CNAAN LIPHSHIZ
Netanyahu made the statement on Monday during a state visit to Ukraine in which he attended a Holocaust commemoration event at the former killing site of Babi Yar near Kiev. He was accompanied by dignitaries including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is the first Jewish person elected to that office in Ukraine’s history.
On 29 and 30 September 1941, Ukrainian auxiliary police took about 33 000 Jews to be murdered by German soldiers in the Babi Yar patchwork of ravines on the margins of the Ukrainian capital.
During his speech, Netanyahu, whose previous visit to Ukraine as prime minister was in 1999, praised Ukrainian non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust.
But he also addressed in several places in his speech the role Nazi collaborators had in the Holocaust, which is a highly sensitive subject in Ukraine.
After mentioning how the Holocaust was carried out by “the Nazis and their collaborators”, Netanyahu said that “with one swipe of their sword, the Nazis and their partners ended a thousand years” of coexistence between Jews and Ukrainians.
The murder at Babi Yar “didn’t happen on a different planet, but minutes away from Kiev’s bustling centre. The murders of Babi Yar by the Nazis and their collaborators prepared for the murder of the Jews of Ukraine,” Netanyahu said.
In recent years, Ukraine has experienced several major controversies over state honours and other honours for people who fought alongside the Nazis against the Soviets.
Netanyahu has mentioned collaborators in past commemoration speeches, but he doesn’t always do so. In his 2016 Holocaust Day speech, for example, he didn’t mention collaborators in spite of mentioning the Nazis 11 times.
“To humanity, Babi Yar is a warning sign,” Netanyahu said. “To Jews, it’s a timeless command. We’ll always defend ourselves by our own force against any enemy.”
Zelensky, a former comedian who won the presidency last month, expressed admiration for Israel’s defense capabilities during his swearing-in speech in May. “We must become Icelanders in soccer, Israelis in defending our land, Japanese in technology,” he said.
He didn’t mention collaboration in his speech. “We cannot forget and forgive” the events at Babi Yar, Zelensky said. “The Ukrainian people will always remember crimes against humanity. We will never forget what racism and xenophobia lead to.” Zelensky told reporters that he had asked Netanyahu to recognise as a genocide the Holodomor famine, caused in 1932 by Soviet policies.
Ukrainian media devoted some attention to claims that Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife, insulted Ukrainians when she threw to the ground a piece of bread offered to her during a welcoming ceremony.
Benjamin Netanyahu received the piece of bread from a welcoming party of three women on the tarmac of an airport in Kiev upon landing there. He dipped the bread in salt and bit off a piece, offering the rest to his wife. But she quietly dropped it to the ground without tasting it, in what many Ukrainians online described as a sign of disrespect.
Andriy Bohdan, the head of the office of the president of Ukraine, dismissed these claims, saying Sara Netanyahu, who wore an outfit featuring the Ukrainian national colours to the welcoming ceremony, had “no intention” of disrespecting Ukraine.
Israel and Ukraine signed a free-trade agreement earlier this year. During the trip, Zelensky announced the opening of a Ukrainian government high-tech and investment centre in Jerusalem. Netanyahu has urged many world leaders he has met to follow the United States in moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Israel will open its own high-tech and investment centre in Kiev.
