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The Gaza War Led Russia to Embrace Hamas, and Use It as Leverage Against the West
Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 7, 2023. Photo: Sputnik/Sergei Bobylev/Pool via REUTERS
When the Israel-Hamas war broke out in October 2023, Russia had been involved in its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine for a year and a half. Given the challenges Russia has faced during the war, Putin has sought allies in the so-called “Global South,” and has sought to portray Russia’s war against Ukraine as a war against NATO and what Moscow described as Western neo-colonialism. This overall policy perspective has shifted Russia from its once close bilateral relationship with Israel, which it sees as part of the Western camp, to an increasingly pro-Hamas position.
Interestingly enough however, despite Russia’s rising anti-Israeli (and antisemitic) rhetoric, Israel’s two main goals in its dealing with Russia — the freedom of action for the Israeli air force in Syrian airspace and the continued emigration of Russian Jews to Israel — continued to be achieved. Indeed, Israel expanded its activity in Syria, flying missions all over the country and even bombing the annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, an action that was to lead to a serious confrontation between Israel and Iran.
Putin was initially silent during the first few days of the Israel-Hamas war, as the Russian leader was probably assessing its costs and benefits for Russia. On the benefit side, the war diverted US and Western attention from the war in Ukraine, and Putin may have hoped that it would divert US weapons that would have gone to Ukraine to Israel, although Republican Congressional opposition in the US to aid to Ukraine was to serve the same purpose.
In addition, since the Palestinian issue was popular in the Global South, with the exception of the Modi regime in India which remained pro-Israeli — and since US President Joe Biden immediately came out in support of Israel and transferred weapons to the Jewish State — Putin may have hoped that the war would weaken the US position in the Global South.
On the other hand, however, since Iran was an ally of Hamas, there was a danger of a conflict between Israel and Iran, especially when Hezbollah started firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Hamas. In any case, when Putin did publicly respond to the war a few days after the war started, he did not blame Hamas but called the war “a clear example of the failure of US policy in the Middle East which has never defended the interest of the Palestinians in peace talks.”
While Putin did acknowledge Israel’s right to self-defense, saying it had suffered an “unprecedented attack,” he then compared the Israeli invasion of Gaza to the Nazi siege of Leningrad. After Putin’s statement, Russia introduced a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for a cease-fire and the release of hostages (some of whom were Russian citizens). The US, however, vetoed the Russian UNSC resolution because it did not mention the Hamas attack. Several months later, it was Russia that vetoed a similar US UNSC resolution because it did mention the Hamas attack. Russia also provided humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.
In another effort to demonstrate that Russia had a role to play in the conflict, Putin offered to host a meeting of foreign ministers to bring an end to the war, stating that “we have very stable and trade relations with Israel and we have (had) friendly relations with the Palestinians for decades.” The Russian leader, however, got no support for his planned meeting. Putin then had a belated condolence call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in mid-October, but followed it with a formal invitation to a Hamas delegation to visit Moscow — less than two weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel — thereby appearing to legitimize both the organization and the attack. Needless to say, the Israeli leadership was furious with the visit.
It is possible that the pro-Hamas tilt in Russian foreign policy together with the rising tide of antisemitism in the official Russian press, which was often directed against President Zelensky of Ukraine, who is Jewish, may have encouraged near-pogroms in the North Caucasus soon after the visit of the Hamas delegation. Rioters stormed the airport at Makhachkala, Dagestan, as a flight from Israel was arriving; a Jewish community center was set afire; and a hotel was put under siege as rioters sought to discover if there were any Jews among the guests. While Putin blamed the mob’s actions on Ukraine, the actions of the rioters had to be problematic for him as they served to undermine his description of the Russian Federation as a place of inter-faith and inter-ethnic harmony.
Meanwhile, Russia’s anti-Israeli rhetoric was growing, as the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, stated on November 2 that Israel, being an “occupying state” did not have the right to self-defense, under international law. There appeared to be a slight improvement in Russian-Israeli relations in December, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the Doha forum, stated that Hamas had carried out a “terrorist attack” — but followed up this statement by commenting “at the same time it is unacceptable to use this event for the collective punishment of millions of Palestinian people with indiscriminate shelling.”
In looking at the reasons for the change in Moscow’s tone about Hamas, it is possible that Lavrov was appealing to the leadership of the Arab States in attendance who viewed Hamas negatively. This was especially the case of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Putin also made another telephone call to Netanyahu, this time according to Russian sources, to discuss the crisis caused by the Hamas attack. According to the Israeli version of the call, Netanyahu criticized Russia’s UN representatives for their “anti-Israeli positions,” and the Israeli leader also voiced “robust disapproval” of Russia’s “dangerous cooperation” with Iran. According to the Russian version of the call, Putin highlighted “the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.”
In January 2024, Russian-Israeli relations took another turn for the worse, as during a meeting on Syria at Astana, Kazakhstan, the Russian special representative for Syria, Alexander Lavrentyev, stated, in reference to South Africa’s lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide, that Israel’s actions in Gaza represent a “real crime” which “can even be interpreted as genocide.” In addition, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticized Germany for defending Israel at the International Court of Justice, given Germany’s actions in World War Two, and she went on to compare Germany’s defense of Israel with its support for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia was stepping up its efforts to woo the Global South. Taking a page from the old Soviet playbook, when the USSR was wooing the Third World with the Soviet Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Association, Putin created, through his United Russia Party, an organization called “The Forum of Supporters for the Fight Against Neocolonialism and the Freedom of Nations.” Meeting in Moscow in mid-February, the organization expressed solidarity with the Palestinians.
Putin also sought to exploit the growing crisis in Gaza to once again urge Palestinian unity between Hamas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. To do this, he convened a Palestinian unity conference in Moscow at the end of February. Even though it did not appear that Hamas and Fatah were ready to agree to unify — so deep were their differences — neither group felt able to resist Moscow’s invitation. For Hamas, which was getting battered by Israeli attacks, Russia offered important diplomatic cover, especially in the UN, while the Palestinian Authority, which had been sidelined by the ongoing conflict in Gaza, may have seen the Moscow meeting as a means of improving its diplomatic position. In any case, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas did not want to alienate Russia by refusing to participate in the meeting.
Despite the failure of many such “unity” conferences in the past, Putin may have hoped that the rapidly deteriorating situation in Gaza would propel the two major Palestinian groups toward unity. Indeed at the start of the conference, Lavrov offered to the Palestinian groups the services of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister and special envoy to the Middle East, Mikhail Bogdanov, as well as the head of the Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vitaly Naumkin, to provide “advisory services” to help mediate the discussions. Unfortunately for Moscow, however, the meeting turned out to be a failure despite the final communique calling for unity. Еven the pretense of unity was shattered two weeks after the conference when Hamas attacked Abbas’ choice for the Palestinian Authority’s new Prime Minister, Mohamed Mustafa, a close confidant of Abbas, asserting that the choice was made without consulting it, despite the meeting in Moscow. For its part, the Palestinian Authority attacked Hamas for not consulting it, “when it made the decision to undertake the October 7 adventure which brought down upon the Palestinian people a disaster even more horrible than that of 1948.” Moscow sought to put the best possible light on the continuing Hamas-Fatah conflict by praising the appointment of Mustafa, while also hoping that he would “enjoy the support of the entire Palestinian population.”
As Moscow was trying to forge Palestinian unity, its relations with Israel continued to deteriorate. The Russian deputy UN ambassador, Maria Zabolotskaya, cast doubt on the report by Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary General’s special representative for sexual violence in conflict, about rapes by Hamas fighters during their attack on Israel on October 7. Zabolotskaya, who had questioned Patten’s report on rapes by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, attacked the report on Hamas, calling it a “half-truth which in no way gives a universal picture of what is happening.”
In April, Russia faced its most serious crisis of the war. Up until this time, Moscow had been protecting Hamas at the UN, denouncing Israeli activities in Gaza, and blaming the US for the war in Gaza, all the time trying to improve its position in the Global South at the expense of the United States. In April, however, Iran and Israel directly attacked each other, raising the possibility of a wider war that could have pulled in the United States and caused a US-Iranian war, which would pose very difficult problems of choice for Moscow, given its close tie to Iran on which it continued to depend for drones and missiles. Consequently, Russia sought to play down the conflict (as did the US) and seemed satisfied by April 19 that it did not escalate into the wider Middle East war, which it may well have feared.
In looking at Moscow’s response to the escalation between Israel and Iran there are several things to note. First, as might be expected, Russia criticized Israel for its attack on the embassy annex while blaming the US as well. Then, when Iran retaliated with its major attack on Israel, Moscow urged Israel to stay calm. The Russian warnings did not succeed in preventing the Israeli retaliatory attack on Iran which destroyed a SAM-300 complex that was guarding an Iranian nuclear installation at Natanz. However, Moscow must have been relieved that the Iranian leadership played down the Israeli attack and saw no need to escalate further. Still, the relative ease with which Israel had destroyed the Russian-built SAM-300 complex had to be of concern to both Russia and Iran because it underlined Iran’s vulnerability. Nonetheless, following the Israeli attack, tension eased, and it appeared — at least in the short run — that a more general Middle East war had been avoided, a situation that Moscow welcomed.
Despite the easing of tension, Russian-Israeli relations continued to deteriorate in April. In early April, Russia supported the Palestinian Authority’s request to obtain full membership in the UN — much to the displeasure of Israel — and even when the US vetoed the Palestinian request, Moscow promised to continue the effort to obtain full UN membership for the Palestinians. A new low in the Russia-Israel relationship was reached on April 19 when Russia urged the UN to sanction Israel for its failure to comply with a UNSC resolution (on which the US had abstained) that called on Israel for a cease-fire during Ramadan. As might be expected, given Russian policy since the war broke out, Russia also condemned the US for its aid to Israel. The Russian call for sanctions against Israel is a useful point of departure to draw some preliminary conclusions about Russian policy toward the Israel-Hamas war.
First, the deterioration of relations between Israel and Russia during the war has been significant. Not only did Moscow legitimize the Hamas attack on Israel by inviting a Hamas delegation to Moscow only two weeks after the Hamas attack, but it also protected Hamas by introducing UN Security Council Resolutions to end the war that made no mention of the Hamas attack while vetoing a US UNSC resolution that mentioned Hamas. It also supported the South African effort to bring genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, downplayed Israeli claims that Hamas had sexually assaulted Israeli women during its October 7th attack, and called on the UN Security Council to sanction Israel for its actions in Gaza. Still, while Russian invective against Israel, sprinkled with a large dose of antisemitism increased, Russia continued to allow Israeli war planes to fly through Syrian air space to attack Iranian and Hezbollah positions in that country, and it also continued to permit Russian Jewish emigration to Israel. In trying to explain Russian behavior, one can point to Moscow’s desire to maintain high-tech trade relations with Israel, and also its possible concern that with Assad’s still shaky control over Syria, Israel might move to help Assad’s enemies.
Second, at least by default, Russia has benefited in the Global South from the continued flow of US arms to Israel during the war, a policy that was unpopular in the Global South (except in India where the Modi regime is closely allied to Israel) where the Palestinian issue has resonated. By supplying humanitarian aid to Gaza and backing the Palestinian positions at the UN, Moscow could claim an improved position in the Global South, even as it sought to conflate its war in Ukraine with the Palestinian struggle against Israel. Still, the Russian position was not without its problems. Hamas is unpopular with the leaderships of a number of Arab states which Moscow has been courting, such as Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and the clash between Israel and Iran in April 2024 had the potential of escalating into a full-scale war that would have threatened Russia’s ally Iran, especially if the US got directly involved in the conflict.
A third preliminary conclusion that could be drawn from this study is that Russia has had little influence over the events that transpired after the Hamas attack of October 7th. Thus its call for an international conference to settle the war proved unsuccessful; the key diplomatic efforts to achieve a cease-fire were undertaken by the US, Egypt, and Qatar, not Russia; despite a major diplomatic effort, Moscow was unable to forge a reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and Russian was even unable to extract all the Russian citizens who were held hostage by Hamas despite all that Russia had done diplomatically for the Palestinian organization. Finally, despite Moscow’s warnings, Israel attacked Iran directly, an event that also showed the vulnerability of Russia’s SAM-300 system.
In sum, in the first six months of the war, it can be said that while Russia may have gained politically from the war — because of the close US-Israeli relationship — its influence in the conflict was quite limited and the deterioration of Russian-Israeli relations may yet change the Israeli position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Prof. Robert Freedman is one of the leading U.S. authorities on Israel, the Middle East, and American foreign policy. He is a former President, the Hebrew University in Baltimore, and currently is a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University. His has advised policymakers in State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and has been a commentator on major American news outlets. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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Pro-Hamas Student Group Launches Legal Offensive Against Universities
Anti-Zionist protesters being arrested at Pomona College on April 5, 2024. They had taken over an administrative building. Photo: Screenshot/Students for Justice in Palestine via Instagram
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has launched a major lawfare offensive apparently aimed at securing a right to break school rules on college campuses and promote anti-Israel hatred, which has contributed to a surge of antisemitic incidents at universities across the US.
On Monday, SJP at the University of Vermont (UVM) filed a federal lawsuit alleging that school officials violated the constitution and perpetrated anti-Palestinian bias by suspending the group for breaking multiple rules, local media reported. Meanwhile, SJP filed a separate civil rights complaint against the University of Georgia (UGA), where some nine students were arrested in April for illegally occupying school property, claiming that its members were victims of “extreme differential treatment.”
The lawsuit against UVM followed SJP’s latest suspension for violating what the university called “the code of student conduct,” a “solicitation and posting policy,” and other offenses. In excerpts of court documents shared by Valley News on Tuesday, the lawyer representing the group, John Franco, said the accusations were false and intended to squelch speech which is critical of Israel.
“In a word, as a state instrumentality, the defendants have invoked state power to muzzle UVMSJP, to delegitimize it, and to give anyone else second thoughts about associating with it,” Franco wrote in the complaint, which is seeking an injunctive reversal of the suspension. Elsewhere he said UVM has “chosen to weaponize procedural permitting issues and the student misconduct process to bully and intimidate UVMSJP and other students, chilling the exercise of their protected First Amendment rights.”
First reported by Athens Politics Nerd, SJP’s civil rights complaint against UGA lodges accusations of racism.
“UGA’s targeted discriminatory investigation of students and student organizations that are made up of mostly Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslim members, perceived to be Palestinian, affiliated with, or advocating in support of Palestinians amounts to a McCarthyist campaign to punish students for their identity and/or expressive activity,” a copy of the complaint shared by Athens says. “There is simply no justification for UGA’s differential treatment of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.”
The legal actions come amid National Students for Justice Palestine’s, as well as its affiliate groups’, sustained and unrelenting campaigns to intimidate university officials into boycotting Israel and banning expressions of Zionism from higher education. As The Algemeiner has previously reported, SJP also regularly traffics in hate speech, destroys property, and trumpets its support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and overthrowing the government of the United States.
Last week, the SJP chapter of Pomona College promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories falsely accusing Israel and the US of spreading the Covid-19 virus to commit genocide and maintain “colonial” rule over people of color.
“Pandemics are a tool of the colonizer,” said an SJP pamphlet distributed during a club fair at the school, according to a Jewish students club, Haverim, that acquired a copy the document. “By bomb or by pathogen, these attacks on Palestinian life are man-made, intentional policy choices … The american [sic] state and israeli [sic] settler colony have found a dress rehearsal for more targeted genocides in their construction of today’s eugenicist normalcy wherein everyone is expected to sustain repeated covid infections indefinitely until death.”
Earlier this month, National Students for Justice Palestine (NSJP), which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, publicly discussed its grand strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US in a now-deleted tweet that was posted to X/Twitter.
“Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said last week. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
In August, on the first day of school, SJP affiliated anti-Zionist students at Cornell University vandalized an administrative building, shattering the glazings of its front doors and graffitiing “Blood is on your hands” and “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” on it. Eleven days earlier, the SJP chapter of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced the beginning of what it described as an “armed rebellion,” claiming a right to use political violence as a tactic for achieving its objective of destroying Zionism, Israel, and capitalism.
“We emphasize our support for the right to resistance, not only in Palestine, but also here in the imperial core,” the group said in a manifesto — which was reportedly crafted with the help of anti-Zionist UNC professors — posted on social media. “We condone all forms of principled action, including armed rebellion, necessary to stop Israel’s genocide and apartheid, and to dismantle imperialism and capitalism more broadly. The oppressors will never grant full liberty to the oppressed; the oppressed must seize liberty with their own hands.”
Columbia University in New York City is still dealing with the legal repercussions of refusing to rein in SJP’s behavior. According to a lawsuit filed February, students linked to SJP beat up five Jewish students in Columbia’s Butler Library. Another attacked a Jewish students with a stick, lacerating his head and breaking his finger, after being asked to return missing persons posters she had stolen. In June, the school settled a lawsuit in which it was accused by a student of neglecting its obligation to foster a safe learning environment amid riotous pro-Hamas protests that were held at the school throughout the final weeks of the academic year.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Trump Says Israel ‘Will Not Exist Within Two Years’ if Harris Elected President During Heated Debate
Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump points towards Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris, during a presidential debate hosted by ABC in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump insisted on Tuesday night that his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris would prove catastrophic for Israel if she were to win the White House in November.
Trump argued during his first presidential debate with Harris, the current US vice president, that she “hates” Israel and that her election would lead to the Jewish state’s swift demise. He also took a jab at Harris for allegedly snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by not attending his address to a joint session of the US Congress in July.
“If she’s president, I believe Israel will not exist within two years from now. She hates Israel,” asserted Trump, who served as US president from 2017-2021.
Trump went on to claim that Harris also “hates” people of Arabic descent and that her foreign policy approach would result in a destructive regional war in the Middle East.
“At the same time, in her own way, she hates the Arab population, because the whole place is going to get blown up. Arabs, Jewish people, Israel, Israel will be gone,” Trump said.
The Republican nominee also took a swipe at the Biden administration’s approach to Iran, arguing that its policies have resulted in empowering and enriching the Islamist regime in Tehran.
“Iran was broke under Donald Trump,” Trump said. “Now, Iran has three-hundred billion dollars, because they took off all the sanctions that I had. Iran had no money for Hamas or Hezbollah or any of the 28 different spheres of terror.”
Trump was referring to his decision as president to withdraw from the controversial 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and reimpose harsh economic sanctions on he regime. The Biden administration sought unsuccessfully to renegotiate the nuclear accord and has offered certain sanctions waivers, which according to critics benefit Tehran and allow it to spend more money on supporting terrorism.
US intelligence agencies have long labeled Iran as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Supporters of Trump’s policies toward Iran argued in part that they gave the regime less resources to give to its terrorist proxies across the Middle East, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Critics countered that the nuclear deal was a better path to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that Washington should work to prevent escalation with Tehran.
“They had no money for terror. They were broke. Now, they’re a rich nation. And now, what they’re doing,” Trump continued.
The former president urged the audience to “look at what’s happening to the Houthis and Yemen. Look at what’s going on in the Middle East.”
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia, a US-designated terrorist organization, began disrupting global trade with its attacks on shipping in the busy Red Sea corridor after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, arguing its aggression was a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza. The Iran-backed movement has also said it will target all ships heading to Israeli ports, even if they do not pass through the Red Sea, and claimed responsibility for attempted drone and missile strikes targeting Israel.
Harris on Tuesday night emphatically denied Trump’s assertion that she harbors animosity toward the Jewish state. She argued that the former president was attempting to distract from his own “weak” foreign policy record.
Harris echoed her previous comments on the ongoing war in Gaza, insisting that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
She added that the war in Gaza must “end immediately” and repeated calls for Israel to strike a ceasefire and hostage deal with the Hamas terrorist group. The Democratic nominee also underscored the need for a “two-state solution” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Israeli TV Stars Call for Immediate Release of Hamas Hostages in New Video Message
Gabriel (played by Michael Aloni) and Rochel (played by Yuval Scharf) in “The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem.” Photo: Yes Studios.
Some of the biggest Israeli television stars are calling for the immediate release of the 101 individuals still held hostage by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip for almost a year now following the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel.
Actors from “Fauda,” “Shtisel,” “The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem,” “Night Therapy,” “On The Spectrum,” and other popular shows in Israel pleaded for the safe return of the hostages in a video message released on Tuesday by Israel’s Yes TV.
“When we shoot a show, we know the script, we know what the story is, who is against who and we know how the story will end,” they said in the video, with each person stating a different part of the message. “But now, this isn’t a show. These are real people, and their time is running out. This pain is impossible to bear. There’s no air.”
“If they don’t come back, then who are we? Who?” many of them asked. “What does it say about us?”
“How will we look our children in the eyes?” asked Noa Koller, the star and creator of “Rehearsals,” who is also a mother of two. “Our grandchildren?” added “Shtisel” star Sasson Gabay, who is a grandfather.
“There are people alive there,” the actors said repeatedly. “These are their lives, and our lives — all of our lives. We have to bring all of them home, now, now,” they said again and again.
The video also featured “Beauty Queen of Jerusalem” stars Yuval Scharf and Hila Saada, “Fauda” and “The Lesson” star Doron Ben-David, “Fauda” and “Night Therapy” actor Yaakov Zada Daniel, “On the Spectrum” and “Bloody Murray” actress Neomi Levov, Israeli film star Yael Abecassis, “Fire Dance” star Yehuda Levi, “Berlin Blues” actress Shirah Naor, comedian Tom Yaar, comedian and actor Yuval Semo, and others.
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