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Ukraine and Palestine: building real solidarity is hard work

A guest post by JOHN LAWRENCE, from the People and Nature Blog hosted by Simon Pirani.

This article is relevant to the European Parliament Election campaign in Ireland and other parts of Europe.

“Genocide is genocide, a mass grave is a mass grave. We are with the people who are in there, and against the people who put them there”, journalist Ed Vulliamy told a discussion meeting in London on Monday.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s war on Gaza – both of which have settler colonial and genocidal dimensions – had thrown an unusually clear light on the hypocrisy of people who oppose one, but not the other, Vulliamy said.

Marching in London, March 2024. Photos from United Action UK on instagram

In the United Nations, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky abstains over Gaza, and South Africa abstains over Ukraine, Vulliamy said.

“Large sections of the left wonderfully support Gaza but, having denied and justified [the massacre in 1995 of Bosnians by Serb troops at] Srebrenica, at best indulge, or support, Vladimir Putin and his imperial endeavour,” he continued.

On the other hand, the UK rightly lends its support to the Ukrainian resistance, “but is also complicit, and in its way leading, the atrocity, the calamity, the catastrophe and the genocide in Gaza”.

Vulliamy was chairing a panel discussion at the Frontline Club, an association of independent journalists who cover armed conflict, and speaking on the club’s behalf. It does not usually make statements of position – but this was a departure from that general rule.

Vulliamy, who covered the atrocity-ridden Balkan wars of the 1990s, said: “We don’t do genocide à la carte or à la mode. Genocide is genocide.”

Neither Ukrainian nor Palestinian officials were “exactly lining up to join us” at the event, Vulliamy said.

Why do supporters of both Ukraine and Palestine in their respective struggles for self-determination seem like such a minority?
There is little hard data on how far these constituencies overlap. A little more than two-thirds of people in the UK support military aid to Ukraine, while a similar proportion back an immediate ceasefire in Gaza – implying that at least one third of people in the UK hold both positions. But anecdotally, the division often feels stark.
That may partly be because, in western countries, there is very little direct acquaintance with armed conflict – and with the prospect that such a conflict may annihilate one’s family, and then one’s country – or even with the sorts of societies in which those conflicts taken place.
Many discussions about war on the western left thus function in terms both abstract and ignorant – a “high-politics, western-centred worldview”, as the Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh has put it.

In these circumstances, perhaps it’s easier to decide on such questions based on geopolitics without appreciating the human consequences.

Empathy as the foundation of solidarity

Indeed, the panellists at the Frontline Club event had, in common with Vulliamy, a personal connection to the reality of conflict – whether viscerally, through their extended family, or both. That made his starting point easier to grasp.

□ Dr Khaled Dawas, a British-Palestinian surgeon, has been to Gaza twice since 7 October last year to provide medical care.

□ Emili Stevenson is a Jewish activist with the anti-occupation group Na’amod, whose mother comes from Srebrenica, scene of the genocidal massacre in 1995.

□ Mariia Pastukh co-organises the London-based Ukraine solidarity collective Vsesvit, which has provided logistical aid to Ukraine and currently organises cultural and fundraising events. She spoke frankly about the support for Israel amongst Ukrainians – far from universal, but jarring in its scale and vehemence.

□ Alina El Assadi is a Ukrainian-Palestinian artist whose family history gives her an instinctive sympathy for both causes, one which she has often found was far from universally reciprocated among Ukrainians or Arabs of her acquaintance.

Commonalities of experience alone are not enough to establish empathy.

Polling suggests that 70% of Palestinians oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and 22% are in favour of it. However, the polls say that 69% of Ukrainians sympathise more with Israel than with Palestine, with just 1% taking the reverse position, and 18% sympathise with both sides equally.

Those concerned to draw connections between the two causes frequently alight on cultural or narrative connections between the two struggling nations.

The Ukrainian community in Gaza and the Palestinian community in Ukraine – largely a legacy of Palestinians who studied in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union – form an under-recognised bridge between the two communities.

Some of these people, having fled Gaza, now find themselves under Russian bombardment in Odessa.

The bombardment is ameliorated, but not prevented, by air defence systems supplied by the same parties that are providing the materiel which Israel used to force them to flee in the first place.

The watermelon is both a national symbol of Palestine and the Ukrainian city of Kherson, which was liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in November 2022, after nine months of Russian occupation.

El Assadi’s art dwells on this symbolic echo, as well as the similarities between Palestinian and Ukrainian embroidery.

Both Russia’s invasion and Israel’s occupation have an ecocidal dimension – destruction of the environment – which has destroyed the habitats of the white storks whose migratory cycle once bound Palestine to Ukraine.

Bridging the divides

Yet these resonances are often not strong enough to bridge the divide, especially when opinions are ideologically entrenched.

Two of the panellists at Monday’s event – Dawas and Pastukh – thought the roots of failures of solidarity lay in a tendency to think along the lines that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. This notion has some, albeit not extensive, support from psychological research.

On this account, whether people identify with their own nation-state’s political class will shape their attitudes toward that state’s friends and enemies.

No doubt, there are multiple sources of “campism” – the worldview that derives policy on international conflicts from the geopolitical bloc to which the parties in the conflict are imagined to be aligned.

It would be troubling to accept that a fundamental psychological principle is a dominant factor.

The implication could be that internationalists – those who support the rights of oppressed people without national distinction – will always be in a minority.

Regardless, other factors are at work.

One is the media environment and the resultant accuracy – or otherwise – of views of conflicts.

Pastukh stressed the poor state of reporting on Israel-Palestine in Ukraine, and called on Ukrainian journalists to explain the conflict more objectively.  There is no doubt that much reporting in the US and much of Europe is both slanted against Palestinians and broadly supportive of Ukraine.

Other factors are, perhaps, specific to the left.

During the lifetime of the Soviet Union, the left developed a series of intellectual habits – including monomaniacally focussing on the depredations of the West and soft-peddling those of its antagonists – that have been hard to shake off.

This habit was distilled ideologically in a folk version of Lenin’s international thought that makes unvarying opposition to the West, no matter the consequences, out to be an important socialist principle.

Recent years have also seen an apparent rise in a strain of conspiracy thinking appealing to people alienated from mainstream politics. Some of this appears to reflect deliberate propaganda efforts funded by global antagonists of the US, including Russia, China, Iran, and their allies.

The reality is probably that efforts to work for an internationalism that stands for all the people at risk from genocidal military actions will have to work on a number of fronts. Monday’s discussion was a reminder that a growing cross-section of people recognise the need to do so.

“It doesn’t matter whether your hospital is in Mariupol or in Gaza. We are with the doctors, nurses, patients, who are being bombed against the people who are bombing them,” Vulliamy said, introducing the meeting. “It’s pretty straightforward, and that’s our starting point.” 15 May 2024

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From the Ukraine Information Group:

From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime

A public discussion meeting on: What internationalism means – Unite the struggles of Palestine, Ukraine and beyond

Tuesday 11 June, 7.0 pm, Community Centre, 62 Marchmont St, London WC1N 1AB

Information from unitethestruggles@gmail.com

Ukraine and Palestine are both small nations resisting a vicious colonial power. Their needs, circumstances, and allies are different, but their causes stand on the same foundation. Both Ukrainians and Palestinians have a right to be free and to resist genocide and occupation through all legitimate military means. Both peoples deserve committed international solidarity.

The western political class supports Ukraine, albeit inconsistently and insufficiently, but not Palestine. This hypocrisy is founded in racism, and in the legacy of the Cold War. We reject this hypocrisy – and also reject its mirror image, often laced with Russian imperialist myths and nostalgia for the Soviet Union, that supports Palestine but not Ukraine.

The need to call out hypocrisy is obvious, but the next steps for us might not be. We need to move to positive solidarity without borders; to forging political and practical links between diverse struggles; and to challenging the narratives that undermine this unity.

There are other conflicts around the world where similar dynamics are at play, including Rwanda and Uganda’s war to control mineral production in eastern Congo, the Sudanese civil war, fuelled by outside parties including the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Russia, and Kashmir’s long struggle for independence from India. In every case, we call for solidarity with democratic, anti-imperialist forces, and for opposition to occupation and oppression.

Join our meeting on Tuesday 11 June to discuss this further.

□ More on Palestine and Ukraine: solidarity actions

□ “I stand on the side of the oppressed, whoever they are.” Interview with Adeeb Shaheen, Palestinian-Ukrainian activist, by Commons.com.ua.

□ On People & Nature: Palestine, Ukraine and the crisis of empires (April 2024)

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One left-wing Euro-Election candidate in Ireland, Rory Hearne, (Social Democrats, North-West) Constituency) is clear :

In terms of the broader issues facing Europe, the EU has largely gone for a containment strategy against Russia in the Ukrainian war. It’s difficult to see too any other viable approach, given that the continent is faced with such a dangerous – not to mention nuclear-armed – adversary in Vladimir Putin. It truly is an absolute nightmare.
“It is,” nods Hearne. “Europe has responded in the best way it could. We rightfully absolutely opposed the horrific invasion of Ukraine. There’s no question the Russian invasion is imperialist, and it was horrific watching it. I would support how the EU has responded, and I’m proud of Ireland taking in Ukrainian refugees. What I’d say is we have to continue to support Ukraine. I think we also need to find ways of peace, and ways of not creating a permanent war there.”
Finally, as a long-time advocate for the Palestinian cause, Hearne is utterly appalled at Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and equally dismayed at the hopeless passivity of US President Joe Biden.

Rory Hearne – We need Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to be decimated