Who Does Russia Support in Palestinian-Israeli Conflict?

“Right now the most important thing [in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis] is to stop the bloodshed. Collective efforts are more than needed in the interests of an early ceasefire and stabilization of the situation on the ground,” Russian President Putin said Friday at a CIS heads of state meeting in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

The goal of talks “should be the implementation of the UN two-state formula, which envisions the creation of an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, coexisting in peace and security with Israel,” the Russian president said. “We need to concern ourselves with resolving this issue through peaceful means. In the current situation there is no alternative,” he emphasized.

Reiterating his earlier-stated position on the crisis being the result of the Washington’s failed regional policy, Putin pointed out that the so-called Quartet on the Middle East, consisting of the UN, Russia, the United States and the European Union, hasn’t been activated to try to cool tensions.

Russia’s efforts to strike a balanced approach to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis has rung alarm bells in the US and NATO establishment and their loyal servants in the media, with Western media churning out article after article on how Moscow could “benefit” from or "take advantage" of the conflict, and trying to twist the narrative in the most convoluted way to find an alleged trace of Russian influence on the escalating violence.

The propaganda campaign stems from Putin’s decision not to join Western leaders in offering Israel Russia’s full-throated support, and to instead delve into history to point out that the ultimate “root of all problems” in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis stems from the failure of the 1947 UN-mandated creation of a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one. The Palestinian problem “touches the heart” of all residents of the Middle East, and all Muslims in general, Putin said, adding that Russia’s stance on the conflict “is well known both to the Israeli side and to our friends in Palestine.”

As far as the escalation is concerned, the Russian president has urged, first and foremost, that civilians are left out of the fighting. “If men decide to fight amongst themselves, let them do it. But leave women and children alone,” he said, stressing that this applies to both sides.

Moscow’s present posture on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, which seeks to achieve maximum balance, follows decades of positions which shifted dramatically based on geopolitical and ideological considerations, going back to the start of the crisis in the late 1940s.

As a founding member of the United Nations system which emerged after World War II, the Soviet Union eagerly supported the creation of separate Palestinian and Jewish states. The USSR became the first country in the world to recognize Israel in 1948, and went so far as to approve arms sales by Czechoslovakia, a Soviet bloc country, to Tel Aviv during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949.

Relations between the Soviet Union and Israel soon soured, however, due to the failure of the promised Palestinian state to materialize, with Tel Aviv adding insult to injury by ignoring Moscow’s proposal for UN Security Council trusteeship over the city of Jerusalem. Israeli demands requesting the USSR to allow for the immigration of Soviet Jews, plus Tel Aviv’s gradual efforts to cozy up to the West, prompted Moscow to terminate trade relations in 1949, and to sever diplomatic relations entirely in early 1953 after a terrorist attack at the Soviet diplomatic mission in Israel, which Moscow blamed on the Israeli government.

Relations were restored shortly after Joseph Stalin’s death in mid-1953, but remained tense, with Soviet support for anti-Western national liberation movements across the Middle East, including Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt – which refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist, naturally straining ties.

In June 1967, after Israel launched preemptive aerial strikes against the Egyptians and sparked a new regional war with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Algeria, Moscow again broke off relations with Tel Aviv.

From 1967 until 1985, the USSR did not maintain any contacts with Israel whatsoever, with Soviet and Israeli intelligence agencies clashing in Cold War hot spots across the globe, from Africa to Latin America, and Moscow sending billions of dollars’ worth of increasingly advanced military hardware to their Middle Eastern allies. Throughout this period, the USSR expressed its full support to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its longtime leader, Yasser Arafat.

Ties gradually began to be restored in the mid-to-late 1980s, after Mikhail Gorbachev launched his perestroika and ‘New Political Thinking’ reforms aimed at ending the Cold War. Soviet-Israeli consular contacts were resumed in 1987, and diplomatic relations were fully restored in October 1991, months before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the post-Soviet period, ties between Russia and Israel quickly warmed, coming to include close diplomatic, economic, cultural and even military contacts, complemented by the migration of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Russia to Israel, with a visa-free travel regime agreed in 2008. Politically, despite Israel’s alliance with the US, Moscow found ways to find common ground with Tel Aviv, focusing heavily on cooperation in counterterrorism (but without agreeing to formally categorize certain enemies of Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah, as “terrorist groups”).

Throughout the post-Soviet period, Russia also continued to support Palestine in its quest for statehood, joining 137 other UN members recognizing Palestine as a de jure sovereign state, and Russian officials, including President Putin, meeting regularly with representatives of the PLO, Hamas, and the Palestinian National Authority. During every successive bout of violence, in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and 2020, Russia called for a speedy halt in fighting. In 2012, Moscow voted in favor of the General Assembly resolution which granted Palestine non-member observer status in the UN.

The escalation of the Ukrainian crisis into a full-blown NATO proxy war against Russia in 2022 heightened bilateral tensions with Israel somewhat, with Tel Aviv’s limited support for Kiev, combined with a diplomatic flap over comments made by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, straining ties with Moscow. However, even during the crisis, behind-the-scenes talks continued, with now former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett revealing this past February that he offered his services as an indirect mediator, and that Russia and Ukraine were apparently on the brink of a settlement before the US and its allies swooped in to kill the talks.

The answer to question posed in the headline to this piece, i.e. who does Russia support, is: both sides. Moscow wants to see a peaceful resolution to the crisis in which both sides’ interests are satisfied. Russia’s decades-long push to try to strike a balance in relations with Israel and Palestine (whose statehood Russia actually recognizes, unlike the US, for example) and its broader effort to establish warm ties with other key actors, such as Israel’s sworn enemy Iran, makes Moscow a potentially ideal and natural mediator. Whether Israelis and the Palestinians agree to such mediation is a decision they and their regional and international allies and partners will have to make.