{"id":12001,"date":"2018-10-17T21:43:52","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T21:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=12001"},"modified":"2018-10-17T21:43:52","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T21:43:52","slug":"ukraine-antisemitism-racism-and-the-far-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/ukraine-antisemitism-racism-and-the-far-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine, Antisemitism, racism, and the far right"},"content":{"rendered":"
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People, including Ukrainian nationalists and members of far-right radical groups, take part in a procession to mark the Defender of Ukraine Day in Kyiv, Ukraine October 14, 2018. (REUTERS\/Valentyn Ogirenko)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

October 14\u00a0saw the latest in a string of\u00a0annual mass marches\u00a0by the far right in Ukraine.\u00a0As many as\u00a010,000\u00a0people\u00a0participated, mainly young men, chanting\u00a0fiercely.\u00a0A nighttime torchlight parade with\u00a0signs proclaiming, \u201cWe\u2019ll\u00a0return\u00a0Ukraine\u00a0to Ukrainians,\u201d contained\u00a0echoes of Nazi-style symbolism.<\/p>\n

Lax law enforcement and indifference by the security services to the operations of the far right\u00a0is being noticed by extremists from abroad who are flocking to Ukraine.\u00a0German media reported the presence of the German extreme right (JN-NPD,\u00a0Dritte\u00a0Weg) at the rally. According to Ukrainian political analyst\u00a0Anton Shekhovtsov,\u00a0far-right Norwegians, Swedes, and Italians were supposed to be there too. And on October 15, they all gathered in Kyiv for the Paneuropa\u00a0conference\u00a0organized\u00a0by the Ukrainian neo-Nazi National Corps party.\u00a0\"Kyiv,\" says Shekhovtsov,\u00a0\"has now become one of the major centers of European far-right activities.\"<\/p>\n

Such activism, naturally, unnerves liberals as well as Jews, and national minorities. And they often result in\u00a0alarmist\u00a0headlines in Western and Israeli newspapers.<\/p>\n

Coming in a year\u00a0in\u00a0which the white\u00a0supremacist\u00a0C14 group engaged in savage beatings at a Roma encampment\u00a0near Kyiv, one could draw the conclusion that\u00a0the far right\u00a0is on the\u00a0rise\u00a0in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

But such a reading would be mistaken.\u00a0Far-right sentiments exist in Ukraine,\u00a0but\u00a0these ultranationalist groupings attract little public support.\u00a0As\u00a0the\u00a0March 2019 presidential\u00a0election approaches,\u00a0recent\u00a0polls\u00a0show that the combined vote of far-right\u00a0presidential\u00a0candidates\u00a0amounts\u00a0to around 4 percent. A similarly paltry\u00a0level of support is to be found for the far-right Svoboda and National Corps parties.\u00a0Compared to the support of far-right parties such as the\u00a0AfD\u00a0in Germany\u00a0(12.6\u00a0percent support),\u00a0Marine Le Pen\u2019s Rally for the Nation (13\u00a0percent) and\u00a0Italy\u2019s Northern League (17.4\u00a0percent), Ukraine\u2019s public has little sympathy for\u00a0the\u00a0far right.<\/p>\n

Nor can these\u00a0fringe Ukrainian\u00a0parties be labeled pro-Nazi, though their leaders initially were\u00a0drawn to proto-fascist ideas.Ukraine is a country on whose territory two million Jews died in the Holocaust. It is also a country in which five million non-Jewish Ukrainians perished in combat\u00a0as a result of Nazi occupation. Virtually\u00a0every family has the memory of Nazi brutality etched into its memory.\u00a0Ukraine\u2019s nationalists of the 1930s and 1940s, who advanced antisemitic and proto-fascist ideas, were also eventually hunted down for extermination by the Nazi regime.<\/p>\n

To be sure, casual\u00a0antisemitism\u00a0and\u00a0Jewish stereotypes persist in everyday life.\u00a0And\u00a0antisemitic graffiti\u00a0appears\u00a0with regularity\u00a0near Jewish synagogues, cemeteries,\u00a0and cultural institutions.\u00a0Even still,\u00a0this\u00a0regrettable phenomenon\u00a0is widespread\u00a0in most advanced\u00a0industrial democracies.<\/p>\n

At the same time, in the last two years there has been not a single recorded violent\u00a0attack against a Jewish\u00a0person. The last such attack occurred on\u00a0October 7, 2016,\u00a0against a Hasidic rabbi visiting the city of Zhytomyr.<\/p>\n

Between 2016 and 2017, acts of vandalism against Jewish targets increased from 19 to 24, but were still far below those reported in many European countries. While an Israeli government report issued in January 2018 alleged a doubling of antisemitic incidents in Ukraine, it failed to provide<\/a>\u00a0detailed answers about its methodology or sources.<\/p>\n

Unlike two decades ago, when\u00a0Silski\u00a0Visti<\/em>, an\u00a0antisemitic newspaper reached millions of readers, today there is no mass circulation periodical spilling out antisemitic bile.<\/p>\n

Moreover, in comparison\u00a0with its Central and East European neighbors, Ukraine remains a remarkably tolerant society, even as it faces\u00a0Russian\u00a0occupation\u00a0in\u00a0part of\u00a0its territory.\u00a0A\u00a02016 Pew Research Center\u00a0poll\u00a0<\/a>found that among South, Central,\u00a0and\u00a0East European countries, Ukraine had the highest level of acceptance of Jews as fellow citizens, with only 5 percent of the public disagreeing.<\/p>\n

The leadership role of Jews in the\u00a0country\u2019s\u00a0economic and political life is rarely a topic of public discourse and is accepted as normal.<\/p>\n

The country has a Jewish\u00a0Prime Minister, Volodymyr\u00a0Groisman.The\u00a0president\u2019s chief of staff is Jewish, as\u00a0was his last chief of staff, Borys\u00a0Lozhkin, who now heads the Ukrainian\u00a0Jewish Confederation\u00a0and is a\u00a0vice\u00a0president of the World Jewish Congress.<\/p>\n

According to the Ukrainian Jewish Confederation,\u00a0more than thirty\u00a0of 427 members of parliament are\u00a0Jewish.\u00a0And\u00a0the Committee on\u00a0Interparliamentary\u00a0Relations with Israel is the largest of all such groupings in the Ukrainian Rada, numbering nearly 140 deputies, a third of the legislature.<\/p>\n

Ukraine\u2019s\u00a0religious leaders have\u00a0regular access to\u00a0key\u00a0government leaders. And Ukrainian government and state leaders routinely\u00a0take part in commemorative ceremonies of remembrance of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

All this is not to say that there are no serious problems.<\/p>\n

Ukraine\u2019s memory politics reflect too much\u00a0heroization\u00a0of a complex past and not enough acknowledgment of such issues as indigenous antisemitism and collaboration with the Nazi occupation. More, too, needs to be done in restoring\u00a0the\u00a0killing fields in which Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

More ominously,\u00a0Ukraine\u2019s far-right,\u00a0para-military formations and their penchant for vigilantism remain\u00a0a problem that must be more vigorously countered by the state and their sources of funding investigated thoroughly.<\/p>\n

Antisemitic vandalism needs to be rooted out and hate speech handled in accordance with Ukrainian law.\u00a0Government reactions\u00a0to acts or expressions of antisemitism remain far too slow. And incidents of violence against Roma by members of far-right groups such as C14 must be swiftly prosecuted. \u200b<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0Western and Israeli governments, media, and NGOs should be sensitive to\u00a0Russia\u2019s hybrid warfare and disinformation around the topic of antisemitism and the far-right in Ukraine.\u00a0Russia\u2019s\u00a0deployment\u00a0of actors who wittingly or unwittingly are encouraged to engage in hate speech, incite anti-minority tensions, commit vandalism,\u00a0and employ violence is another phenomenon that must be better understood. In a poor country,\u00a0it is easy to buy or win the allegiance of alienated youth and enlist them in fringe politics either by far-right operatives or Russian agents.<\/p>\n

Ukraine's far right may not be a rising force. But in a poor country facing external aggression, it is a force that cannot be ignored.<\/p>\n

By Adrian Karatnycky
\n<\/em>Adrian Karatnycky\u00a0is a\u00a0senior\u00a0fellow with the Atlantic Council, and co-director and\u00a0board member of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.<\/em><\/p>\n

Originally appeared in , Atlanticcouncil.org<\/a>, October 15, 2018.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October 14\u00a0saw the latest in a string of\u00a0annual mass marches\u00a0by the far right in Ukraine.\u00a0As many as\u00a010,000\u00a0people\u00a0participated, mainly young men, chanting\u00a0fiercely.\u00a0A nighttime torchlight parade with\u00a0signs proclaiming, \u201cWe\u2019ll\u00a0return\u00a0Ukraine\u00a0to Ukrainians,\u201d contained\u00a0echoes of Nazi-style symbolism. Lax law enforcement...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12002,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-commentary-and-analysis","primary-category-22","primary-category-commentary-and-analysis"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12001"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12007,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12001\/revisions\/12007"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}