We see a vague figure jump into the abyss. We look back at the script and shout, "We've done this movie already! Stop and turn back!" But business continues despite everything that is perceived as a normal course of history.
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We now often hear the phrase "the right side of history." Former US President Barack Obama used to use it a lot. It arrogantly portrays the speaker as someone who knows that history is progressing. Progressing somewhere, and he knows where, this is one of those hollow statements that provide temporary relief for the consciousness. But in a country like Israel, one is required to understand where it stands in the vicious whirlpool of this event, of the Russian incursion of Ukraine.
The moral aspect is important, but from the moment President Joe Biden made it clear that the Ukrainian people are the wall that Russia's Vladimir Putin encountered, and that Washington will not send troops, it means that everyone in the international area has a utilitarian consideration that is not moral at all. Even the things the US can do without placing boots on the ground, it chooses not to. For example, when it comes to the Russian nuclear threat.
Similar to Ukraine, Israel stands as a border state, a buffer state, for in many ways it borders Russia in the north. Israeli leadership again finds itself facing a dilemma that has accompanied the state since its inception in 1948 – at the height of the previous Cold War.
Israel's heart is in the west, but without the limited political and military aid of Soviet Russia at the time, there would be no Jewish state.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, then-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion made a pathetic effort to create an alliance with the US and even offered to send Israel Defense Forces troops to Korea. That, of course, never came to be. American support for Israel was lacking. Americans wanted very little to do with Israel. Limited financial assistance and an arms embargo.
The path that Ben Gurion paved in the face of the American alienation during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower and the dangerous hostility of the USSR, was of Western neutrality, similarly to Sweden and France, that became an important strategic partner at a time of need. And, of course, the opening of the "textile factory" in Dimona.
When Levi Eshkol became Prime Minister in 1963, an era of rapprochement began with Washington and then-President Lyndon Johnson. Beginning with the 1967 Six-Day War and onward, Israel is on America's side and is paying the price for it.
From 1967 until 1973, including the Yom Kippur War, is the period when the IDF also fought with the USSR. No one can preach to Israel on this subject.
Israel has paid the price for abandoning Western neutrality. In the last decade, Jerusalem has found the right balance in the world, in which Moscow is a weaker power than Washington.
Israel's current actions push us again toward the American side. We must continue to differentiate between the political-strategic and moral dimensions crying out to us from the Ukrainian soil.
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