Why has Israel succeeded and Ukraine not yet?

I remember once traveling to Lviv on a train. My fellow traveler, a young boy who was coming back to his native Stryi from Israel, was good company. His aunt, who had lived in Israel for many years, kept inviting him to visit her. Finally, he mustered courage to do so. But it so happened that a short visit gradually turned into a several-months-long stay in that country, and he, naturally, gained certain impressions. What first struck him was the way the Israelis value the country they in fact built in the desert. Of course, there are some problems, but you can feel devotion, responsibility, and love for their country at every step.

Security is a special issue. The Jews are always on the alert owing to the constant danger of terrorist acts or even a war. Both men and women undergo military training in that country. One of Israel’s founding fathers, David Ben-Gurion, once said: “Without the citizen-soldier there is no army, and without the army there is no nation.”

Naturally, my interlocutor’s impressions are just one of everyday-life examples. Very much has been written about Israel’s achievements. It is an illustrative example of building a successful state. This raises a question: why has Israel managed to build a strong state in spite of the awful Holocaust tragedy during World War Two, while Ukraine, which also went through a similar tragedy of the genocidal Holodomor in 1932-33, has so far failed to do so? The difference is even in the fact that the Jews who were born in Ukraine and then immigrated to Palestine (Golda Meir, Vladimir Jabotisky, et al.) also became a model of successfulness. But it is difficult to cite similar examples of Jewish nation builders in Ukraine.

Ukraine restored its independence in the early 1990s and stood a chance to begin to build a successful state, but Ukrainian politicians began to care about something else – their own interests. As a result, this country went through two Maidans and ended up in a war, losing thousands of human lives and some territory. We are still living in these realities. So what is the difference between Israel and Ukraine on the path of state-building?

“IF WE MANAGE TO FORM A POLITICAL NATION, WE WILL BE A PROSPEROUS COUNTRY”

Yurii SHCHERBAK, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to Israel in 1992-94, political writer:

“I have long reflected on the phenomenon of Israel, which is worthy of being followed. The point is that Israel was forming as an exclusively ideological state. First of all, a national democratic movement was formed – it was the Zionist nationalist movement of the Israeli people. It was rather democratic, however, and comprised both the Right and the Left. Jews began to leave for Palestine in the 1920s. I once came to know about rather a strange thing: when Chekists busted a Jewish nationalist organization in Kyiv, its members were punished by being deported from the Soviet Union. They all went to Palestine. When I was the ambassador to Israel, the SBU gave me the dossiers of those people, which I handed over to the descendants of Israel’s founders.

“Somebody even said jokingly: the committed Jews, who wanted to build a state of their own, were ready to bear great sufferings, but they became builders of Israel, while others enlisted in the Communist Party and the Soviet Union’s security services. It is, of course, a relative division, for there were a lot of sound-minded people who stayed behind in the USSR. But still it is not the idealists in the Soviet Union who created anti-Semitic myths that Jews were cowards and dodged fighting for the Soviet fatherland in World War Two. Of course, it is a pack of lies because there were many courageous people, many Heroes of the Soviet Union among the Jewish people.

“When I began to explore this issue, I saw that Israel was being built on ideological foundations. It was not being built like Soviet Ukraine was – for everybody, where there was so much trash, if you’ll pardon the word, which hated the very word ‘Ukraine.’ There were no such things in Israel because they announced that their mission was to protect the Jewish people. They are still performing this mission. I remember Israel’s great statesman, the now late Shimon Peres, saying to me: ‘We don’t meddle in high-profile geopolitical affairs – we only respond to violations of the rights of Jews.’ After the Holocaust, the question of why God turned a blind eye to the chosen people became the object of philosophical debates among Jews. And they, including those who survived in World War Two and after the Holocaust, found strength to build, defend, and consolidate their state.

“As for us, we are beginning to do so only now. We can see against the backdrop of the Euromaidan and Russian aggression that Ukrainians are self-organizing and sacrificing their lives for the Fatherland. But we can in no way say that all of our people are so patriotic. This is our enormous problem. Let us look at our political history, at the venal ruling class that thrived at the expense of Russian gas and oil money, whose representatives used to go to the Kremlin and crawl on their bellies to win the love of [Moscow] bosses. They were obliged to undergo ‘casting’ in Moscow in order to be appointed to a top office here. These people were elementarily recruited and put on the hook by the Russian special services.

“Another factor is unflagging US support for Israel. The US has been steadily giving that country an annual 3-4 billion dollars in aid for many years. It also supplies the most up-to-date weapons, while many Israelis have been trained at US military academies and colleges. I visited almost all the defense enterprises of Israel. As far back as 1993 I saw drones which are now all the vogue in defense.

“Some people claim that it is wrong to compare Ukraine with Israel. These people, who want to downplay the exploit of the Ukrainian military, must not be listened to. We begin to follow the path of Israel, but our road is much longer and more painful. We, Ukrainians, are forming a Ukrainian political nation that is not infected with Russian imperial interests. If we manage to form this political nation, we will be a prosperous country.

“We should also remember that more than half a million Ukrainian Jews have left for Israel. Not all of them found their happy future there, and some even came back. Many Ukrainian Jews, including those who enlisted in Ukrainian volunteer units, showed themselves as true sons of their Fatherland. We must appreciate and revere this. I am sure the Ukrainian people appreciate it, and there is no anti-Semitism in our country. Ukrainians are aware that the Jews managed to establish a wise and strong state, and we should learn this experience. What is more, we must rely on our national values and throw away the widespread nonsense that Ukrainians and Russians are part of the same nation. Ukrainians are a separate nation with its own national interests. These interests are close to both the Russians and the Jews who reside in Ukraine. And the role of defense and the armed forces is very important in this context.”

“THE KEY TO ISRAEL’S SUCCESS WAS THE AWARENESS THAT PEOPLE ARE OUR ONLY WEALTH”

Eli BELOTSERCOVSKY, Ambassador of the State of Israel to Ukraine:

“I believe that the key to Israel’s success was the fact that, since the foundation of our state, all the Israeli governments and political authorities have been aware that people are our only wealth. It is our main resource. And you should invest in every resource so that it bears fruit and can be used as much as possible. Therefore, the goal of a state is to let every member of society realize their potential. Or, in other words, it is necessary to create proper conditions for every member of society to realize themselves as much as possible. Applying this principle is the root cause of all our achievements. Investing in people, education, medicine, health care, security, and the infrastructure makes up sort of a social contract between the individual and the state. The individual is prepared to invest in the state and even to risk his/her life in the army, when s/he knows that the state will do its best to help him realize his/her potential. I think this link is one of the main causes of our achievements, to put it briefly.

“As for the role of the elite in the making of the State of Israel, the hut of Ben-Gurion, the first head of the Israeli government, shows that the elite in Israel is an intellectual rather than a material notion. Ben-Gurion lived very austerely, and his being the premier had no impact at all on his economic situation. He was absolutely uninterested in wealth. And this tradition still continues now. For our leadership and government, the idea of a link between the individual and the state is that the state should be not something abstract but something real which allows every member of society to count on assistance from the state. It is not that we have fully achieved this, but the state clearly tends to help every member of society to prosper.

“Why has Ukraine, which experienced a similar tragedy, the Holodomor, failed so far to build a strong state? I am not an expert on Ukraine, but I can say briefly that you have a colossal potential. Ukraine has a very essential human resource. Therefore, your country should set a trend to exploit this resource.

“Whenever I am asked what lessons Ukraine can learn from the Israeli experience, I always say that this question should be put to our Ukrainian friends. Our job is to share our experience. It is for you to decide which of this may be of use to Ukraine.

“I think the latest events in your country – not only the war, but also Ukraine’s European choice – have brought our states much closer to each other.”