viewpoint: ben cohen

Bibi Netanyahu’s Russian realism

Posted

These are the days that Vladimir Putin has been aching for since the end of the Cold War. 

On Dec. 5, 1989, three weeks after the Berlin Wall was torn down, angry crowds stormed the Dresden Headquarters of the Stasi, the brutal secret police of the Soviet puppet regime in East Germany. At the time, KGB officer Putin was based in the office across the street reserved for the representatives of the Soviet security apparatus. When Russia’s future president picked up the phone to demand military protection from the surging masses, he was told that nothing could be done without orders from Moscow — and Moscow, said the person at the other end, “is silent.”

What a contrast that is with the present. The beleaguered KGB agent who personally witnessed the collapse of communism, and has nursed the wound ever since, is now running Moscow — a world capital that is very far from silent. 

In geopolitical terms, Russia trades on fear of its hard power in places like Eastern Europe and the Middle East. But fear is not the only factor; national leaders looking for fresh opportunities in the face of American isolationism and retreat are looking more and more to Putin for support. In that regard, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has met with Putin four times over the last year and with President Barack Obama only once, exemplifies this new trend.

Netanyahu’s most recent visit to Moscow took place in June, when Russia and Israel marked 25 years since the resumption of diplomatic relations severed by the Soviet Union after the 1967 Six-Day War. While there, the Israeli leader announced that his hosts would be returning an Israeli tank captured during the Lebanon War of 1982, which had been on display in a Russian museum. The symbolism was uncomplicated and largely welcome: Russia, the gesture seemed to say, regrets its past hostility to Israel and will henceforth treat the Jewish state with respect.

Page 1 / 3