Less than three weeks after billionaire businessman Petro Poroshenko’s landslide victory in the Ukrainian presidential election, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, is set to elect the next president of Israel. On June 10, the Knesset will select a successor to President Shimon Peres, who, at 90 years old is the world’s oldest living head of state, and has decided not to seek a second seven-year term.
The election comes as Israeli leaders refuse to condemn the Russian invasion of Crimea, and its subsequent support for separatist militants in eastern Ukraine, who have incited a bloody conflict that has left hundreds dead.
Though the Knesset will select the president in a secret ballot vote, several polls have been conducted to gauge public support for presidential candidates. Thirty-one percent of respondents to a poll conducted by Haaretz, Israel’s newspaper of record, said they would vote for Reuven Rivlin, the former Speaker of the Knesset.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has endorsed Rivlin’s bid for the presidency, which is mainly of symbolic and ceremonial significance.
Dan Shechtman, a professor and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, received support from 22 percent of respondents in the Haaretz poll. Dalia Dorner, a Justice on Israel’s Supreme Court from 1993 to 2004, finished third in the poll, with 11 percent of participants supporting her candidacy.
In a March 5 statement, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said that it was “following with great concern the events in Ukraine,” and that it was “anxious for peace for all its citizens,” but declined to comment on the presence of Russian troops in Crimea.
During a secret trip to Ukraine, Peres and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman met with Poroshenko on April 21 to discuss the ongoing crisis, and the future of Ukrainian-Israeli relations.
“Normalization of relations between the two fraternal nations, between the neighbors is our (Israel’s) priority,” reads a press release published on April 22.
On May 27, Israel’s Foreign Ministry commended Ukraine for holding democratic elections, saying that it “remains committed to strengthening its bilateral ties and cooperation with Ukraine, and looks forward to working with its leadership to further promote the relations between our two countries.”
Tourism may be playing a role in Israel’s silence: more than 600,000 Russian tourists visited Israel in 2013, a number second only to American tourists.
Additionally, the Russian lobby is strong in Israel: about 20 percent of Israel’s population is Russian or Soviet-born, and several Russian-speakers occupy prominent posts in the country’s government, including Lieberman.
Still, more Ukrainians than Russians immigrated to Israel from 1990-2012, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, and not all Russian-born Israelis are sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic regime.
Paul J. Saunders, the executive director of the Center for the National Interest, suggested in an April 7 article in Al-Monitor that Israel’s and Russia’s similar policies towards Islamic terrorism, which may also be a reason for Israel’s silence: their “similarly unconstrained approaches to combating Islamic extremist terrorism…has led to tacit support for one another’s policies, including Russia’s wars in Chechnya.”
When Israel decided not to support a UN resolution affirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, U.S. State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki said that U.S. diplomats were “surprised.”
However, Psaki said that Israel’s diplomatic response to the annexation of Crimea was not a “major concern.”
Both Russia and Ukraine have significant Jewish populations. About 190,000 Jews live in Russia, and nearly 70,000 live in Ukraine.
Israeli-Ukrainian relations developed under Peres, who took office in 2007: this cooperation culminated in 2010 when the nations cancelled mutual visa entry requirements.
In -2010, Peres and Lieberman visited Ukraine for three days, during which he visited the Babyn Yar ravine outside Kyiv, the site of Nazi massacres of more than 100,000 Jews from 1941 to 1944. During their visit, Ukraine and Israel reached an agreement on the reciprocal protection of investments.
Kyiv Post staff writer Isaac Webb can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @IsaacDWebb.
