The pro-Russian insurgency in Ukraine’s Donbas region is “our Gaza,” one Ukrainian Jewish leader told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, invoking the specter of the on again, off again conflict between Israel and Hamas to express his pessimism regarding the future of organized Jewish life in the east of his country.
Interviewed while representing his community at a state sponsored event here in the capital of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, Joseph Zissels of the Vaad of Ukraine asserted that while there still remain synagogues and Jews in the areas controlled by the rebels, “that doesn’t mean that it is going to go back to the same condition.”
The situation in Donbas is not comparable to the frozen conflicts in Russian-dominated Georgian territories such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where a lack of conflict allows for a modicum of stability, he explained.
“The conflict that is frozen in Abkhazia and elsewhere in Georgia…where Russia came in with their own soldiers, there is no war there. There are Jews there. Donbas is still hot and it’s going to stay that way for a very long time. It’s going to be just like Gaza, sometimes hot, sometimes cold,” Zissels said.
Many of those who left Donetsk, Luhansk and other rebel centers in Donbas for Israel “will never come back to Ukraine because in that particular area they will never have peace,” he said, again comparing the region to Gaza.
According to Russian media reports dating back to 2008, when Russian and Georgia fought a war over South Ossetia, there is only one Jew left in the regional capital of Tskhinval. Efforts by one of Tbilisi’s Rabbis to track her down on behalf of The Jerusalem Post proved fruitless.
Many in the west fear that Russia hopes to create another frozen conflict in Donbas to exert pressure over Kiev to mitigate its turn to the west.
While nationalists and supporters of European integration are expected to do well in next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Zissels seemed sanguine about the neo-Nazi Svoboda party’s chances. Svoboda and similar groups have been cited by Moscow as proof that fascists and anti-Semites have taken over in Kiev.
Svoboda has “lost the support of the electorate,” Zissels stated, citing the party’s dismal performance in May’s presidential elections in which Svoboda presidential candidate Oleh Tyahnybok received 1.16 percent of the vote.
“Two years ago they got ten and a half percent [in parliamentary elections] and now they have a risk of not making it into Parliament,” he quipped.
According to a poll conducted by the Kyiv Post earlier this month, Svoboda is expected to surpass the five percent election threshold with 6.1 percent of the vote, down significantly from the 2012 election. A more recent poll conducted by the lko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives and Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, however, placed Svoboda at merely 2.2 percent support.
In recent years, Svoboda has taken pains to Tyahnybok has undertaken “significant efforts to remove the extremist image,” but has continued making anti-Semitic statements, according to a report by Swedish academic Per Rudling, who studies extremism in Ukraine. However, the group has been especially careful to tone down its rhetoric since entering parliament, Zissels stated.
They “won’t even allow themselves to say anything antisemitic,” he said.
Svoboda supporters rioted outside of the parliament in Kiev earlier this month, following demands that the government honor the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a far right militia that engaged in ethnic cleansing during World War II.
Pravy Sektor, another far right group, has also taken great pains to shed its anti-Semitic reputation, going so far as to protest in favor of IDF during Israel summer war in Gaza.