Putin, Netanyahu and the instrumentalization of World War II

The longer the Israeli offensive on Gaza goes on and the worse it gets, the more bluntly the similarities between Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin become apparent. First of all – in Gaza even more than in Ukraine – there are the systematic strikes on civilian infrastructure to drive the local population to despair.

Then there’s the disregard for fundamental standards of humanitarian law, which has led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants for both the Russian president and the Israeli prime minister.

Yet this doesn’t seem to trouble Joe Biden, whose unconditional support for Israel is based on an explicitly “Zionist” commitment of over half a century. The Russian and Israeli leaders’ biased references to World War II and their aggressive rewriting of such history should, however, worry Western democracies on this 80^th anniversary of the Normandy landings.

‘Historian in chief’

The invocation of the Great Patriotic War, in which 26 million Soviets perished between 1941 and 1945, including 16 million civilians, has become the bedrock of the Kremlin’s ultranationalist, anti-Western propaganda. As Nicolas Werth masterfully demonstrates in his 2022 book Poutine, historien en chef (“Putin, historian in chief”), “Stalin redeemed Lenin’s wrongdoing. By restoring the values of patriotism scorned and rejected by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, he restored Russia’s imperial grandeur and led to victory in 1945.”

Laws heavily penalizing reminders of the collaboration between the USSR and Nazi Germany, from 1939 to 1941, were widely adopted after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and then after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The aim is to stigmatize the Ukrainian resistance as a bunch of “Nazis” engaged in a veritable “genocide” against the Russian-speaking majority of the Donbas.

As for Netanyahu, he has never had a word to say about the 1933 agreement between the Nazi regime and the Zionist organization, which became the only Jewish movement authorized in Germany at the time. This agreement enabled 53,000 German Jews to emigrate to Palestine. In contrast, he is relentless about equating Palestinian nationalists with Nazis.

Back in 1993, when Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition, drew a dubious parallel with the 1938 Munich Agreement, which annexed part of Czechoslovakia for the benefit of Nazi Germany: “The Arab regimes have embarked on a campaign to persuade the West that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank, like the Sudeten Germans, are a separate people who deserve the right to self-determination.” He added that “the Arabs have taken their inspiration directly from the Nazis, as they too often do, to fight Israel.”

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