Vladimir Putin’s second presidential term (2004–2008) was marked by Moscow’s obvious desire to regain its status as a global superpower, which had been lost by the Soviet Union as a result of its defeat in the Cold War. The point of official departure from the former policy of open partnership with Western countries and close cooperation with NATO was the so-called 2007 Munich Speech of the Russian President and the invasion of Georgia that followed in August 2008. Moscow’s global claims gained momentum sharply after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and received an even more refined doctrinal formulation after February 24, 2022.

A critical element of the Kremlin’s new doctrine, which represented a peculiar synthesis of neoconservatism and formally leftist Soviet ideology, was its anti-colonial aspect: the movement of the unprivileged countries of the Global South against the world economic and political dominance of the Global North, usually identified with the US-led bloc of “old” and “old-new” Western democracies.

From the point of view of the Russian leadership, such ideological constructs were to become the common denominator of the geopolitical, diplomatic and economic strategy of the international organizations that Moscow is building as a tool to confront the “collective West.” Notable among them is BRICS — an informal association of initially four non-Western states with rapidly growing economies, established in 2006 at the initiative of the Russian Federation, which has gradually expanded to nine member states, together accounting for 46% of the world’s population and 37% of global GDP.

Moscow’s bid for leadership in the global South also had an obvious Middle East dimension. Already at the beginning of the shift in Russia’s foreign policy, it was made clear there that Moscow was no longer willing to settle for the rather formal status of “co-sponsor of the Middle East peace process,” but intended to set the tone in the region. It is clear that with such an “anti-imperialist” vision, which, incidentally, is shared by ultra-leftist and radical-progressive circles in Western countries, the emergence of the subject of “Israeli colonialism” allegedly oppressing the “freedom-loving people of Palestine” in the official rhetoric of the Kremlin was a matter of time.

As a result, in late 2010s Russia’s initial practice of balancing and mediating between almost all actors involved in the Middle East conflict began to gradually change, and its final reformatting took place after October 7, 2023.  This time Moscow almost openly supported Hamas as a satellite of Iran, Russia’s current closest partner in the Middle East.

Russia’s support for the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank, whose leaders from the very beginning of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 have taken the side of Moscow, where they continue to repeat the long-exhausted formula about the creation of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital as the only way to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. (In this context, the results of voting by PA residents with Russian citizenship in the March 2024 Russian presidential election are quite revealing. More than 90% of those who took part in the elections in the PA voted for Vladimir Putin, while Vladislav Davankov was the leading candidate among the Russian citizens who voted in Israel).

The appearance of the PNA/PLO and Hamas delegations at the next BRICS summit in Kazan in late October 2024 as honorary observer guests in the “BRICS plus/outreach” format was in line with this policy. The head of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) made the most of the arena graciously provided by the organizers and the sympathetic attention of the federal and local Russian press to accuse Israel of “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs, “ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip,” and other alleged “violations of international law.” He concluded by demanding that BRICS member states impose sanctions against Israel and expressed hope that “Palestine will be accepted as a member of BRICS” in the near future.

In fact, it is not so much the bilateral relations with the virtual “Palestinian state” that are important for Russia itself, but rather more significant things for Moscow – its attempts to intercept the status of the main sponsor of the “Palestinian cause” from the West in order to gain geopolitical regional and global advocacy perspectives. Apparently, it is within the framework of such a strategy that the Soviet rhetoric about the alleged “pivotal nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the entire situation in the Middle East” and its “key role in the major regional crises threatening the security and stability of the region” is being revitalized.

Russian society, which until recently was generally favorably disposed toward Israel, has embraced the revival of propaganda clichés that seemed to have been long gone: according to polls, the percentage of Russians sympathizing with the Palestinian Arabs today is many times higher than the percentage of those sympathizing with the Jewish state.

In fact, this was not a big surprise. Data collected over 26 years of sociological observations by the authoritative Moscow-based Levada Center showed that although the majority of Russians do not support either side in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, since 2011 there has been a gradual increase in the share of respondents whose sympathies are on the side of the Palestinian Arabs, while at the same time the number of respondents who support the Israelis has been decreasing. By October 2024, the level of support for Palestinian Arabs exceeded the level of support for Israelis by 4.5 times (28% and 6%, respectively), while 13 years ago the ratio was inverse.

However, also in 2011 there was an absolute maximum — more than 70% — of respondents who did not express sympathy for either side in the conflict. In October 2024, the share of such respondents in Russia amounted to 57% — almost identical (56%) to the share of Americans who chose the same answer option in a parallel survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. At the same time, while the share of those who found it difficult to answer was four times lower than among respondents in Russia, the share of Americans who supported Israel (31%) was five times higher than the share of Russians (6%), among whom the number of those who sympathized with the Palestinians was, on the contrary, 2.5 times higher than among those who sympathized with the Israelis (28% and 11%, respectively).

In light of these data, it is not surprising that the share of American respondents who believe that Israel is protecting its interests in the current conflict and its actions are justified is more than twice as high (32% and 14%) as the share of Russians who share this opinion. But among those who chose the statement “Israel has gone too far and its actions are not justified,” the split was the opposite: 59% of the Russians surveyed and 34% of the Americans thought so.

The fundamental question — What is going to be “the day after”? — eventually leads the debate to the problem of establishing a Palestinian state, which in the romantic period of the Norwegian Accords of 1993–1997 was considered by many to be the optimal solution to the Palestinian Arab problem and the trigger for ending the almost century-long Arab-Israeli confrontation and the Middle East conflict as a whole. While the idea of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict according to the Oslo model (“two states for two peoples”) has clearly exhausted itself long ago, this formula is still too entrenched in international political and diplomatic discourse to be abandoned without severe consequences for the strategies based on it, the careers built on it, and the diplomatic, political and economic resources invested in it. And it is in this capacity that it remains a notable geopolitical and geostrategic factor.

It seems that public sentiments in the two countries quite accurately reflect the local media agenda: rather diversified in the United States, and relatively homogeneous, with the dominance of pro-government media, in Russia. At first glance, the opinions of Americans and Russians are completely identical on this point: 49% of respondents in both the American and Russian samples were in favor of the creation of an independent Palestinian state. At the same time, the number of those who were against the creation of such a state in the United States (41%) was slightly less than those who were in favor, while in Russia this number was three times less (14%).

However, if for the United States and its allies this subject, in one way or another, mistakenly or not, is still seen as one of the ways to solve the problem, for Russia and its allies it is hardly more than an active propaganda resource and a tool of geopolitical confrontation with the “global West” and competition with China, Turkey and the Saudi bloc for influence in the Middle East.

Prof. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin lectures in Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and is Academic Chairman of the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies in Herzliya, Israel. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.

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