Two talon-like hands over a scene of destruction, representing Israel and Ukraine. Photo: Al Mayadeen.
By Fra Hughes – Dec 18, 2022
Who would ever have believed in a million years or in a parallel universe that in the year 2022 anyone could write an article comparing “Israel” with Ukraine’s resurgent fascism?
Well, let’s begin. Shall we?
Let us see if there is a comparison.
Let’s see if that comparison is valid.
The Israeli entity was established in bloodshed in 1948.
Not the anti-colonial revolutionary bloodshed of Egypt, Ireland, Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, or Kenya, to mention but a few. No, “Israel” was “born” in colonial bloodshed.
It didn’t come from a people who had risen up, shaking off the chains and shackles of imperialist military occupation of the French, the British, the Spanish, the Dutch, or the Portuguese. No, these Israelis were colonial occupiers. They were alien settlers using brute force, military superiority, ethnic cleansing, rape, murder, mutilation, and other barbaric methods of extermination to cleanse what they claim to be “their land” of its indigenous population.
The first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland was established in 1897 by Theodore Herzl.
Its aim was to create a “homeland” for the Jewish people: a land where Jewish people could live “in peace” and “free from the threat of violence or discrimination,” which is a laudable goal considering that Jews had suffered disproportionately from pogroms and racist violence in many European countries, from European rulers, who in the main were the unelected Christian monarchies of the time.
Many Jews were forced out of Spain in 1492; they emigrated and were welcomed into West Asia.
Palestine and most of the countries in the region already had settled ethnic indigenously-assimilated Jewish communities.
There were Iraqi Jews, Syrian Jews, Persian Jews, Yemeni Jews, Libyan Jews… etc.
Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity.
If you are born in America, then you are American; if you’re born in Russia, you are Russian; or French, or British, or Canadian… etc. based on where you are born.
You may be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or Shinto, but religion alone is not a defining national characteristic.
Indeed, nearly all the earliest converts to this political ideology they called Zionism were atheists.
They did not believe in organized religion.
They did, however, believe in organized violence.
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From 1902, the Jewish National Fund began to confiscate lands in Palestine, then under Turkish Ottoman occupation, and without going into a more in-depth analysis of what else transpired, the rest is history, as they say.
Sadly, it is still a living history for the Palestinians of today.
Their homes were demolished, their dreams stolen, their land sequestered, and their children imprisoned, beaten, and killed. In fact, over 50 Palestinian children have been brutally murdered by the Zionist IOF this year alone.
The West Bank is under illegal occupation with nearly 1 million illegal Zionist settlers trying to steal as much land as possible from the native Palestinians, while Gaza is home to 2.2 million indigenous Palestinians, nearly all refugees from previous Zionist wars of aggression. These Palestinians are living under an inhumane illegal occupation, besieged by land, sea, and air.
While it is true that the early Zionists were not religious, they were happy to use the Jewish religious card while deciding where to “build their new utopia, a new Babylon, a second Temple Mount.”
Palestine was not the first nor the only choice for the new “Israel.”
As they scoured the maps of the world looking for a safe haven, they considered the following among others: Ararat City in the United States, the British Uganda program, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the USSR, Fugu, the Japanese Plan, Madagascar, British Guiana, Italian East Africa, and even Port Davey, Australia.
To the detriment of the Palestinian people and the wider regional collective, the cancer of Zionism was planted in Palestine by the Zionists with the help of the Jewish National Fund, watered by Zionist financiers and fertilized via the Balfour Agreement when the British government acceded to give a part of Palestine to the Zionist movement for the expressed purpose of building a Zionist Jewish “homeland.”
They claimed it was a land without a people for a people without a land.
Nothing could have been further from the truth! On May 15, 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, town, cities, and villages.
“Israel” was born in bloodshed in 1948 and continues to wallow in bloodshed over 74 years later.
Ukraine has been invaded, governed, occupied, and subjected to foreign rule by many of its closest neighbors over several centuries.
It joined the USSR in 1922 after Ukrainian Bolsheviks took power from the Ukrainian Nationalists.
After the downfall of the USSR in 1991, caused in part by the cold war, European and American sanctions, the continuation of the arms and space race, and the huge physical space that was the USSR, which came under increasing internal and external economic pressures, Ukraine became an independent state.
While many working classes of former soviet citizens wished to see the return to communism, those days ended when oligarchs and pro-Western political apparatchiks in charge of the USSR decided to reform the Soviet economies. They made economic peace with the West and embraced free market reform by adopting the privatization system. However, some of them realized then that the genie had been lost from the lamp and the cold war launched by America and its western imperialist and NATO allies would come to fruition, as the nationalized state utilities of the former Soviet Union became the property of the now newly liberated constituent parts of the USSR. These were now self-governing national bodies; they led to a new class of oligarchs, capitalists, foreign investors, and global corporations who would collectively steal the wealth of the nations that rightly belonged to peoples.
While NATO promised not to encroach one centimeter eastward toward Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has actually done the complete opposite and now nuclear weapons are bordering the Russian Federation.
As part of this encroachment, Victoria Nuland, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden spent over $5 billion promoting, financing, and, some even claim, arming the fascist coup plotters of the Maidan Square riots in 2014 to overthrow the democratically elected leader and government of the Ukrainian people in order to install a fiercely anti-Russian pro-NATO cabal at the head of state.
A coup inflamed the dying members of the conflict from World War II. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian nationalists had joined Hitler’s Nazi battalions and killed their fellow Ukrainians. Ukrainian nationalists sent their Jewish Ukrainian friends to death camps. There were Russian-speaking Ukrainians and gypsies all over the country.
It was the Russians who defeated Nazism in WWII, losing over 25 million of its people in the process. Without Russia, Europe would be today under the jackboot of the Third Reich.
Europeans have forgotten the debt of freedom they owe to the Russian people.
With the fascist coup of 2014 came the open resurgence of fascism on the streets and in the armed forces of Ukraine.
A schism erupted between the anti-Russian fascist forces in Kiev and the Ukrainian ethnic Russian-speaking citizens in eastern Ukraine, specifically the Donbass region and Crimea, which borders Russia.
Kiev sent in tanks, guns, bombs, and aircraft to subdue, oppress, murder, and occupy its own citizens.
Literally, no one in Ukraine voted for the coup. Very few people actually support it even today.
The fascists seized power under American direction. The people of eastern Ukraine refused to recognize a coup that encapsulated the soon-to-be persecution of Russian-speaking, Orthodox Ukrainians.
People have the right to defend their democracy against a foreign-inspired illegal coup. Don’t they?
The people said no, so Kiev sent in the neo-Nazis, and civil war in eastern Ukraine ensued.
For 8 years, the people of Donbass, Lugansk, Donetsk, and Crimea resisted neo-Nazi occupation.
The Minsk Agreements 1 and 2 were negotiated to bring peace to the country.
Zelensky was elected with a mandate of bringing peace to the region.
Instead, and in order to gain power, he lied. He told the people what they wanted to hear. They wanted peace, but what did he give them? A build-up of arms, men, and equipment.
A $5 billion war was bought and paid for in 2014 on the streets of Kiev, in Maidan Square.
The most corrupt government in Europe was expending its natural resources in a war on behalf not of the Ukrainian people, but in favor of the American, Western, and NATO capitalism.
The only victors are the Military Industrial Complex, its lobbyists, its shareholders—to include politicians and their families, and the moneylenders we call banks: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum… etc.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “it is the bankers behind me I fear, more than the Confederates in front of me.”
Finally, let us compare Israeli Zionism with Ukrainian neo-Nazism.
“Israel” wants a “Nation State” with complete loyalty as an “ethnically homogenous Jewish entity.”
Ukraine wants a Nation State with complete loyalty to the state as an ethnically Ukrainian Catholic entity.
“Israel” discriminates against its Arab Palestinian citizens, treating them as second-class citizens, and would, if it could, get rid of the entire Palestinian population.
Ukraine treats its Ukrainian Russian-speaking citizens as second-class citizens and would, if it could, get rid of its Russian-speaking citizens.
While “Israel” ethnically cleanses the land of the Palestinian population and bombs Gaza routinely, we can recognize the same cause-and-effect pattern being used in Ukraine against Donbass.
While Israeli settlers burn down olive groves and attack, injure, and maim the indigenous Palestinian population, we could see similar events in Ukraine too.
The massacre in the trade union building in Odessa is one example.
The routine execution, dismemberment, and torture of Russian-speaking Ukrainians are perpetrated by the fascist forces of Kiev.
The Israeli occupation forces are made up of those born in occupied Palestine after 1948 and those from around the world who wish to migrate to “Israel” alongside political Zionists who believe the end justifies the means and thus join the IOF for ideological reasons.
We see the same modus operandi working in Ukraine. Fascists from around the globe flock to Ukraine to murder Russians and consolidate the fascists in power.
America is supplying Ukraine with weapons, financing war, and giving political cover to the Zionists of “Israel.”
The US is giving political cover to fascist Ukraine.
“Israel” is governed by an elected right-wing semi-fascist, Zionist government.
Ukraine is governed by an elected right-wing semi-fascist, neo-Nazi government.
Both leaders are zionists, indeed Zelensky has stated publicly he wants to turn Ukraine into a second “Israel,” and I assume by extension, he wants to turn eastern Ukraine into a second Gaza.
To complete the analogy and the irony of how the devil makes strange political bedfellows. Let us recap.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian nationalists and European Nazis joined Hitler in his fight against Russia, against communism and took an active part in the wholesale slaughter and destruction of the Jewish people in the European continent.
It was the Russians and the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who fought and died to liberate Ukraine and Europe from the cancer of Nazism.
It was the Russians who saved and freed the Jews in Auschwitz and who saved Europe from fascism.
These facts are seldom alluded to or remembered in “Israel” or Europe.
Today, the descendants and worshippers of the Banderite slaughtering fascists continue to pursue their ideological supremacy over and the extermination of Russian Slavs, the inferior race that must be demonized, ostracized, and exterminated.
Surely these values are the basis of Zionism, what it stands for, and a reminder of how European Jews died at the hands of these very same ideological thugs and governments.
Apparently, Israeli soldiers and mercenaries are fighting side by side with neo-Nazis, while “Israel” supplies weapons of mass destruction to Ukraine and welcomes Kiev’s fascist leader Zelensky to occupied Palestine.
Zionism is a cancer in West Asia, and its twin is fascism in Europe, and both must be treated aggressively, or they will kill the host body.
Ukraine and “Israel”, “Israel” and Ukraine: two sides with one ideology, both pariah apartheid bodies.
Fra Hughes
Fra Hughes is an Irish political activist, commentator, and author. His most recent books are My Walk with Palestine: an Activist's Tale and Voices from Donbass.
