Lady Chatterley, Brutus, and Delilah’s fabled betrayals were just put to shame. Yes, Connie Chatterley slept with the gardener behind her paralyzed husband’s back, and Caesar’s best friend joined his assassins, and Samson’s lover sold him to his enemies for several thousand coins, but none of these icons of infidelity did their treacheries in live broadcast to the entire human race.
That distinction in the history of betrayal – “a day of American infamy,” in the words of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens – is now Uncle Sam’s.
Washington’s abandonment of Ukraine came in two installments – first last Friday’s public beratement of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House, then this week’s suspension of military aid to Kyiv.
Added up, one might suspect this is a one-two punch the Ukrainian nation cannot sustain. That impression, as we Israelis know better than others – is unfounded.
It's nothing new
FOLLOWING THE exchange involving US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week in the Oval Office, European leaders came out of the woodwork to give words of encouragement to Ukraine even as they still fund Russia through energy purchases. (credit: BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS)
FOLLOWING THE exchange involving US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week in the Oval Office, European leaders came out of the woodwork to give words of encouragement to Ukraine even as they still fund Russia through energy purchases. (credit: BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS)
UKRAINE’S BETRAYAL is nothing new.
Last century, as tsarist Russia unraveled, Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed an independent republic only to be invaded by the Red Army, annexed by the Soviet Union, and scorched by the civil war between Russia’s Reds and Whites.
Before that, as the Russians struck the Brest Litovsk deal that took them out of World War I, they handed parts of Ukraine to Germany. After that, as Moscow signed the 1921 Treaty of Riga that ended the Polish-Russian War, swaths of western Ukraine were granted to Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.
Traumatizing though it was, this continuum of political robbery and territorial dismemberment was but a prelude to the Soviet Union’s atrocities – the purges of Ukraine’s intelligentsia, the deportations of its peasantry, and the starvation of its population, when the 1930s’ infamous Holodomor famine killed millions of Ukrainians.
Ukrainians thus see the Russians as killers of their nation’s soul and body and robbers of its land. It’s a heritage of bad blood that harks back centuries, to the Cossack revolt of 1648-1657, when Ukrainian national hero Bogdan Khmelnitsky defeated Poland only to see his Russian ally take over the land he thought he liberated.
These memories govern Russian-Ukrainian relations to this day, and we Jews are well positioned to discuss these bloodied events because our forebears were their victims no less than the Ukrainians themselves, often even more.
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THE CROSSBACK revolt was animated by the worst anti-Jewish violence since Rome stormed Judea, a bloodbath after which – according to historian of Polish Jewry Raphael Mahler – Ukrainian Jewry was halved.
The violence following World War I was even worse for Ukraine’s Jews, as what began with 30 pogroms in 1918, and swelled to 685 by late 1919, ended with 100,000 Jewish widows and 200,000 Jewish orphans mourning 250,000 dead Jews, according to historian Salo Baron.
The current Ukrainian situation is, of course, very different.
The Ukrainian who was shamed in the White House is a proud Jew, an inversion of Symon Petliura, the Ukrainian leader whose troops habitually slaughtered Jews before a Jew who had lost 14 relatives in those pogroms shot him dead on a Parisian sidewalk.
That was last century. Now the Ukrainians are the blameless victims, not only of their neighbor’s aggression but also of their ally’s betrayal, which came with the absurd charge that their molestation by their giant neighbor was not the giant’s idea, but theirs.
The Ukrainians thus need advice about what to do when betrayed, advice that we Israelis are well equipped to impart, having been betrayed not by one, but by three different superpowers.
Second betrayer, the Soviet Union
OUR SECOND betrayer was the one Ukrainians know all too well, the Soviet Union. It came after Moscow, realizing Israel will not become communist, halted Communist Czechoslovakia’s arms shipments to the young IDF. Our two other betrayers were Ukraine’s current allies. The first was the British Empire, which 22 years after having committed to restore the Jews to their ancestral land made a U-turn, locked the Promised Land's doors, and thus abandonded the Holocuast's prospective victims to Nazi Germany's devices.
Israel’s last betrayer (for now) was France, which in 1967, with three enemy armies gathered along Israel’s borders and threatening to destroy it, froze signed arms deals with Israel, and warned Jerusalem not to wage a preemptive war.
The Jews responded to these setbacks in two ways: industrially and diplomatically.
The industrial response was to build what the Jews had not built since antiquity – an arms industry. The effort that began with the clandestine production of bullets, mortars, and grenades evolved into a multi-billion dollar arms industry that made anything and everything, from tanks and jets, to radars and missile boats; in 2023 alone, this industry registered $13 billion in foreign sales.
The remedy to Israel’s diplomatic betrayal was the same as the recommended response to romantic betrayal: find another partner.
When its Czechoslovak supply line disappeared, Israel turned to France, which by the mid1950s had modernized the Israel Air Force, supplying the fighter jets that would star in the wars of 1956 and 1967. And after French supplies vanished, Israel replaced them with American arms.
Yes, Ukraine’s situation is different. It faces a superpower that has nuclear bombs, a population nearly five times the size of Ukraine's, and the world's biggest and richest land. However, Israel overcame its betrayals with a population hardly the size of greater Kyiv’s and a land hardly 3% of Ukraine’s size, and with no mineral riches at all.
Ukraine has a vast land with fertile soil, mineral wealth, 32 million people, an industrialized economy, an educated workforce, and a brave army. It can create, fight, and prevail, provided it realizes that in diplomacy – as in romance – what feels like love’s sanctuary might actually be Delilah’s bed.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.