With the historic friendship between Putin and Netanyahu shelved, the change in Russian-Israeli relations did not begin on October 7, 2023, but when Israel began to openly support Ukraine, more than a year earlier. And on the Moscow-Tehran-Beijing axis, Middle East issues are both symbolic and practical.
Moscow () – While Iran attacks Israel with rockets and drones, Russia's representative to the UN, Vasili Nebenzya, calls on the international community to condemn “Israel's dastardly actions” for the attacks on the Iranian embassy in Damascus. It is not the first case in which Putin's Russia sides with Israel's adversaries in recent years, after the classic Soviet accusations against “Israeli belligerence” seem to have been left in the past. Along with Iran and Russia, the shadow of China also looms, in a “triple alliance” that seems to be consolidated not only in the accusations against the government of Israel, but at the level of global military and geopolitical strategies.
The change in relations between Russians and Israelis was commented on in The Moscow Times by Zeev Khanin, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel's second largest academic institution. Remember that Nebenzja had already stated several times that “Israel has no right to self-defense” as an “occupying force” against Gaza and the Palestinians, and this “can only be a conscious diplomatic manipulation, certainly not a misunderstanding or lack of information.” historical”. Putin's propaganda returns to the Soviet narrative about the “colonial project of the State of Israel” against the local Arab population, which therefore has the right to fight with any method and weapon. And this neo-Soviet propaganda “tickles and revives the minority positions of the Western ultra-left.”
The turning point did not begin on October 7, 2023, according to the expert on post-Soviet conflicts, but on February 24, 2022, “when Israel openly supported Ukraine, although it did not officially apply Western sanctions.” It seemed that this would not lead to a break in relations, also given the historical friendship between Putin and Netanyahu, although the coordination between Moscow and Jerusalem in operations in Syria, which had been developing positively for years, was now reduced to a minimum. While the alliance with Iran, now increasingly operational, is also evident on the military level for the conflict in Ukraine, and Hamas now appears as a satellite of the Iranians. According to Khanin, Russia “trails behind Iran even in its criticism of Israel, for which it has no real need.” If the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were to escalate into an open conflict with the entire Arab world, Russia would gain nothing from this escalation.
All commentators are now openly talking about a “Third World War”, a conflict between the “Global North” and the “Global South” on several fronts, and Russia aspires to the role of leader of the Global South, along with China and India. Middle East issues are, then, both symbolic and practical, and Moscow needs to speak and act with more authority and toughness than China, which also supports similar propaganda against Israel and its allies, but more cautiously and without burning its bridges with nobody. Zeev Khanin does not believe the version that Russia helped organize the Hamas attack against Israel, but he certainly “tries to make the most of it.”
If the Gaza war had not broken out, the expert recalls, almost certainly “the princes of Saudi Arabia would have shaken Netanyahu's hand, putting an end forever to the Arab-Israeli conflict and establishing diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem,” with a great alliance United States-Israel-Saudi Arabia. That is why the Moscow-Tehran-Beijing counter-alliance has been formed today, which repeats in all latitudes its denunciation of “American monopolism”, countered by a “multipolar vision of the world.” In reality, the three allies each pursue their own interests and try to add their own vassals; two are nuclear powers, Iran is about to become one, they use the weapons of the economy (especially Beijing) in different ways, and the “multipolar” evolution could hold many surprises in the near future.
