The piece has been published in The Daily Telegraph by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.

When Vladimir Putin launched his “special operation” against Ukraine on 24 February, his mission was clear. The “Nazi” gov­ern­ment in Kyiv was to fall – within 72 hours by most estimates – and the Russian-speaking majority in the eastern regions of Ukraine would be rescued from “genocide”.

The language used by Putin was carefully crafted to present Ukraine as a vestige of Hitler’s Third Reich, thereby stirring Russian pride and ‘jus­ti­fy­ing’ all measures taken against Ukraine. Putin’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov likened Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to their suc­cess­ful repulse of Napoleon and defeat of Hitler in the Great Patriotic War, marketing this invasion as the third instal­ment in the trilogy of Russian heroism.

The defeat of Napoleon in 1812 was impress­ive. Entering Russia with 450,000 men, Napoleon captured Moscow but even­tu­ally limped home with little more than 50,000 — ravaged by hellish combat, mad with hunger, and rife with disease. In World War II, the Soviet Union was mauled by the Nazi advance like no other country, losing some 20 million citizens in brutal urban fighting and from Hitler’s depop­u­la­tion plan that saw entire cities and millions of prisoners of war starved to death. Nazism would not have been defeated without millions of indi­vidu­al acts of valour and sacrifice by ordinary Soviet citizens.

But if the destruc­tion of Ukraine in our time and before our eyes is also a war against Nazism, then what exactly was the Red Army fighting in 1941 – 45? If Ukraine is led by a cadre of Nazi thugs with a Jew at the helm, what is a Nazi anyway?

Putin’s pro­pa­ganda oblit­er­ates language and reforms it into whatever he pleases. If the language used to under­stand the struggle against Nazism loses its true meaning, how can we begin to under­stand those cata­clys­mic events, and the lessons to be taken from them?

Putin is not alone in this practice. Last week, Palestini­an President Mahmoud Abbas told the visibly shocked German Chan­cel­lor that Israel had inflicted “50 Holo­causts” on the Palestini­ans. The actual Holocaust involved the destruc­tion of a people in purpose-built factories of death and across thousands of killing sites across Europe. The global Jewish pop­u­la­tion is still yet to reach its pre-war numbers. The Palestini­an pop­u­la­tion has grown fivefold since the 1960s.

Like his author­it­ari­an coun­ter­part in the Kremlin, Abbas knows exactly what he is doing. He under­stands that an abiding source of support for Israel comes from an appre­ci­ation of the Jewish quest for security and a home of their own arising from their people being hunted and murdered in their millions, packed in ditches like sardines and shot, and gassed in death-camps using a common pesticide.

Abbas cal­cu­lates that if he destroys the language used to describe these events, the events them­selves will lose meaning. Sympathy and support for Israel can then shift to the Palestini­ans.

The com­mon­al­ity of tactics between Putin and the Palestini­ans is unsur­pris­ing. Abbas earned his PhD in the former Soviet Union for a thesis alleging Jews had col­lab­or­ated with the Nazis in their own destruc­tion. The Soviet Union had since the 1950s been the world’s foremost purveyor of antisemitic pro­pa­ganda packaged as mere critique of Israel.

Ulti­mately, both Putin and Abbas stand to lose from any invest­ig­a­tion of their claims. Not only is the idea that modern Ukraine is a Nazi outpost plainly absurd, Russia’s record of imper­i­al­ism and antisemitism, con­sist­ing of state-sanc­tioned mob slaughter, a catalogue of racist laws and Stalinist threats to deploy nuclear weapons against Israel, is difficult to surpass.

Equally, Abbas’s invoc­a­tion of the Holocaust in the context of his own people, leads a path to the shameful history of Palestini­an col­lab­or­a­tion with Nazism. The father of Palestini­an nation­al­ism, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, spent the war in Berlin receiving an enormous pension from the Nazis, recording radio addresses in Arabic including a call to “kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” Al-Husseini sought and obtained assur­ances from Hitler that once the “Jewish question” had been resolved in Europe, the Final Solution would be exported to the Middle East. He recruited Bosnian Muslims to join the Nazi SS and these units pursued Jews in Croatia and massacred civilians in Bosnia.

In Al-Husseini’s most chilling inter­ven­tion, upon learning that the Red Cross had brokered the exchange of Jewish orphans for captured German officers, Al-Husseini scuppered the deal fearing the children would be settled in what was then British Palestine. The children were rerouted. The Auschwitz log records that the 1,260 children along with 53 Czech chap­er­ones arrived at the camp on October 7, 1943 and were all gassed on the same day.

History reveals much about why we are as we are. It is sacred and must be protected. Putin’s dis­tor­tions have only succeeded in den­ig­rat­ing the memories of those who fell in the battle against actual Nazism. Abbas has merely repelled the German public and drawn attention to the unwaver­ing ability of Palestini­an leaders to stand on the wrong side of history.

Alex Ryvchin is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry