The Ukrainian Embassy and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs are actively discussing the program of President Viktor Yushchenko’s visit to Israel, despite the fact that there is no agreement in the president’s milieu on the efficacy of the visit at this time: the events taking place concurrently with the UPA rehabilitation process and the award conferred on Roman Shukhevych may be regarded as an unfavorable background for Yushchenko’s meeting with the Israeli leadership. Part of the president’s entourage, observing Russia’s activities in regard to the above issues, may be afraid of provocations during the visit.
The Israeli media can hardly be described as packed with discussions of the visit, although there is some degree of interest. Our impression is that the Israeli public is indifferent to this visit and to Ukraine’s complicated history, except perhaps for certain representatives of the Russian-speaking community.
We do not know whether an appeal to Israel to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide is one of the visit’s objectives because the Ukrainian president’s trip has been postponed for more than two years owing to various reasons, and many unresolved issues have accumulated over this period.
Why is the Holodomor issue so important to Ukraine? The country is in the process of national and historical self-determination, rethinking events from the distant and more recent past, especially those that mark fatal, tragic milestones. The Holodomor and the Second World War are precisely such milestones, painful issues, so the issue of recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide is very acute for Ukraine. By saying genocide, we are referring above all to the Holocaust. There are, however, other tragic examples: Armenia, Kampuchea, and Rwanda, or the mass deportations of the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushetians, and so on, which were carried out by the Stalinist regime and which resulted in the death of almost half the deportees.
The formal reason for which the Holodomor has still not been recognized as genocide has to do with terminology. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide reads that “...genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Without a doubt the Holodomor was a deliberately engineered famine for political and ideological reasons, which resulted, according to various sources, in the annihilation of five to seven million people, of whom Ukrainian peasants as well as residents of the Kuban region (mostly of Ukrainian parentage), residents of the Volga area, and Kazakhstan constituted the absolute majority.
For Ukraine this crime of the communist regime became a national tragedy, a terrible blow to its gene pool. Nevertheless, today there are quite a few people who are eager to debate whether the annihilation of Ukrainian peasants was the direct purpose of the Holodomor or the consequence of the communist policy aimed against the individual peasant-farmers working their own holdings.
At the very least, such discussions strike us as unethical. Someday we will learn from archival documents what Stalin and his comrades had planned. However, we know with absolute certainty the results of their heinous endeavors; one must judge the horrible events of those years precisely by their results. And the results of the Holodomor are such as to completely fall under the category of genocide.
Now that a number of countries, including European ones, have recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide, it is ludicrous to engage in a terminological dispute. At issue here is a symbolic act that will serve to strengthen our polarized world.
Regrettably, Russia’s stand on the matter is seen as markedly equivocal. It refuses to recognize the Holodomor as genocide on principle, declaring that its victims were not only residents of Ukraine but of other areas. In actual fact, Russia is afraid that, as the legal successor of the USSR, it may receive complaints and be asked to pay compensation. These fears are justified only if Russia considers itself both the successor as well as the continuer of the Soviet state, in which case it will indeed have to take advantage of the USSR’s achievements but also assume responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the Soviet government.
As for other countries — above all, true civilized democracies — we hope that they will recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide, having become aware of the historical justice of this move. This recognition will be exceptionally important for Ukraine in its aspirations to become part of the democratic world. In fact, Russia may realize that Ukraine’s tragedy is also its own because what is at issue here is not the complaints of one nation against another one but the crimes that were committed by a totalitarian regime, in whose implementation took part members of various nationalities, who were blinded by hatred and hiding behind a certain ideology.
Speaking of Israel, we can see at least three reasons why in this historical period it cannot recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide:
1. Stereotypical thinking about Ukraine, weighed down by memories of gloomy pages in the history of Ukrainian-Jewish relations.
2. The persistent belief in the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the lack of readiness to admit that there have been events in the history of other peoples, which are no less painful to them as the Holocaust is to the Jews. It should be noted that this attitude causes misunderstandings for many peoples who have either lived through their own tragedies or fortunately avoided them.
3. “Tactical” considerations: the unwillingness to get into a conflict with Russia on the subject.
One can only hope that, sooner or later, other reasons will prevail in Israel’s official position and in the mentality of Israeli society, namely:
1. Sympathy of a people that endured a tragedy for other peoples who suffered their own tragedies.
2. Solidarity of the democratic world against surviving imperialistic, authoritarian, and totalitarian regimes.
3. Prospects for Ukraine-Israel relations as opposed to what we believe is a lack of prospects in Israel’s relations with Russia.
We believe that, sooner or later, Israel will also recognize the tragedy in Armenia and the Stalinist deportations as acts of genocide. For the time being, we hope that official Israel will treat with understanding Ukraine’s appeal for recognition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide and accept this request for consideration.
If not for those “tactical” considerations” — which throughout history often prevented putting an end to the criminal activities of totalitarian empires — our world would look entirely different today.
If, after the Armenian genocide, the international community had assessed the threat of such crimes to humanity and found an antidote, then the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and other mass crimes would not have been perpetrated.
There are no criteria other than ethical ones. The pain of every nation must become the pain of all mankind; there is no other path to a tolerant world.
Yosyp Zisels is the head of the Vaad Ukraine Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities. Halyna Haraz is Vaad Ukraine’s representative to Israel .
