[News] Four Lessons from Ukraine

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestinechronicle.com
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/navigating-our-humanity-ilan-pappe-on-the-four-lessons-from-ukraine/>
Navigating
our Humanity: Ilan Pappé on the Four Lessons from Ukraine
*By Ilan Pappe <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ilan-pappe> -
March 4, 2022*
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Israeli warplanes attacked hundreds of towers and civilian 'targets' in the
Gaza Strip. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

*By Ilan Pappe <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ilan-pappe>*

The *USA Today* reported that a photo that went viral about a high-rise in
the Ukraine being hit by Russian bombing turned out to be a high-rise from
the Gaza Strip, demolished
<https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/24/fact-check-gaza-strip-not-ukraine-pictured-explosion-photo/6922317001/>
by the Israeli Air Force in May 2021. A few days before that, the Ukrainian
Foreign Minister complained to the Israeli ambassador in Kiev that “you’re
treating us like Gaza”; he was furious that Israel did not condemn the
Russian invasion and was only interested in evicting Israeli citizens from
the state (*Haaretz*, February 17, 2022). It was a mixture of reference to
the Ukrainian evacuation of Ukrainian spouses of Palestinian men from the
Gaza Strip in May 2021, as well as a reminder to Israel of the Ukrainian
president’s full support for Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip in that
month (I will return to that support towards the end of this piece).

Israel’s assaults on Gaza should, indeed, be mentioned and considered when
evaluating the present crisis in the Ukraine. It is not a coincidence that
photos are being confused – there are not many high-rises that were toppled
in the Ukraine, but there is an abundance of ruined high-rises in the Gaza
Strip. However, it is not only the hypocrisy about Palestine that emerges
when we consider the Ukraine crisis in a wider context; it is the overall
Western double standards that should be scrutinized, without, for one
moment, being indifferent to news and images coming to us from the war zone
in the Ukraine: traumatized children, streams of refugees, sights of
buildings ruined by bombing and the looming danger that this is only the
beginning of a human catastrophe at the heart of Europe.

At the same time, those of us experiencing, reporting and digesting the
human catastrophes in Palestine cannot escape the hypocrisy of the West and
we can point to it without belittling, for a moment, our human solidarity
and empathy with victims of any war. We need to do this, since the moral
dishonesty underwriting the deceitful agenda set by the Western political
elites and media will once more allow them to hide their own racism and
impunity as it will continue to provide immunity for Israel and its
oppression of the Palestinians. I detected four false assumptions which are
at the heart of the Western elite’s engagement with the Ukraine crisis, so
far, and have framed them as four lessons.

*Lesson One: White Refugees are Welcome; Others Less So*

The unprecedented collective EU decision to open up its borders to the
Ukrainian refugees, followed by a more guarded policy by Britain, cannot go
unnoticed in comparison to the closure of most of the European gates to the
refugees coming from the Arab world and Africa since 2015.  The clear
racist prioritization, distinguishing between life seekers on the basis of
color, religion and ethnicity is abhorrent, but unlikely to change very
soon. Some European leaders are not even ashamed to broadcast their racism
publicly as does
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe-welcomes-ukrainian-refugees--others-not-so-much/2022/02/28/96981546-9867-11ec-9987-9dceee62a3f6_story.html>
the Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov:

“These [the Ukrainian refugees] are not the refugees we are used to … these
people are Europeans. These people are intelligent, they are educated
people. … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were
not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have
been even terrorists…”

He is not alone. The Western media talks about “our kind of refugees” all
the time, and this racism is manifested clearly on the border crossings
between the Ukraine and its European neighbours. This racist attitude, with
strong Islamophobic undertones, is not going to change, since the European
leadership is still denying the multi-ethnic and multicultural fabric of
societies all over the continent. A human reality created by years of
European colonialism and imperialism that the current European governments
deny and ignore and, at the same time, these governments pursue immigration
policies that are based on the very same racism that permeated the
colonialism and imperialism of the past.

*Lesson Two: You Can Invade Iraq but not the Ukraine*

The Western media’s unwillingness to contextualize the Russian decision to
invade within a wider – and obvious – analysis of how the rules of the
international game changed in 2003 is quite bewildering. It is difficult to
find any analysis that points to the fact that the US and Britain violated
international law on a state’s sovereignty when their armies, with a
coalition of Western countries, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.  Occupying a
whole country for the sake of political ends was not invented in this
century by Vladimir Putin; it was introduced as a justified tool of policy
by the West.

*Lesson Three: Sometimes Neo-Nazism Can Be Tolerated*

The analysis also fails to highlight some of Putin’s valid points about the
Ukraine; which by no means justify the invasion, but need our attention
even during the invasion.  Up to the present crisis, the progressive
Western media outlets, such as *The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington
Post* etc., warned us about the growing power of neo-Nazi groups in the
Ukraine that could impact the future of Europe and beyond. The same outlets
today dismiss the significance of neo-Nazism in the Ukraine.

*The Nation* on February 22, 2019 reported:

“Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultra nationalism and
erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial
euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on
feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of
Nazi collaborators.”

Two years earlier, the *Washington Post* (June 15, 2017) warned, very
perceptively, that a Ukrainian clash with Russia should not allow us to
forget about the power of neo-Nazism in the Ukraine:

“As Ukraine’s fight against Russian-supported separatists continues, Kiev
faces another threat to its long-term sovereignty: powerful right-wing
ultra-nationalist groups. These groups are not shy about using violence to
achieve their goals, which are certainly at odds with the tolerant
Western-oriented democracy Kiev ostensibly seeks to become.”

However, today, the *Washington Post* adopts a dismissive attitude and
calls such a description as a “false accusation”:

“Operating in Ukraine are several nationalist paramilitary groups, such as
the Azov movement and Right Sector, that espouse neo-Nazi ideology. While
high-profile, they appear to have little public support. Only one far-right
party, Svoboda, is represented in Ukraine’s parliament, and only holds one
seat.”

The previous warnings of an outlet such as *The Hill *(November 9, 2017),
the largest independent news site in the USA, are forgotten:

“There are, indeed, neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been
overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact
that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow
is profoundly disturbing. It is especially disturbing given the current
surge of neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe.”

*Lesson Four: Hitting High-rises is only a War Crime in Europe*

The Ukrainian establishment does not only have a connection with these
neo-Nazi groups and armies, it is also disturbingly and embarrassingly
pro-Israeli.  One of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s first acts was to
withdraw the Ukraine from the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of
the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People – the only international
tribunal that makes sure the Nakba is not denied or forgotten.

The decision was initiated by the Ukrainian President; he had no sympathy
for the plight of the Palestinian refugees, nor did he consider them to be
victims of any crime. In his interviews after the last barbaric Israeli
bombardment of the Gaza Strip in May 2021, he stated
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGY6fHodcUY> that the only tragedy in Gaza
was the one suffered by the Israelis.  If this is so, than it is only the
Russians who suffer in the Ukraine.

But Zelensky is not alone. When it comes to Palestine, the hypocrisy
reaches a new level. One empty high-rise hit in the Ukraine dominated the
news and prompted deep analysis about human brutality, Putin and
inhumanity. These bombings should be condemned, of course, but it seems
that those leading the condemnation among world leaders were silent when
Israel flattened the town of Jenin in 2000, the Al-Dahaya neighborhood in
Beirut in 2006 and the city of Gaza in one brutal wave after the other,
over the past fifteen years. No sanctions, whatsoever, were even discussed,
let alone imposed, on Israel for its war crimes in 1948 and ever since. In
fact, in most of the Western countries which are leading the sanctions
against Russia today, even mentioning the possibility of imposing sanctions
against Israel is illegal and framed as anti-Semitic.

Even when genuine human solidarity in the West is justly expressed with the
Ukraine, we cannot overlook its racist context and Europe-centric bias. The
massive solidarity of the West is reserved for whoever is willing to join
its bloc and sphere of influence. This official empathy is nowhere to be
found when similar, and worse, violence is directed against non-Europeans,
in general, and towards the Palestinians, in particular.

We can navigate as conscientious persons between our responses to
calamities and our responsibility to point out hypocrisy that in many ways
paved the way for such catastrophes. Legitimizing internationally the
invasion of sovereign countries and licensing the continued colonization
and oppression of others, such as Palestine and its people, will lead to
more tragedies, such as the Ukrainian one, in the future, and everywhere on
our planet.

*- Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a
senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the
author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A
History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about
Israel. Pappé is described as one of Israel’s 'New Historians' who, since
the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the
early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948.
He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.*
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