bullies because of what the Russian empire did to them, and they had no other person to visit their rage upon than Jews. Imperial Russia did plenty to us too, but part of what they did was to use Jews as an official scapegoat against whom Ukrainian/Polish/Baltic peasant violence was sanctioned, and in most cases deliberately provoked.
Nobody really gets the scale of pogroms today. It wasn't just a series of riots, it was the systemic murder of roughly 180,000 Jews in both turn of the century waves. By the standard of any group's history but Jews, it was a genocide more than a half-century before the Holocaust.
So yes, there should be no love lost between Jews and either Ukraine or Russia, but as usual, Jews have to step in and make the ugly compromises nobody else is willing to make, and while the rest of the world is standing on ceremony and making life inconvenient for Russians in the West who have little to do with Putin's policies, a Jewish state may be stepping in to make peace between their murderers.
It's hard not to see writing on the wall that we're going to get blamed when this effort fails....
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