Netanyahu mentions Nazi collaborators during Shoah speech in Ukraine

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the actions of the Nazis and collaborators at a killing site in Ukraine show that Jews must defend themselves.

Netanyahu made the statement Monday during a state visit to Ukraine, in which he attended a Holocaust commemoration event at the former killing site of Babi Yar near Kiev, alongside dignitaries including Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky, who is the first Jewish person elected to that office in Ukraine’s history.

Ukrainian auxiliary police on Sept. 29-30, 1941 took about 33,000 Jews to be murdered by German soldiers in the Babi Yar patchwork of ravines on the margins of the Ukrainian capital.

During his speech, Netanyahu, whose previous visit to Ukraine as prime minister was in 1999, praised Ukrainian non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust.

But he also addressed in several places in his speech the role that collaborators of the Nazis had in the Holocaust, which is currently a highly sensitive subject in Ukraine.

After mentioning how the Holocaust was carried out by “the Nazis and their collaborators,” Netanyahu also said that “with one swipe of their sword, the Nazis and their partners ended a thousand years” of coexistence between Jews and Ukrainians.

He further said that the murder at Babi Yar “didn’t happen on a different planet, but minutes away from Kiev’s bustling centre. The murders of Babi Yar by the Nazis and their collaborators prepared the murder of the Jews of Ukraine,” Netanyahu said.

In recent years, Ukraine has seen several major controversies over state honours and other honours for people who fought alongside the Nazis against the Soviets.

Netanyahu has mentioned collaborators in the past in commemoration speeches, but he does not always do so. In his 2016 Holocaust Day speech, for example, he mentioned no collaborators, despite mentioning the Nazis 11 times.

“To humanity, Babi Yar is a warning sign,” Netanyahu said. “To Jews, it’s a timeless command: We’ll always defend ourselves by our own force against any enemy,” Netanyahu said.

Zelensky, a former comedian who won the presidency last month, expressed admiration for Israel’s defence capabilities during his swearing-in speech in May. “We must become Icelanders in football, Israelis in defending our land, Japanese in technology,” he said.

Zelensky did not mention collaboration in his speech. “We cannot forget and forgive” the events at Babi Yar, Zelensky said. “The Ukrainian people will always remember crimes against humanity. We will never forget what racism and xenophobia lead to.” Zelensky told reporters that he had asked Netanyahu to recognise as a genocide the Holodomor famine, caused in 1932 by Soviet policies.

Ukrainian media devoted some attention to claims that Sarah Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife, insulted Ukrainians when she threw to the ground a piece of bread offered to her during a welcoming ceremony.

Benjamin Netanyahu received the piece of bread from a welcoming party of three women on the tarmac of an airport in Kiev upon landing there. He dipped the bread in salt and bit off a piece, offering the rest to his wife. But she quietly dropped it to the ground without tasting it, in what many Ukrainians online described as a sign of disrespect.

Andriy Bohdan, head of the office of the President of Ukraine, dismissed these claims, saying Sarah Netanyahu, who wore an outfit featuring the Ukrainian national colours to the welcoming ceremony, had “no intention” of disrespecting Ukraine.

Israel and Ukraine singed a free-trade agreement earlier this year. During the trip, Zelensky announced the opening of a Ukrainian government high-tech and investment centre in Jerusalem. Netanyahu has urged many world leaders he has met to follow the United States in moving their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Israel will open its own high-tech and investment centre in Kiev.