On Lavrov's Spat With Israel - Who Is Right?

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is in a spat with Israel over its support for Nazis militia in the Ukraine.

The immediate cause is a passage in an interview Lavrov had with the Italian TV network Mediaset:

Question: This is how you see it, while Vladimir Zelensky puts it differently. He believes denazification doesn’t make any sense. He is a Jew. The Nazis, Azov – there are very few of them (several thousand). Vladimir Zelensky refutes your view of the situation. Do you believe Vladimir Zelensky is an obstacle to peace?

Sergey Lavrov: It makes no difference to me what President Vladimir Zelensky refutes or does not refute. He is as fickle as the wind, as they say. He can change his position several times a day.

I heard him say that they would not even discuss demilitarisation and denazification during peace talks. First, they are torpedoing the talks just as they did the Minsk agreements for eight years. Second, there is nazification there: the captured militants as well as members of the Azov and Aidar battalions and other units wear swastikas or symbols of Nazi Waffen-SS battalions on their clothes or have them tattooed on their bodies; they openly read and promote Mein Kampf. His argument is: How can there be Nazism in Ukraine if he is a Jew? I may be mistaken but Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood, too. This means absolutely nothing. The wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews. “Every family has its black sheep,” as we say.

The Zionist entity in Palestine reacted with harsh words:

The Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, condemned on Monday a recent claim by the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, that Jews were “the biggest antisemites.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry also summoned the Russian ambassador to Israel to explain Mr. Lavrov’s remarks, while the Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, demanded an apology.
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Mr. Bennett said that he viewed Mr. Lavrov’s remarks with the “utmost severity,” saying that the comments were “untrue and their intentions are wrong.”

Mr. Bennett added, “The goal of such lies is to accuse the Jews themselves of the most awful crimes in history, which were perpetrated against them, and thereby absolve Israel’s enemies of responsibility.”

Separately, Mr. Lapid said that Mr. Lavrov’s comments were “both an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error.”

“Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust,” he added. “The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”

Mr. Lapid has a big mouth that hides the whitewashing of Jewish Nazi collaborators in which his own family was involved.

But first let us tackle the question of Adolf Hitler's ancestry. The History channel has a piece on it:

In the decades since Adolf Hitler’s death, the Nazi leader’s ancestry has been a subject of rampant speculation and intense controversy. Some have suggested that his father, Alois, born to an unwed woman named Maria Schickelgruber, was the illegitimate child of Leopold Frankenberger, a young Jewish man whose family employed her as a maid. (She subsequently married Johann Georg Hiedler–later spelled “Hitler”–whose surname her son adopted.)

In 2019 the Jerusalem Post reported of new research on the issue:

[A] study by psychologist and physician Leonard Sax has shed new light supporting the claim that Hitler’s father’s father had Jewish roots.

The study, titled “Aus den Gemeinden von Burgenland: Revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather,” which was published in the current issue of the Journal of European Studies, examines claims by Hitler’s lawyer Hans Frank, who allegedly discovered the truth.

Hitler asked Frank to look into the claim in 1930, after his nephew William Patrick Hitler threatened to expose that the leader’s grandfather was Jewish.

In his 1946 memoir, which was published seven years after he was executed during the Nuremberg trials, “Frank claimed to have uncovered evidence in 1930 that Hitler’s paternal grandfather was a Jewish man living in Graz, Austria, in the household where Hitler’s grandmother was employed,” and it was in 1836 that Hitler’s grandmother Maria Anna Schicklgruber became pregnant, Sax explained.
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Sax writes in the study that according to the letters in Frank’s memoir, “Frankenberger Sr. sent money for the support of the child from infancy until its 14th birthday.”

“The motivation for the payment, according to Frank, was not charity but primarily a concern about the authorities becoming involved: ‘The Jew paid without a court order, because he was concerned about the result of a court hearing and the connected publicity,’” the letters state.

It seems to me that Lavrov has that one right. It really seems that Adolf Hitler had some Jewish ancestors who even paid for the upbringing of his father.

Now onto the other issue, Lavrov's claim that:

.. the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews. “Every family has its black sheep,” as we say.

Yair Lapid does not agree with that. Well, his father didn't either until, to his embarrassment, some new facts proved him wrong. There is for example the well known case of Rudolf Kasztner in which Lapid's father was involved.

As the Times of Israel reported in 2016:

[The British Jewish historian Paul] Bogdanor was “extremely shocked” to find that everything pointed towards Kasztner’s having been “a collaborator” with the Nazis, and a “betrayer of the Zionist movement and the Jewish people.”

Bogdanor’s new book, “Kasztner’s Crime,” published in October, sets out the case against the Jewish leader in damning detail. Even the most devoted defender might have second thoughts after reading his book.
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Kasztner was a leader of a small Zionist grouping in Budapest towards the end of World War II. He led a Jewish rescue committee which, before the Nazis entered Hungary, did succeed in saving the lives of a number of Jews. But once the Nazis arrived, Kasztner, an ambitious lawyer, became embroiled in prolonged negotiations with the Nazi leadership, particularly Adolf Eichmann.

After complex dealings with Eichmann, Kasztner succeeded in getting the Nazis to agree to the deportation of a group of 1,684 Hungarian Jews, the so-called “Kasztner Train,” who eventually ended up in freedom in Switzerland.

But thousands more continued on the doomed path to Auschwitz. Bogdanor says that not only did Kasztner know they were being sent to their deaths, but that he actively kept such information secret from other Jews in Hungary and the wider Jewish world.

Kasztner deliberately put selected strong Zionists who wanted to emigrate to Palestine on his list. Those Hungarian Jews who did not want to emigrate were deceived by him to believe that the Nazis were no danger to them. Kazstner himself later found a role in the Zionist establishment:

Kasztner himself did not get on the train, but survived the war and made his way to Palestine. By 1952 he was a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and a would-be member of Knesset, though he did not succeed in obtaining a place high enough on the Mapai list to become elected.

Nevertheless, when, in 1953, an embittered Hungarian Jew named Malkiel Gruenwald distributed a pamphlet about Kasztner, naming him as a Nazi collaborator, the Israeli government thought highly enough of him to bring a libel suit on his behalf, accusing Gruenwald of defamation.

During the trial, dozens of witnesses testified about Kasztner’s actions during the war. The case lasted 18 months and did not end well for him. The presiding judge ruled that Kasztner had indeed collaborated, and in words which echo down the years, said he had “sold his soul to the devil.”

The Israeli government of the day fell and Kasztner and his family became virtual prisoners in their home. He resigned from his post, his wife sank into depression and his daughter spoke, years later, of having been ostracized and mocked by other children at school.

On March 3, 1957, right-wing extremists shot Kasztner dead. The following year, too late for him, the court verdict was reversed, suggesting that much of what was claimed against him was not correct. Leading the campaign in ensuing years to rehabilitate Kasztner was journalist and political Tommy Lapid, himself a Hungarian Jew and father of Yair Lapid, the leader of today’s Yesh Atid party.

The father of the current Foreign Minister of Israel Yair Lapid tried to rehabilitate Kasztner. But the British historian found that Kasztner was indeed guilty:

“Kasztner didn’t start out as someone evil,” says Bogdanor. “He started out as someone who wanted to rescue Jews, and before March 1944, he did rescue Jews. But when the Nazis occupied Hungary, he began negotiating with them and, very quickly, I argue, he became a collaborator.”
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The central charge made against Kasztner by the surviving Hungarian Jews was, says Bogdanor, “not just that he failed to warn them [of the Nazis’ intention]. It was that Kasztner had instructed local Jewish leadership to mislead them, and to deceive them into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. After Kasztner had visited the local communities, the leadership spread false information — which he had given them — that the Jews were going to be resettled inside Hungary. Agranat and the other judges overlooked this matter of deception.”

Bogdanor admits to being profoundly shocked by the depth and extent of what he found out about Kasztner. It would have been bad enough, he argues, if Kasztner had passively collaborated with the Nazis. But he actively collaborated, he says, taking steps to mislead both Jews inside Hungary and his Jewish contacts in the outside world.

Yair Lapid, just like his father, is wrong. There were quite a number of Jewish collaborators and some were even officers in Hitlers Wehrmacht.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to Yair Lapid's false accusations:

Michael Elgort ?????????? @just_whatever - 9:18 UTC · May 3, 2022
Today Russian @mfa_Russia has officially replied on its telegram channel to @yairlapid statement that you see below and this reply deserves to be translated and posted in full. A long thread with full translation below, link to the source in the end

The complete translation of the Foreign Ministry statement is here. It says (format edited for readability):

We paid attention to the anti-historical statements of Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, which largely explain the course of the current Israeli government to support the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv. The Israeli minister said literally the following: “The Jews did not destroy themselves during the Holocaust. Blaming Jews for antisemitism is a blatant level of racism against Jews”. For some reason, the Western press (and some of our liberals) still argue about whether there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine. The Jewish origin of Vladimir @ZelenskyyUa is given, as one of the "reinforced concrete" arguments. The argument is not only untenable, but also crafty. History, unfortunately, knows tragic examples of cooperation between Jews and the Nazis. In Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe, the Germans appointed Jewish industrialists as heads of ghettos and Jewish councils (“Judenrats”), some of whom are remembered for absolutely monstrous deeds.

Jakub Leikin in Warsaw conducted surveillance of the Jews and reported everything to the German occupation administration, dooming his compatriots to certain, and sometimes painful death, and Chaim Rumkowski generally offered the Jews of Lodz to give their children to the Nazis in exchange for saving the lives of adult residents of the ghetto, there are many evidence of his words. It only remains to agree with H. Dreyfus a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, that the complicity of Jews in the Holocaust is a “marginal phenomenon” (but not a taboo and is the subject of research). ...

The Foreign Ministry then points to Israeli government sources which documented a big increase of antisemitism in Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan coup:

Since the coup in 2014, antisemitism has flourished in Ukraine. The report of the Minister for Relations with the Diaspora of Israel, @naftalibennett (PM now), indicates that in 2017 the number of antisemitic incidents including dozens of acts of vandalism in museums, synagogues and memorials, increased manifold in Ukraine.

Ukraine has become the leader among all the countries of the former USSR in terms of the number of antisemitic incidents, and some publications indicate that Ukraine generally surpasses all the countries of the former USSR combined in their number. One of the prominent representatives of the Jewish movement in Ukraine, Eduard Dolinsky, recently feared the termination of the activities of his organization (“Ukrainian Jewish Committee”).

There is a certain tradition of collaboration between Zionists and antisemitic people. Event the founder of the Zionist movement to establish a 'Jewish state', Theodor Herzl, was guilty of it:

[A]s the Austro-Hungarian writer Theodor Herzl was about to publish his manifesto The Jewish State in February 1896, he faced intense pressure from Vienna’s Jewish community to halt publication. Herzl rejected the pleas, published the book, and launched a movement that ultimately led to the establishment of modern Israel. Around the same time, the residents of Vienna elected an anti-Semitic mayor. To the relief of Vienna’s Jews, the emperor refused to approve Karl Lueger, but Herzl lobbied the prime minister to accept the people’s choice, arguing that boycotting the populist leader would only increase hatred of Jews.

Herzl had hoped that the installment of an anti-semitic mayor would push more Jews in Vienna towards supporting his idea of a 'Jewish state'.

Israel's arming of fascist militia in Ukraine may well have a similar motive:

Israel is keen on bringing in Ukrainian Jewish refugees for the purpose of maintaining Jewish demographic “supremacy” over the Palestinian population, academics and analysts say.

Since the outbreak of the war with Russia on February 24, the Israeli government has called on Ukrainian Jewish refugees to immigrate to Israel and removed bureaucratic hurdles to secure their arrival as quickly as possible.

“We call on the Jews of Ukraine to immigrate to Israel – your home,” Israel’s Ministry of Immigration and Absorption said in a statement on February 26.

Does that also explain why Igor Kolomoiski, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch who lives in Israel, has financed the Azov battalion and other fascist militia in Ukraine?

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