Naftali Bennett Enters the International Arena

“When I was growing up in Ukraine, in Donetsk, there were many nations and nationalities. There were those with identity papers that read ‘Russian,’ ‘Ukrainian,’ ‘Georgian,’ or ‘Kozak.’ This was not so important since there was not much difference among them. The single designation that stood out was ‘Jew.’ If that was written as your identity, it was as if you had a disease. . . . This week, I was reminded of those days when I saw thousands of people standing at the borders of the Ukraine trying to escape. . . . They are standing there day and night and there is only one word that can help them get out: ‘Jew.’ If you are a Jew, there are Jews outside who care about and are waiting for you.”

These words were uttered recently by the former prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky, commenting on the horrors of the escalating humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. I had them in mind when the office of Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, announced his trip to Russia this past Saturday to see Vladimir Putin in an attempt to mediate between Moscow and Kiev.

Bennett is the first foreign leader to meet with the Russian president face-to-face since war broke out in Ukraine last month. For much of the past week, he’s been running an intensive diplomatic mission involving Washington, Moscow, Kiev, Berlin, and Paris. That he is doing so underscores the dramatic transformation the Jewish people have undergone in the course of the last century: from suffering expulsions, pogroms, and annihilation to constituting a strong and independent nation-state, accepted by other nations, called upon to rescue Jews wherever they may be, and working to halt a terrible and gratuitous war in the heart of Europe—a war that threatens a global confrontation between nuclear powers. The mere attempt to play such a role gives the lie to the popular image of Israel as a pariah state, shunned by all for its supposed crimes.