Israel is telling Ukraine it will not butt out of a debate over Kyiv’s glorification of World War II figures who collaborated with the Nazis.
On Thursday, a Ukrainian diplomat in Tel Aviv told Israeli counterparts that the subject of memorializing Stepan Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists related to “internal issues of Ukrainian politics” and Israel’s protests about it are “counterproductive,” according to the news site Jewish.ru.
“The memory of the Holocaust and the war on anti-Semitism, including glorification of the killing of Jews, is not an internal matter,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry says in a statement Monday.
The statement says speaking out about it is a “responsibility of the first degree for any Israeli diplomat and a joint moral obligation for Israel and its many friends around the world.”
FILE – In this Oct. 15, 2005 file photo, a partisan veteran from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army carries a portrait of Ukrainian Insurgent Army leader Stepan Bandera during a march in Kiev. Ukraine. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)
Last week, Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine, Joel Lion, and his Polish counterpart Bartosz Cichocki wrote officials an open letter condemning the government-sponsored honoring of Stepan Bandera and Andryi Melnyk, two collaborators with the Third Reich.
The Israeli statement Monday does not specifically mention Bandera or Melnyk, but says it comes against “the background of honoring the names of murderers of Jews in the Holocaust and pogroms, the spiritual fathers of anti-Semitism.”
Ukrainian president Vladymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, is expected to visit Israel next week for a Holocaust commemoration ceremony.
— with JTA
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