Russia played both Israel and Hamas: Here’s why Putin has picked the side of the terrorists

The Soviet Union funded Palestinian terrorists but the policy changed to a more evenhanded one under Putin. That has changed and now Putin is backing the Palestinians.

Rebekah Koffler is a strategic military intelligence analyst and the author of Putin’s Playbook. She is Managing Editor of an e-mail newsletter for independent thinkers, CutToTheNews.com. Follow her on Twitter @Rebekah0132

Since becoming president in 2000, Putin drastically improved the Russian-Israeli relationship. After decades of hostile relations between the USSR and Israel, Putin became the first Kremlin leader to visit Israel in 2005. He subsequently endorsed the building of a massive $60 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, to which he donated a month’s worth of his salary. Having opened in Moscow in 2012, the museum acknowledged Russia’s and the USSR’s history of antisemitism, and recognized the contributions of Jews to Soviet life. 

Putin’s amicable attitude toward Jewish people was likely in response to the affection he received as a child from an old, religious Jewish couple with whom his family shared a communal apartment in St. Petersburg. As a practical matter, Putin probably calculated that the 1.2 million Russian and former Soviet émigrés living in Israel represented a good pool of expatriates who could return to their own or their parents’ motherland, adding some educated human capital to demographically struggling Russia.