OpEd: Zelensky Keeps a Distance from His Jewishness and from Israel

By Alex Gordon

HAIFA, Israel — President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky was a comic actor and hero of the popular movie series Servant of the People, in which he played the role of a simple teacher who became the president of the state.

Later he turned into a real president of Ukraine and a tragic hero in the war unleashed by the Russian Federation on February 24, 2022. It is possible that the election of a Jew as president of Ukraine happened because actor Zelensky brilliantly played the role of the president of Ukraine in the movie.

Zelensky prepared public opinion for the paradoxical election of a representative of the unpopular Jewish people in Ukraine as president of that country. The successful comic actor and movie manager became an outstanding performer of the tragic role of the Ukrainian leader and an effective political manager.

Servant of the People is also the name of the political party founded by Zelensky. Zelensky’s comic past and his tragic present have combined into a tragicomedy. One of the highlights of the tragicomedy is that the main Ukrainian is Jewish. This is a surprising phenomenon in a country in which Jews were for many years unloved stepchildren, victims of pogroms, and inferior citizens.

In the series Servant of the People, viewers were amused by the fact that the role of the Ukrainian president is played by an ethnic Jew with the appearance, gestures, and facial expressions of a typical Jew. It was a paradox: a Jew plays the role of the leader of Ukraine and does it so successfully that he can be believed and trusted to rule Ukraine. And, lo and behold, the “jester” became king and surpassed the Ukrainian “kings” in popularity and effectiveness.

After a series of failures of Ukrainians as presidents of Ukraine, the people of this country elected a Jew as head of state, and the Jew chose the role of the leader of the Ukrainian nation. Zelensky has been waging Ukraine’s war against Russia as commander-in-chief for over two years, challenging the Soviet Ukrainian anti-Jewish stereotype of “Jews didn’t fight” (but sat on the home front during World War II).

In the movie studio “Kvartal 95” created by Zelensky, he played the role of Jews more than once, but all of his characters were endowed with negative traits that are considered typical of Jews in Ukraine: greed in the roles of a doctor and synagogue servant, and cowardice in the role of “King” Leonid. Zelensky’s alienation from Jews was felt from the first minute of his tenure as president. Only once, in an interview with The Times of Israel in January 2020, did he say: “And you know I have Jewish blood. And I’m the president. Nobody cares. Nobody asks me about it.”

But the silencing of his Jewishness has characterized his entire tenure as president. Mentioning his Jewishness became taboo. Benjamin Disraeli, a baptized Jew, was Prime Minister of Great Britain and openly discussed Jewish issues and wrote novels with Jewish characters. Léon Blum was Prime Minister of France and spoke freely about his Jewishness. Bruno Kraisky was Chancellor of Austria and made no secret of his Jewishness. Walter Rathenau was Foreign Minister of Germany and spoke proudly of his Jewish ancestry. None of them were ashamed of their Jewishness as Zelensky was. Apparently, President Zelensky knows that it is not a good idea to mention his Jewishness in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian president has brown eyes, dark brown hair, Jewish facial expressions and gestures. Zelensky has not had plastic surgery and his nationality is written all over his face. Zelensky, an assimilated, Russian-speaking Jew, with the appearance of a hero from the works of Sholom Aleichem, who has little knowledge of the Ukrainian language and, therefore, Ukrainian literature, wears the Ukrainian president’s masquerade costume, which he has transformed in recent years into a paramilitary uniform: a t-shirt and khaki-colored pants with a trident, symbol of Ukraine.

He’s not a unique character. There have already been such in Jewish history. He joined the gallery of “non-Jewish Jews” according to the classification contained in the Polish-British political scientist Isaac Deutscher’s article The Message of the Non-Jewish Jew (1954). Characterizing his heroes, Deutscher writes: “They are all radicals, children of Jewish parents who have abandoned their roots and Jewish tradition. And another thing: each of them has caused Jews (we are not talking about non-Jews now) much suffering.”  One way to disassociate oneself from Jewishness is to establish a cold relationship with Jewish history.

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, President Zelensky demanded that Israel supply his country with Israeli weapons and that the Jewish state join anti-Russian sanctions, calling these actions taking “the right side of history.”  To demand that Israel take an absolutely pro-Ukrainian position was not tactful, because the history of Ukrainian Jews during the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Haidamaks, during the Russian Civil War, during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and other anti-Jewish pogroms does not show that Ukrainians have always been on the “right side of history.”

The history of relations between Ukrainians and Jews did not begin on February 24, 2022, with Russia’s attack on Ukraine, as apparently believed by the Ukrainian president, who “bombarded” Israel with a series of requests for military aid to his country and compared the current situation of Ukrainians to that of Jews during the Nazi occupation. Zelensky was comparing incomparable things: at the time of Russian aggression, Ukrainians had a country, an army, and international support, while the Ukrainian Jews of 1941-1943 were unarmed, defenseless, and without the support of foreign countries and their fellow citizens. Zelensky recognized the right of Israelis to defend themselves against terrorists, but the Jews of Ukraine in 1941-1943 had no right to self-defense. Thus, President Zelensky distorted Jewish history and confidently removed himself from the people of his parents.

As a gifted politician, Zelensky realized that he needed to distance himself as much as possible from the Jewish people if he wished to remain the leader of the Ukrainian nation. But apparently his position as leader of the Ukrainian nation required him to sever his relationship not only with Jewish history, but also with the Jewish state.

On June 2, 2024, Ukrainian President Zelensky, speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue Forum in Singapore, said that Ukraine will recognize Palestine and Israel: “Ukraine will recognize two states, Israel and Palestine, and will do everything so that Israel stops, so that this conflict ends, and so that civilians do not suffer.” This position of the Ukrainian president is completely in line with that of his worst enemy, Russian President Putin.

Zelensky called for an immediate halt to the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that is, an end to the war in Gaza, leaving Hamas as the military force ruling the population of Gaza and capable of continuing terrorist attacks against Israel. He called for peace, but he does not accept calls for peace between Russia and Ukraine, for that peace means continued occupation of Ukrainian lands by the Russian Federation. So, peace is not always better than war. And in this case, ending the war in Gaza will not lead to peace, but will give the Hamas terrorist movement a respite to prepare for a new war and new terrorist attacks.

Zelensky does not realize that there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There is a clash between the forces of the “Islamic Axis” led by Iran, which openly seek the destruction of Israel. On the side of the Palestinian Arabs are the Iranians, Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese and Yemeni terrorists and pro-Palestinian activists in the US and in Europe. This conflict is broader and deeper than local. It goes even beyond the Middle East, for, as Zelensky knows, there are demands from many parts of the world for a Palestine free of Jews, “from the river to the sea.” And “free Palestine” is a call for the destruction of Israel.

The state of Palestine does not exist. So, what kind of Palestine does Zelensky recognize? With the call for a free Palestine and the accompanying worldwide anti-Jewish movement, one cannot morally equate the two sides of the conflict. The Palestinian-Israeli “border conflict” of which Zelensky speaks has become a widespread anti-Semitic movement. Zelensky’s pronouncement of equal recognition of the two sides of the conflict is the result of his further alienation from the Jewish people.

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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.