Translated material
Above the Arab peaceful hut...
The negative attitude of Russians towards Israel has become part of the overall picture of the archaization of mass consciousness and is associated with the perception of the armed conflict in Ukraine
(18+) THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) IS PRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED AND (OR) SENT BY FOREIGN AGENT ANDREY VLADIMIROVICH KOLESNIKOV OR CONCERNES THE ACTIVITIES OF FOREIGN AGENT ANDREY VLADIMIROVICH KOLESNIKOV.
In the early 2010s, Russians, who had not yet recovered from the psychological anesthesia of gadget modernization according to Medvedev and the Russian-American “reset”, which turned out to be an “overload,” had a very good attitude towards Western countries, and looked at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with the indifference of an arbiter, not taking sides. After some time, the number of sympathizers with Israel, according to regular measurements by the Levada Center*, even exceeded the share of sympathizers with the Palestinians.
It seemed that one of the rudiments of the Soviet and Russian “people’s” consciousness—the idea of the obvious rightness of the “Arab peaceful hut” over which “the shaggy Jew soars proudly” (to use a line by Joseph Brodsky)—had become a thing of the past. But this has never happened, and here it is again: around 2017, the curve of sympathy for Israel intersected with the curve of sympathy for the Palestinians: the first went down, the second went up.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, in 2022, when the old imperial instincts that seemed to have died down broke through, the Palestinianophilia curve experienced a powerful rise. For it is clear: where “the Israeli military, known to the whole world” (already in the words of Alexander Galich), there is the United States, and where the United States is, there is NATO. The 2022 conflict turned into an endless existential battle with the “destructive neoliberal” West, into which something Jewish, and for some even Judeo-Masonic, is a priori sewn. In this logic, the joke about the existence of a special caste of “Judeo-Banderaites” no longer seemed like a funny oxymoron.
What do we get out of a fresh joint study by the foreign agent Levada Center and the alien Chicago Council, which was responsible for the American part of respondents’ answers to sociologists’ questions about the Arab-Israeli conflict? The majority of Russian citizens surveyed still do not support either side - 57%, but this figure is much lower than what has been recorded in recent years. 28% of respondents favor the Palestinians—an increase of 22% (!) since 2011. And the main part of the growth occurred, of course, during the period of active regeneration of archaic ideas about the world in the “elite”, propaganda, and after them - the mass consciousness of Russians. 6% of respondents sympathize with Israel—a drop of 9 percentage points since 2012.
Observations of the mood of the population in everyday conversations show a simple and only possible result in a situation of returning to “traditional spiritual and moral values”, which confirms the figures of large surveys:
whoever is for *** and Putin is for Hamas and Hezbollah; whoever is for Israel and against the Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist organizations is for peace and against the Kremlin.
Nothing personal - just automatic restoration of the old mental matrix. Let's make a reservation: there are exceptions to any rules, as well as to any generalizations.
What happened to the mass consciousness is a projection of the political views of the authorities, promoted by propaganda. But there is also some kind of a priori, axiomatic logic of the old prejudice, which, it turns out, is easy to awaken from a lethargic sleep: you cannot be a truly Russian, former Soviet, imperial patriot and at the same time support Israel. This is also a projection of the old Soviet attitude towards the ongoing conflict: “As a mother,” I say, “and as a woman, I demand them to answer!” (“About how Klim Petrovich spoke at a rally in defense of peace”; the year Alexander Arkadyevich wrote this poem was 1968; the Six-Day War of 1967 died down not so long ago). The identification system “friend or foe” at the sight of an Israeli soldier begins to blink and signal furiously...
The world is becoming more complex, and Putin’s modern, but archaic ideology makes it, on the contrary, black and white without shades. Moreover, what was recently white becomes black, and vice versa. It is easier to live in such a world, to which the frightened and confused mass consciousness reacts positively.
Israel had the status of a friend when it was necessary to politically speculate on the topic of Ukrainian anti-Semitism or, in general, to build a positive image of Putin as a philo-Semite. And he was indeed quite successful in this field, including when in January 2020, shortly before the fatal Covid pause, he visited Israel in connection with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. This was still a period of extremely active contacts with Benjamin Netanyahu, who in those years was not at all lazy about coming to Moscow for work.
Now the need to maintain the image of a great friend of the Jewish people and its tragic history has disappeared.
And not before, and in the very explanation of the NWO, the motive of “denazification” was somehow trivialized and wilted, and Arab friends - as befits a real empire - must be supported, because Israel is still on the side of the United States.
Typically, ordinary Russian respondents feel this. According to the mentioned study, responsibility for instability and bloodshed in the Middle East lies primarily with the United States and NATO. 38% of respondents think so, while 22% blame Israel itself, and only 8% blame Hamas/the Palestinian side. What NATO has to do with Palestine is a rhetorical question. It just has, and that's all. This apriority was developed by similar ideas, according to which NATO was going to attack Russia, the United States intends to dismember our country and populate it with Americans fleeing the Yellowstone volcano (as Nikolai Patrushev, the presidential assistant for shipbuilding, teaches us).
This view of reality is a toxic cocktail of ignorance and indifference. Ignorance is born from indifference - it’s easier to escape reality without giving yourself a chance to think. The result is that two more curves crossed in the Levada Center study: somewhere around the turn of 2022, indicators of negative attitudes towards Israel shot up and indicators of positive attitudes fell down. Since 2018, the share of respondents with a negative attitude towards Israel has increased by 34 percentage points. and is now 51%. 27% of respondents have a positive attitude towards Israel; their number has decreased by 32 percentage points since 2018.
Combined with European anti-Semitism, massive pro-Palestinian sentiments among students and sometimes among professors in the Western world, oblivion of the Holocaust, the memory of which can be easily distorted and obscured in our time, the situation with public opinion in Russia creates problems for Israel. The country, of course, does not find itself in isolation, not to mention the fact that under terrorist bombs, repatriates from Russia are still flocking there: they leave - just to leave or have a second passport - no longer even with their mothers, fathers, wives and husbands, and almost on grandmothers and great-grandmothers discovered in the archives. However, the image of the country and people is changing.
Anti-Semitism, which until recently was a sign of simply unethical behavior, like the indecent habit of blowing your nose into a curtain, is becoming routine, banal and sometimes approved behavior.
In an era not only of fake news, but also of upending concepts and values, (neo)anti-Semitism turns out to be only part of a larger picture. Pictures of a crisis of reason, the routinization of horror and violence - killings of people, permanent hatred, unjust sentences, the ease of talking about nuclear war, new destructive technologies - not for life, but for deception and death. It seems that the world had more fuses during the Cold War era than it does now, in an era that has no name yet.
History truly repeats itself. But not as a farce, but again as a tragedy mixed with farce.