Israel's goals

In order to assess Russia's role in the unfolding situation around the Gaza Strip, it is necessary to examine the schools of international relations theory (IRT) that prevail in the world today.

Realism and liberalism

In order to understand the decision-making mechanism of the Russian side, it is appropriate to start from the fact that Vladimir Putin, who determines Russia's foreign policy strategy and consequently builds bilateral relations with various international actors, adheres to the realist school of IRT. In other words, in order to predict Russia's behaviour with respect to what is happening in the Middle East, it is necessary to assume that Vladimir Putin is a realist.

It should be noted that the second school that dominates the world today is the liberal school. These two schools, which constitute the main strategies in the sphere of international relations today, profess completely different, and in many respects opposite, approaches. For the liberal school, the main question is what political regime its adherents are dealing with in a given country and whether this political regime is democratic, i.e. whether or not it meets the standards of American or Western liberal democracy. Therefore, liberals in international relations only consider as their allies those political regimes that meet liberal criteria based on the formula ‘democracies do not fight each other’. But liberals do fight with ‘non-democracies’, and very aggressively.

As examples of politicians who embody the liberal school, we can cite American Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or the current US President Joe Biden. For them, the decisive factor is whether the state regime is liberal or not. And if the regime is not liberal and in general not democratic, they actively interfere in the affairs of this state to provoke a colour revolution, a coup d'état or even a civil war. All to establish a ‘democratic’ regime in place of what they see as a ‘non-democratic’, totalitarian or authoritarian regime, even at the expense of US economic or security interests. Only then will they build a bilateral relationship with the country. This is the approach of the liberals.

Realists, on the other hand, pay no attention to the political regime they are dealing with; for them the ideology of this or that state is not decisive. But the interests of their own state do matter. In other words, a realist looks first and foremost at whether his country's cooperation with another state is in line with the implementation of security issues, as well as whether this cooperation is economically beneficial or not. For example, US President George W. Bush Jr, being a realist, easily cooperated with the regimes of Arab kingdoms such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, without paying attention to the fact that these states do not have even a hint of American-style democracy and that ‘human rights’ are blatantly not respected. All this because cooperation with them has brought economic benefits to the United States.

Russian President Vladimir Putin therefore belongs to the category of realists. That is, he looks firstly at whether Russia's cooperation with this or that state is beneficial from a security point of view; secondly, whether this cooperation is economically advantageous. At the same time, Putin is usually indifferent to whether the political regime he is dealing with is ideologically liberal, non-liberal, democratic, socialist or, perhaps, authoritarian - this is secondary for Putin when building bilateral relations. The exception was Zelensky's Nazi regime in Kiev, but even in this case, the determining factor was rather a security issue, which played a crucial role in the initiation of the SMO.

Thus, the most important thing Putin proceeds from when making a decision in the field of international politics is whether or not he is pro-Russian. In this sense, when assessing the Middle East situation, it is worth noting that Vladimir Putin, being a realist, may well build relations and establish cooperation with Israel if it meets Russia's security concerns or is economically beneficial. In other words, he is not prejudiced in this regard and we have seen many times in the last quarter century how Putin has sought to engage with Israel, offering friendly, trusting and mutually beneficial relations. Equally, however, he may not build relations with Israel, which may deteriorate if Israel takes actions that become dangerous, i.e. undermine the security of the Russian state or cause direct or indirect economic damage. The same applies to other states in the region, be it Turkey or Iran, or other Arab states, including the Palestinian Authority or Gaza: if they do not challenge Russia's security, Putin cooperates with them. If they behave aggressively towards Russia, as in the case of Turkey's shooting down of a Russian plane in Syria, relations deteriorate and cooperation declines.

The Ukrainian perspective

Let us now look at the current Arab-Israeli conflict from the perspective of this realist approach and try to analytically reconstruct how President Vladimir Putin might assess the current events in the Gaza Strip and what consequences they might have for the entire region. To begin with, the most important issue for the Russian authorities today is the situation in the south of Greater Russia and the war that the West has started against Russia in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin's approach to all other areas, including the Middle East, is mainly based on the development of events in this region and the position taken by international actors regarding the Ukrainian situation.

The United States of America is the main sponsor of Nazi Ukraine, which is currently the main instrument of the West's open war against Russia. In the current situation, it is the US and its allies that are Russia's main and direct geopolitical adversaries. Consequently, political regimes that support Ukraine at the request of the US automatically become hostile to Russia. Prior to the Gaza operation, Israel, despite the fact that the current Ukrainian regime adheres to a blatantly Nazi ideology, supplied weapons and ammunition to Ukraine to wage war against the Russian armed forces. Leaked documents from US intelligence agencies testify to such supplies of lethal weapons from Israel to Ukraine via third countries. Although the official leadership formally denies the existence of lethal weapons supplies, Tel Aviv is helping Kyiv on a much larger scale than is publicly known.

Israeli specialists have also been spotted in the area of Special Military Operations, and Ukraine itself has been implementing Israeli tactics against the Russians, against whom it has waged war in the Donbass all these years, starting with Maidan 2014: not to negotiate with “terrorists” and the Ukrainian authorities, following their Israeli colleagues, call the Donbass militias just that - and at the same time kill the leaders of the “terrorists”, which is observed almost daily, when they kill those who are listed by the Ukrainian authorities in the category of Ukraine's “enemies”. That is, all Russians who have not agreed to become “Ukrainians”. All this, it must be emphasised again, is an Israeli tactic, which the state of Israel has been using for many decades against Palestinians and representatives of various Palestinian and other Islamic organisations.

Another factor is that the current US administration, led by Joe Biden, is equally active in supporting both the Ukrainian Nazi regime and the political regime at the head of the State of Israel. That is to say, for Joe Biden and his administration, these are equal, equivalent subjects, while within the US Congress, there is a constant debate on how to distribute American aid between these most important sectors of American foreign policy: whether to divide it equally or whether to prioritise the funding of the Israeli or Ukrainian Nazi regime.

This support is quite understandable if one bears in mind that the current Ukrainian regime has subjected the populated areas of the Donbass to daily bombardment for the past ten years, destroying the civilians living there and “dehumanising” the population, i.e. refusing to recognise those living there as human beings. In doing so, they arrogantly placed themselves, i.e. the so-called ‘Ukrainians’, at the top of a certain hierarchy, at the bottom of which they placed the Russians. This racist approach, based on the construction of a hierarchy of peoples, is the basis of a European ideological current such as National Socialism. It is precisely this - the hierarchy of peoples divided into superior and inferior - that gives us the right to call the current Ukrainian regime Nazi.

Israeli arrogance

Today we see exactly the same thing in the actions of the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. The IDF is physically wiping out an entire densely populated region of Palestine, home to hundreds of thousands of peaceful people, Israel is effectively committing genocide against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip on the basis of the simple fact that they are Palestinians, while Jews are the “chosen people” they consider themselves to be. On the basis of this “chosen people”, they place themselves at the top of a hierarchy of peoples, destroying those who oppose their will and their idea of who should rule Palestine. It is this arrogance that underlies the actions of the Israeli army, which indiscriminately destroys peaceful neighbourhoods under the pretext of fighting Hamas terrorists, effectively carrying out a barbaric genocide of the Arabs of Palestine. At the same time, just like in the Donbass, these indiscriminate rocket and bomb attacks are killing thousands and thousands of civilians.

It is on the basis of this arrogance that we have every moral right to compare the current Israeli political regime to that of Nazi Ukraine, as well as to the other Nazi regimes, which also proceeded from racial theory, placing themselves at the top of the human hierarchy and placing other peoples they did not like at the bottom. This is the racism at the heart of Nazism. Today Israel, willingly or unwillingly, has picked up the baton, losing overnight the victim image built up over decades. It is now a pure aggressor.

Loss of moral advantage

After the end of the Second World War, Jewish ideologues spent several decades creating an aura of victimhood around Jews, consequently making the Jewish people untouchable. This image of sacrifice gave the Jews enormous advantages that allowed them not only to declare their state in Palestine, but also, without any objection from the rest of humanity, to govern there the fate of those they had begun to squeeze for their messianic project. In their victim status, having gained a moral advantage on this basis, the Jews persecuted anyone who dared in any way to criticise them, oppose their initiatives, including political ones, or question the legitimacy of the birth and further actions of the state of Israel, criticise it or criticise anything related to Jews or Israel. The reason is that the Jews have been victimised in the eyes, above all, of Western humanity and, thanks to the efforts of Israeli propagandists, they have been given full carte blanche to own Palestine, without considering that other peoples live there with their own identity, culture, traditions, faith, and there are other states with their own interests around messianic betrayal built on the bones of the victims.

Today, however, after the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, destroying residential neighbourhoods with civilians, hospitals with defenceless children, old men and women, wiping out an entire region of Palestine, this image of victimhood Israel as a state and Jews as a people have lost. The current Israel is one of the most treacherous and dangerous aggressors in the history of mankind, just as Jews who side with the current Israeli political regime are transformed from victims into pure aggressors, realising the principle of collective responsibility. According to this Old Testament principle, the actions of Hamas are the responsibility of all the inhabitants of Palestine, from the smallest to the largest, without distinction or proportionality.

On the other hand, we see that the Palestinians are supported by states friendly to Russia, such as, for example, Iran, which now supplies the Russian army with very important and necessary drones to fight in Ukraine; such as Syria, which is a direct ally of Russia in the Middle East; such as Lebanon, which has traditionally had good ties with the Russian state for many decades, as well as other Arab and Islamic countries. Among them is Turkey, which is firmly opposed to Israeli aggression in Palestine and thus, based on a realist approach, is moving towards allied and friendlier relations with Russia. The Turkish leadership only needs to properly rethink what is happening in the Donbass, comparing the actions of the Israeli army and the Ukrainian Nazis, the IDF and AFU.

In other words, on the side of the Palestinians today are those states that, to varying degrees, can be described as allies of Russia and adversaries of the US and Israel; allies that assist Russia in its efforts in the war with the West in Ukraine. It is important to emphasise that we should not and cannot blame all Jews - Jews as a people - for the crimes that the current Israeli regime is committing, because not all Jews are sympathetic to these aggressive actions of the current Israeli government and army. Among Jews, for example, there are the traditionalists, those who adhere to Orthodox Judaism rather than the secular principles of the Israeli nation-state. These traditional Jews, Jews who pray and devote their lives to serving God, certainly cannot support these inhuman actions. This is why we must distinguish between traditionalist, believing Jews and those who are now complicit in the current Israeli political regime, which behaves disproportionately aggressively, inhumanly and extremely cruelly, beyond all humanity.

And it is all Jews, including those who do not sympathise with it, who are endangered by the current Israeli political regime. This is not an exaggeration. By applying the principle of collective responsibility against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the current Israeli regime endangers Jews all over the world. Indeed, if all the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, regardless of whether they are affiliated with Hamas or not, are held responsible for the crimes it attributes to Hamas militants, then the same principle of collective responsibility could come back to affect Jews themselves. There would be a threat to persecute all Jews around the world, regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with the crimes of the current Israeli regime. In other words, the principle of collective responsibility that the Israeli government is implementing against all Palestinians, and with them all Muslims, could just as easily be turned against all Jews. In this case, the government of Israel would be responsible for the suffering of all Jews, including those who do not cooperate with that government in its inhuman practices.

Israel's entire argument that the destruction of the Gaza Strip is a response to Hamas' action on 7 October 2023 is neither legally nor morally tenable. If only because the conflict that culminated in the annihilation of the Gaza Strip did not begin on 7 October 2023, nor was it initiated by the Palestinians. The conflict has been going on for many decades and started when the Jews not only began to move into Palestine and establish settlements there, but started to behave rather aggressively, openly using military force to achieve their interests.

Let us not forget that Israel, which emerged from nowhere among the Islamic Arab majority, used military force in 1967 to seize the Golan Heights, which are part of the state of Syria, and has not yet returned that territory. The Golan Heights remain legally Syrian territory of great strategic importance and reclamation, and this is recognised by all but Israel. But no one dares hold Israel to account, just as no one dares force it to return Syria's legitimate territories. What a “sacrifice” that can be...

While Israel itself - one of the most aggressive states on the planet - taking advantage of its “victim” status, has seized many other territories in Palestine as a region by brute military force, without considering the casualties among the civilian population and paying no attention to the Arabs, as if they did not exist or were a part of living nature that, in the best tradition of Western colonisers, must necessarily be enslaved. And this has been happening for many decades: precisely through military force and precisely in a rude and arrogant manner, putting the inhabitants of the entire region out of the way and ignoring their interests. This means that what the Palestinians did on 7 October is only a small part, a far from commensurate response to the military aggression carried out by the Israeli army since Israel's declaration of the territories of Palestine in the mid-20th century.

Compared to Israel's actions, the Palestinians' speeches are merely a symbolic response to draw attention to decades of lawlessness, which for some reason no one in the Western world is paying attention to.

Putin's realism: Russia's possible reaction

Let us now summarise the assessment of what is happening in Palestine from the point of view of the realist approach, to which, as we have already mentioned, Russian President Vladimir Putin adheres. On the one hand we have the Palestinians, with whom our country has built ties for many decades since the Soviet era, and their allies in the form of Iran, Syria, Lebanon and other Arab states friendly to Russia. With all these states Russia is now building more and more bilateral relations, and most of them support Russia in its current conflict with the US and the West.

On the other hand, we see the state of Israel, which even before the start of the aggression against the Gaza Strip supplied weapons to the Ukrainian side, whose specialists are present in the area of the Russian-led Special Military Operation and whose tactics towards the Donbass and the leaders of the Donbass militias have been used all these years by the Nazi regime in Kiev. In addition, the current Israeli government swears allegiance to the United States of America - all in order to receive financial support, including that in the form of weapons, which is eventually allocated, which further emphasises the alliance relationship between the current Israel and the United States. The latter, in turn, is currently Russia's main enemy and admittedly its main geopolitical adversary, causing Russia enormous problems in both the security and economic spheres by imposing countless economic sanctions and supplying weapons to the Ukrainian regime.

One does not need to be a political analyst to compare one thing to another according to the formula “the friend of my enemy is my enemy”. Of course, the events that began on 7 October 2023 came as a surprise to the Russian authorities. At the same time, in today's world, there is a total disregard for international law on the part of the United States of America, which over the past three decades has repeatedly trampled on this very international law, effectively introducing the principle that force is just. In other words, it was the Americans who destroyed the international security system that had existed for many decades under the Soviet Union, which ensured respect for international law. But now the USSR is gone, the bipolar world has been destroyed, international law is no longer respected, and whoever has the force uses it at will, especially the US and its allies. And no one can hold them responsible. In essence, the US has created an atmosphere of lawlessness. The Russian Foreign Ministry, the presidential administration and the Kremlin understand this perfectly well.

Russian politicians have repeatedly spoken out on this issue, criticising the system of “American rules” imposed on the world, established unilaterally instead of international law and which the US changes at will, striking whom it pleases. For example, the British and American air strikes on Yemen.

It is clear that the Russian political leadership is too immersed in the Ukrainian situation to follow closely what is happening in Yemen. Judging by the rare statements and somewhat scattered reactions, it has not yet had time to form an unambiguous, clear and consistent position on the issue. However, it is already clear that Yemen, and the Houthis in particular, are bringing down the power of the United States, in the face of which most of the world has so far been in a daze.

Unipolar globalisation was built on trust in American power, from which Russia, China and other countries have suffered greatly. On the same faith in American power, as well as the belief in the superiority of their military machine, is based the American-centric economy of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, which remains so as long as everyone believes in the immutability of US supremacy. And today this faith is faltering. Everyone thought America was untouchable and no one dared even imagine that it could be challenged in any way. And here we are. A Yemen, which in the West has always been considered a third-world country, not the most important and powerful one, fires on American ships, military facilities and bases on the territory of America's allies as if nothing had happened, without any shame. Washington suffers a huge loss of reputation and trust in American power turns into skepticism towards it. Everyone sees that Americans can and even should be beaten and that they are not the most ‘exceptional’ nation, but ordinary people with their weaknesses, fears and vices.

In fact, most military campaigns in which the Americans have been directly involved, they have lost, and military victories have usually been won with the help of nastiness and missile strikes from an unreachable distance, with the certainty of complete impunity. The Houthis are bound to have followers. Especially if someone helps them.

Under these circumstances, when trust in American power, and thus supremacy, hangs in the balance, it is extremely advantageous for Russia to support the Houthis. But it should do so indirectly. As long as the Ukrainian conflict is ongoing, Russia should avoid direct confrontation with the US and NATO, but this does not mean that there are no other ways to strike at the US. Nothing prevents Russia, following the “rules” of the US itself, from supplying weapons to the Houthis via third countries, such as Iran or other intermediate states.

First of all, hypersonic missiles - aircraft carrier killers, which would be a worthy enough response. After all, if the US and European countries are quietly supplying weapons to Ukraine, why shouldn't Russia provide different weapon systems to those who challenge the US and its allies in the Middle East, including Palestinian militias opposed to the Israeli genocide of civilians? An answer quite commensurate with Russia's enemies sponsoring Ukraine.

In other words, if the US, European countries, and their main ally in the Middle East, Israel, are supplying arms to Ukraine, Russia may well be supporting its adversaries in the Middle East through the supply of necessary military hardware and weapons systems. Both the Palestinians and other Arab and Islamic states allied with the Palestinians. And why not support the Houthis, who are now almost single-handedly destroying the belief in the indestructibility of the American military machine? If they are then given a few hypersonic missiles of the Bramah type, then, given the ease with which the Houthis hit American military targets, there will no longer be a trace of American dominance in the Indian Ocean, where there are no longer so many aircraft carriers.

Therefore, based on Putin's realist policy and Russia's general ability to solve security problems anywhere in the world, we can analytically predict Russia's behaviour with regard to the situation in the Gaza Strip.

Will it develop relations with Israel and support it or will Russian support be directed towards helping Hamas? Since the moral image of the Palestinians is now much higher than the immoral and brutal behaviour of Israel and its allies, that has always been very important to Vladimir Putin. The answer is clear.

Today it is pointless to call for a truce on the Israeli side, because Israel's task, based on the assessment of what is happening, is not to achieve peace, but to physically destroy, wipe out the Gaza Strip along with all its inhabitants. Or, at the very least, cause their mass emigration from there to establish full control over the territory of the Gaza Strip and incorporate it into the State of Israel. This is the goal of the Israeli government today, taking into account its messianic purpose and the fact that it considers itself as the “God’s chosen people”. From their point of view, everyone else should only bow down to them. The racial superiority of the Jews in their worldview is evident.

It is unlikely that Russia, in its current state, will have any effect on this fanatical and obsessive position of the current Israeli leadership. But if Russia achieves a victory in Ukraine, freeing this territory from the Nazi regime and the American and NATO presence, its weight in international processes will become much more significant. And Russia's word will really count.

After the victory in Ukraine, Russia will be able to confidently and convincingly take the side of the Palestinians and begin the process of minimising the costs of Israel's aggressive policy in the Middle East and the US “exceptional nation”, which has already supported the Houthis in Yemen together with Iran.

At the same time, under the conditions of the West's war against Russia, a unity has been restored in Russia itself, both between the elites and the people, and within the elites, that has not been seen since the time of the Great Patriotic War. All state bodies act synchronously on the basis of the law and the general principles formulated by the president, and anyone who opposes this common position of the current Russian authorities has long since left the country or is serving their sentence. Under these conditions of full consensus of the population and authorities, major decisions are made, vectors of development are determined, allies are chosen and enemies are prepared for a worthy response.

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Translation by Costantino Ceoldo