Today we will talk with you about Israel and how it reacts to the war, and to Russia, and to Ukraine.
Israel is both a Middle Eastern state and part of the Western world.
Pro-Ukrainian sentiments are very strong here now. However, as in 2014, Israel does not join any anti-Russian sanctions.
Official Jerusalem, proceeding from the security interests of Israel, and for other reasons too, does not want to quarrel with Moscow.
We will talk about these reasons later.
Nevertheless, there is freedom of speech in Israel, and all kinds of Israeli publications and experts
do not harmonize their publications with the «general line».
Therefore, since I already know Hebrew, and here materials are published not only in Hebrew, but also in English,
we, our editors decided to look and tell you what interesting the Israeli media wrote about the war during the last month.
Let's get started.
The Times of Israel, in an article dated June 22, writes about the formation of a special group
to investigate war crimes of the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine.
The creation of this group was announced by US Attorney General Merrick Garland during his recent visit to Ukraine.
The American «Nazi hunter» Eli M. Rosenbaum will lead the group.
«Nazi hunters» are people who, after the end of World War II, were looking for Nazi criminals who managed to escape justice.
If you are interested, I have a video on this topic – about how the Israeli secret services caught Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.
So, Eli Rosenbaum worked for sixteen years in the Office of Special Investigations of the US Department of Justice.
With his participation, more than a hundred Nazis hiding in the United States were identified,
deprived of American citizenship and deported.
Now Rosenbaum will search for criminals among the Russian military.
It makes me very sad to read this news.
Six months ago, Russia was a country that defeated Nazism and liberated Europe from it.
And now experts on Nazi crimes will be investigating the Russian Armed Forces.
How could it possibly have come to this?
It is symbolic that the article in The Times of Israel was published exactly on June 22 –
the day the Great Patriotic War began.
A year ago on this day, I read letters from the war years. And this year I just decided not to release any videos on June 22.
One of the main Israeli news sites, Ynet, owned by the Yediot Ahronot newspaper,
which is by the way translated as "recent news",
provides statistics on losses and destruction in Ukraine as of the 100th day of the war.
It is important to emphasize that these data are, firstly, incomplete, and secondly, very outdated:
after all, today is already the 122nd day of the war.
So, according to this incomplete and outdated information, more than 21,000 civilians were killed in Mariupol alone.
In Severodonetsk – more than one and a half thousand.
Let me remind you that in the whole of 2021, 7 civilians were killed in the so-called Donetsk People's Republic.
In the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic – 1 civilian.
Vladimir Putin called it «the genocide of the population of Donbass.»
Putin has repeatedly called the end of this «genocide» the goal of his «special military operation.»
Let's take a look at the numbers.
According to the UN, up to fourteen and a half thousand people died in the East of Ukraine from 2014 to 2021.
Moreover, the vast majority of human losses occur in the period up to 2016.
And according to the calculations of the Ynet news agency, this is what happens.
Putin's «special operation» in Mariupol alone killed far more civilians than all the people –
both civilians and military on both sides – in the entire previous eight years of armed conflict in the Donbass.
The same publication says that in the first hundred days of the war, Russian troops destroyed about 38,000 buildings.
About one thousand nine hundred kindergartens, schools and universities were damaged,
and 180 educational institutions were completely destroyed.
Approximately 500 hospitals and the same number of industrial enterprises were affected.
Fourteen million Ukrainians became refugees, half of them went abroad as the result of this war.
Just think about it: every third citizen of Ukraine has lost his home.
In the Israeli press, the glorification of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has become a real trend.
Thus, The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune magazine compares Zelensky with the biblical David, who slew the giant Goliath.
And here is what Ksenia Svetlova, a researcher at the Institute of Politics and Strategy at Reichman University,
a former member of the Israeli parliament and a native of Moscow, writes.
The inhabitants of the Kremlin, assessing the personality of the newly elected president of Ukraine, made three erroneous conclusions.
First, a comedian will never make a real politician.
Second, he will never be able to resist Russian power.
Third: he is not the kind of leader who will fight hard for his people and his land.
All three assumptions turned out to be completely wrong.
At the same time, Svetlova notes that Putin was not the only one who made a mistake in assessing the Ukrainian president.
The American leadership offered Volodymyr Zelensky a safe haven in the West after the invasion began,
believing that he would not want to risk his life.
According to Ksenia Svetlova, the answer of the Ukrainian leader is worthy of going down in history: «I need ammo, not a ride».
Various Israeli publications report on assistance to Ukraine.
Israel sent a batch of helmets and body armor and opened a field hospital in Ukraine.
Israeli doctors have already provided help to 6,000 Ukrainian citizens.
However, what Israel refrains from is the supply of arms.
Moreover, Israel forbade Germany to supply the Armed Forces of Ukraine with Spike anti-tank missiles,
produced at German enterprises under an Israeli license.
Even pressure from the US presidential administration did not help.
During his visit to Washington, the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Amir Eshel, said:
«Russian soldiers should not die from Israeli weapons.»
There are two reasons for this position.
The main reason is that up to a million Jews live in Russia,
and Israel prioritizes their ability to freely travel to their historical homeland.
This is the very philosophy of the State of Israel: every Jew in the world, if he wants it, should repatriate without any problems.
Therefore, the country cannot go to a break with Russia.
The second reason is the very fragile agreements between Moscow and Jerusalem on Syria.
The Syrian Arab Republic bordering the State of Israel has become a real springboard for Iran
and the pro-Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah.
For both Iran and Hezbollah, the destruction of Israel is an openly declared goal,
an integral part of the ideology and the most important point of the political program.
And although pro-Ukrainian sentiment in Israel has been steadily growing since the beginning of the war,
Jerusalem simply cannot afford to quarrel with Moscow, which acts as a moderator in Syria.
Otherwise, millions of citizens of Israel itself will be at risk.
Let's continue the review of the Israeli press and Israeli experts. Next topic.
Since the start of the war, according to The Jerusalem Post,
more than 25,000 Jews from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Moldova have made aliyah – that is, they have repatriated to Israel.
Almost half of them – 11 thousand – are citizens of Ukraine.
Most of them received temporary accommodation in hotels, and then dispersed to different cities,
accompanied by representatives of the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration.
Yes, Israel has a whole ministry that helps repatriates with relocation and settling.
The work of this department is evaluated precisely by the number of ethnic Jews who moved to Israel.
Aliyah and Integration Minister Pnina Tameno-Shete, on the one hand,
is very proud that a record number of repatriates are coming to Israel this year.
On the other hand, in Israel, Pnina Tameno-Shete herself is criticized for the fact
that approximately five thousand Ukrainian Jews left Ukraine for Germany, and not for Israel.
Israeli observers are extremely critical in their assessments of the combat effectiveness of the Russian army.
Dr. Pnina Shuker, a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security,
writes about the extremely low motivation of the Russian military.
According to her, they are depressingly affected by the poor supply of food and equipment,
they often abandon serviceable equipment and look for ways to evade orders.
Further quote: «Many Russian military personnel perceive the war as unjustified and feel deceived,
because they were told that the war would be short and that the Ukrainian people would greet them with flowers.»
Researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Dr. Ido Hecht, believes
that before the war, journalists were inclined to unjustifiably exaggerate
not only the training of the Russian army, but even its real number.
According to Ido Hecht, in reality, Russia has an undeniable advantage on the territory of Ukraine only in aviation.
But for unknown reasons, this advantage is not used:
the researcher calls the role of Russian military aviation in this war negligible.
Perhaps it is because Ukranians used to shoot down Russian jets actively in the beginning of the war
Hecht tries to understand the political goals of the belligerents.
And if on the part of Ukraine these goals are obvious to him – to defend against an invasion –
then what Russia is trying to achieve, he finds it difficult to answer.
Israel Hayom, a major newspaper, reports that the Russian invasion force numbered 190,000 troops in February.
Despite the fact that formally about a million people are employed in the Russian army,
in fact two-thirds of the Russian Armed Forces were thrown into Ukraine.
(Apparently, from the total number of the Russian military,
the author subtracted military officials, logistics officers, teachers of military universities, conscripts,
those who serve in the fleets who cannot physically be transferred to the theater of operations, and so on).
About the quality of the Russian army, Israel Hayom writes very sharply (hereinafter the quote):
“What the Ukrainians saw was a mass of outdated, and sometimes rather degraded and non-modernized Soviet equipment.
In many cases, poor maintenance by Russia came as a real surprise.
The Ukrainians thought their military had problems with corruption.
But the state of the Russian army in the first days of the invasion was shocking.
Those who imagined it to be a Space Marine armada were wrong.
Many expected a much more sophisticated and modern approach from the Russian army.
But in reality, Russia's main tactic is as follows: artillery sweeps away everything in its path,
whether it be enemy defense lines or a densely populated city.
And only after that, the advance of the ground forces through the charred ruins begins.
The war with Russia has already practically wiped out a number of Ukrainian cities, especially in the east,
such as Mariupol or Volnovakha, and the world has not seen such a number of dead civilians since the Second World War.
All the talk about “network-centric warfare” and “precision weapons” turned out to be nothing more than talk.”
In another article, the same Israel Hayom newspaper speaks with undisguised disappointment about the Russian electronic warfare forces.
Given the equipment these troops are equipped with, there was every reason to expect the highest performance from them.
But in reality, electronic warfare means are used very limitedly.
Probably, the operators of modern systems are poorly trained and simply cannot use them properly.
The publication notes that the Russian army has not been able to solve problems with radio communications.
On the territory of Ukraine, the Russian military communicates through open channels that are easy to listen to,
that the low quality of communication in the Russian army was demonstrated during the war with Georgia in August 2008.
There is even a well-known legend: equipment.
at that time, in order to convey the order to the troops to cancel the offensive on Tbilisi,
a messenger had to be sent to them in the UAZ vehicle.
Fourteen years ago it even sounded funny, but now it's not funny.
For a decade and a half, it was not possible to establish communications in the Russian army.
Actually, this was to be expected: how could it be otherwise,
if in peacetime signalmen are usually not even allowed to go to radio stations –
otherwise, God forbid, valuable military property will be broken.
We recently had a story here about a radio engineer who studied at a military university for five years,
received a red diploma for manufacturing a masterpiece rectangular snowdrifts, but did not even learn how to turn on the radio
And here is another article in Israel Hayom.
It claims that due to the insufficient number of high-precision missiles,
the Russian army is forced to use the Xa-22 (X-22) cruise missiles.
This is an anti-ship missile from the sixties! It was supposed to be used to destroy American aircraft carrier strike groups.
And the extremely low accuracy had to be compensated by the warhead with a nuclear charge –
when it comes to an atomic explosion, the miss is not so significant.
It is important to hit approximately into the aircraft carrier group
However, now Russian troops are trying to use an outdated anti-ship missile against ground targets,
and a missile with a high-explosive fragmentation warhead.
The publication notes that low accuracy can lead to hits on civilian objects – even if this was not originally planned.
And the last one. The Jerusalem Post reports that, according to unverified reports,
American microchips were found in samples of the latest Russian equipment captured by Ukrainians –
Ka-52 helicopters and Pantsir anti-aircraft missile systems.
If this is true, then it is not clear how Russia will continue to produce modern military equipment under sanctions.
Dr. Pnina Shuker, whose opinion we have already referred to here,
casts serious doubt on the general support for the war against Ukraine among Russians.
She believes that Russia is psychologically unprepared for war, and the Russians are demoralized.
She said that despite the widespread belief
that Russian society allegedly fully supported the Kremlin in the protracted confrontation,
the invasion of Ukraine was unpopular even before the first shot was fired.
It draws on a Washington Post poll conducted in December 2021:
according to this poll, only 8% of Russians believed that their country should send troops to fight Ukraine.
Dr. Shuker also mentions public opinion surveys carried out in Russia over the past decades.
They, according to her, showed that the Russians oppose any plans to annex the territory of Ukraine or restore the Soviet Union.
She considers the data of sociological polls conducted already during the war and allegedly speaking of support for the invasion of Ukraine to be irrelevant.
Polls cannot be relied upon in a situation where expressing a “wrong” opinion threatens with a fine or even a prison term.
As Pnina Shuker observed, even among the older generation, Putin's nuclear electorate,
there are doubts about how Russia treats its soldiers and their families.
It is interesting that quite obvious positions are expressed regarding sociological research during the war and the position of Russian society,
but, indeed, they are not very popular, because propaganda - both Russian and Ukrainian -
are actively promoting this idea that the entire Russian society supports the war, both see meaning in this for themselves.
Therefore, it has taken root, it seems to me that the expert is right here, well, I myself talk a lot about this too
Here is a non-standard video today – a review of the Israeli press.
If you like this video format, be sure to subscribe to our second channel.
Our colleagues, Anastasia Bryukhanova and Ekaterina Voropay, read the entire world press every day
and watch the entire YouTube in order to go on the air with a news review every day.
We decided to do it about Israel, it seemed interesting to me, people often ask about Israel's reaction.
And, it seems to me, the positions and analysis of Israeli experts are quite accurate and it is useful to research them.
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See you tomorrow.