One more clue to the Judeofascist Alliance (EU/Russia/Israel):
Published Every Week in Moscow Since 1998
MARCH 22-28, 2002
Vol.5, No.10 (153)
Putin forging new links with Jewish right
By AJAY GOYAL / The Russia Journal
The refusal by the chairman of Russia's upper house of parliament, Sergei Mironov, to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during his recent trip to the Middle East was the most public display yet of a shift in Russian policy toward Israel and the Jewish community at home and abroad.
Whether the shift is tactical and temporary, or strategic and long-lasting, and how big a departure it marks from the past is being widely debated. The snub, however, had the paradoxical effect of making people at each extreme of the policy spectrum agree with each other.
Many in the Russian media ridiculed Mironov for the apparent gaffe. To me it was another in a series of messages President Vladimir Putin has been sending to the Jewish lobby in the United States. The overall message is that under Putin, Russia has broken away from the anti-Semitic policies that American Jews associate with the Soviet Union, tsarism and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Tactically, Putin is making a shrewd move aimed at many targets at the same time.
Begin with Arafat: He is widely recognized as having lost his grip on Palestinian national sentiment and on the evolution of the conflict with Israel. The intifada is now in the hands of militant groups such as Hamas that are engaged in a killing game with Ariel Sharon. Putin would not want anything to do with that, and siding with Arafat does not offer any tactical advantages.
Russian support for Arafat was partly a vestige of Cold War confrontation, when every foe of the United States was considered a friend. Even during the Soviet years, when Yevgeny Primakov formulated Russia's policy in the Middle East, there was no love lost for Saddam Hussein, a self-appointed defender of Palestinian and Arab interests. Indeed, as Primakov knew, Saddam's Baath party had shed as much communist blood as that of other domestic and foreign adversaries. But the Soviets went along with him because he, along with Iran, Syria, Libya, Algeria, and Arafat's Palestinian movement - the so-called rejectionist front - formed a bulwark against U.S. expansion in the region. The Soviets had also watched with dismay as Saddam destroyed the potential for a new anti-American front by his ruinous wars on revolutionary Iran and on neighboring Kuwait.
Putin's foreign policy in the last year has taken this history lesson into account, but it has become more flexible out of pragmatic necessity. At the very least, it marks the abandonment of simple Cold War-style thinking, and a challenge to those, like the Jewish lobby in Washington, who have long linked U.S. support for Israel with Cold War ideology.
Initially, the Putin policy shift had a major domestic purpose rather than a foreign policy aim. His initial drive to protect himself from domestic attack - and cut the oligarchs down to size - necessitated the campaign against Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky. Both of them are not only Jews, they hold Israeli passports. They also presented themselves in Israel and in Washington as the leaders of the Russian Jewish community. This, they said, made Kremlin attacks against them look anti-Semitic.
To neutralize that claim, and to get rid of them just as surely, Putin moved to patronize rival Jewish organizations and the Russian rabbinate, which is supported by Orthodox Jewish leaders in Israel and the United States, including Lev Levyev, a diamond merchant, and Natan Sharansky, a right-wing Israeli politician. While Gusinsky has hired Bob Strauss, a close friend of the Bush family, as his lawyer to make life difficult for Putin in Washington, the Russian president has taken the surprising step of seeking support from conservative Jewish communities. One of his objectives is getting the U.S. Congress to abolish the Jackson-Vanik amendment, legislation enacted in 1974 that restricts U.S. extension of most-favored-nation trading status to Moscow to punish the Soviet regime for restricting Jewish emigration.
Putin first started hobnobbing with Sharansky - a Soviet-era emigre to Israel and now a Cabinet minister in Sharon's government - two years ago, and the Washington press corps was spoon-fed stories on how Sharansky had been called back from Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport for a private lunch with Putin. Later, Levyev shared the stage with Putin at the inauguration of a Jewish community center, while a pro-Kremlin rabbi took over as Russia's official chief rabbi, ousting Gusinsky's candidate for the post.
This can be interpreted in many ways. But at the very least, Putin has managed to change the historic burden of Russia's sad relationship with the Jewish community within a short time.
That Putin is also playing his own Jewish card in Middle East politics is evident from the way he has steered the Foreign Ministry away from its subservience to oil companies such as LUKoil and encouraged Russian oil majors to fight among themselves. Several oil company executives are Jewish, but LUKoil's Vagit Alekperov has Muslim roots. While LUKoil has been favored in many European ventures by Putin, the shift in Middle East policy will have dramatic impact on the company, which has been given large concessions in Iraq. In that, its interests have been surrendered for the aims of a pro-Israel policy.
Putin has pursued a similar approach to the arms business, which at one time was dominated by Russians of Jewish origin, in alliance with Israelis. Nowadays the state arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, can work with the Israeli aircraft industry in bidding for arms deals in Turkey, a tie-up that would have been unthinkable in the past, although still a losing one to the Americans.
What do these combinations tell you about Putin's policy? That being Jewish doesn't carry a negative connotation; that it's the business the Kremlin cares about, not the religion of the businessmen.
Who knows what Mironov thought he was doing when he snubbed Arafat. As gestures go, its clumsiness was everything Putin's moves are not. Subtlety in a crass world is easy to misunderstand.
Copyright © 2000 The Russia Journal
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