To justify its illegal invasion of Ukraine, Russian propaganda has its neighbor – falsely – as a fascist state that needs to be “de-nazified.”
Recently, a prominent Malaysian politician sympathetic to Russia took the opposite approach, accusing Ukraine of being a “Zionist” puppet.
In an April 7 Facebook post, Abdul Hadi bin Awang, president of the Malaysian Islamic Party and the Malaysian Prime Minister’s special envoy for the Middle East, baselessly claimed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of a Zionist plot to get Jewish Ukrainians to settle in Israel.
Abdul Hadi accused Zionists of “causing chaos [across] the whole world,” clandestinely colonizing other countries and forming “proxies to engage in warfare directly through leaders who were tools or by subtle provocations.”
“Most recently, Ukraine became an established Zionist base, as 40 percent of its citizens were Zionists or Jews despite the real, hidden statistics. Most of [Israel’s leaders] come from Ukraine or surrounding countries such as Poland, Hungary, Austria and others,” Abdul Hadi said.
“Now, the Zionists have succeeded in appointing a new head of state of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, from among the Jews and hardcore Zionists. In his statement, Zelenskyy mentioned that the state of Ukraine needs to be saved like the state of Israel, thus making the allegations clear and obvious.”
Abdul Hadi claimed Ukrainians have received better treatment as refugees than “war victims in West Asia and Africa” due to “how strong the Zionist influence is on European countries and their allies.”
He compared “provocations” by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Nazi Germany leader Adolf Hitler’s incitement of World War II.
Echoing false Kremlin claims, he said NATO expansion “was an act of provocation that forced Russia to launch an initial attack to save its country.”
Abdul Hadi then made this bogus claim:
“[Ukrainian Jews] did not respond to the Zionist call for them to emigrate to the state of Israel to strengthen the struggle of the Supreme State of Israel as the sole aspiring superpower at the end of time. Thus, the war that took place wisely forced them to migrate to Israel.”
The idea that Zionists are behind Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine to prompt Ukraine’s Jewish population to emigrate to Israel is absurdly false, as is the claim that 40 percent of Ukraine’s citizens are “Zionists or Jews.”
According to some estimates, Jews represent at most 1 percent of Ukraine’s population. And while a recent survey showed Ukrainians generally have toward Israel, that does not necessarily mean they are Zionists, that is, supporters of the movement for Jewish people to have a homeland in the Land of Israel and the region of Palestine.
Even support for the existence of the state of Israel does not necessary correlate to support for the status quo, which Amnesty International and others a policy of apartheid against Palestinians.
However, criticism of Zionism goes beyond support for Palestinian rights. It also including, as Abdul Hadi’s comments imply, the belief that Jews somehow secretly control Western governments.
Abdul Hadi also drastically overestimated the size of Ukraine’s Jewish population.
In 2016, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research that the “core Jewish population” of Ukraine at 56,000 or 0.13 percent of the country’s total population. The World Population Review of Ukrainian Jews at 43,000.
The European Jewish Congress that Ukraine’s Jewish population is 400,000, or less than 1 percent of Ukraine’s total population. That figure has been contested, however, and there are reasonable explanations for discrepancies in the population estimates.
the Jewish Chronicle, of the London-based Jewish Policy Research Institute noted that the religious aspects of Judaism were “strongly suppressed in the Soviet Union,” while Yiddish culture was “all but destroyed after the Second World War.”
That, he said, left Soviet Jews with “an extremely limited knowledge of Jewish religion or culture, able only to be identified as Jews by nationality or to affirm their Jewishness on the grounds of being part of a minority group with common ancestry.”
According to Boyd, multiple criteria are used to determine who is and who is not Jewish. About 45,000 people in Ukraine self-identify as religiously or ethnically Jewish, he said, adding that if you include those with at least one Jewish parent who do not identify as Jewish, the figure grows to 90,000.
Ukraine’s “enlarged” Jewish population – including those living in Jewish households who might not even be Jewish – is 140,000.