The Jewish Agency has played a vital role in helping more than 238,000 Jews emigrate from Russia since 1989. The group has also facilitated the influx of 16,000 immigrants since the start of the war in Ukraine and another 37,000 who entered in Israel on tourist visas and request residency status or wait out the war.
Israel said it was preparing a series of retaliatory actions that it would consider if Russia complied with the ban, although officials did not specify what these were.
“We are in a battle here. It’s not the closing of McDonald’s,” a senior Israeli official told the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth. “We will not accept this in silence.”
Russia’s Justice Ministry, which called for the agency to be shut down, did not specify its problems with the group, saying only that it was in “violation of Russian law in carrying out its activities”.
A Jewish Agency official said the Russians appeared to characterize the agency’s routine collection of immigrants’ personal data as a violation of privacy laws, a charge he called an obvious pretense.
“It’s routine paperwork. Nobody hides it. This is what the Jewish Agency has always done,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. “It’s something absurd. And that shows us that there are ulterior motives.
The official speculated that this highly unusual move could be due to a variety of reasons: a broader Russian crackdown on foreign-linked organizations, retaliation against Israel’s support for Ukraine, or even an expansion of the type of “extortion” that has targeted the Jewish Agency in the past. Russian officials harassed Jewish Agency field operatives before cases were settled to show us “who’s boss,” the official said.
It could also be an internal Russian political rivalry, in which one part of the government uses the Jewish Agency as a political pawn to challenge another.
He said Russia had not officially asked him to scale back operations and the group continued to operate as normal. Another 600,000 Russians remain eligible to migrate under Israel’s right of return laws, the agency estimates.
Many in Israel see Moscow’s move as retaliation for Israel’s increasingly vocal stance against the invasion.
Then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett condemned the violence in Ukraine but refrained from directly criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite pressure from Washington and other Western allies. Instead, Bennett offered to mediate, approaching both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and making an emergency trip to Moscow and Berlin for talks.
But Lapid, who took over as interim prime minister earlier this month when Israel’s coalition government collapsed, was more critical. In April, Moscow slammed then-foreign minister Lapid for overseeing Israel’s vote to expel Russia from the UN Human Rights Council and then making “anti-human” comments. -Russians” condemning the “murder of innocent civilians” during an “unwarranted invasion”.
The two countries also engaged in a public spat in May after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed Zelensky’s Jewish faith by claiming that “Hitler also had Jewish blood” – a discredited anti-Semitic claim.
Lapid called the remarks “both unforgivable and outrageous.” Putin later apologized for Lavrov’s statements during a call with Bennett, according to the prime minister’s office.
Israel’s stance against the war in Ukraine has been complicated from the start by its strained relationship with Russia, which it relies on for two key priorities: allowing Russian Jews to emigrate and its freedom to strike backed forces. by Iran in Syria.
Israel carries out regular – officially unacknowledged – airstrikes against militia sites in Syria. Most of the attacks elicit no Russian comment, although Moscow condemned an attack attributed to Israel on Damascus airport last month. In 2018, Russia accused Israel of shooting down a Russian military plane near the Syrian coast, which killed 15 people on board.
Competing needs have sparked a debate here between those who think it’s too dangerous to take sides and those, like Lapid, who want the country to align itself fully with the Western alliance helping Ukraine. To date, Israel has declined pleas, most recently from President Biden, to supply arms to Ukraine.
This is not the first time that Russia has apparently tried to use the Jewish Agency as a pawn in its relations with Israel. In 1996, Moscow temporarily revoked the group’s credentials to work in the country.
Natan Sharansky, an Israeli human rights activist who spent nine years in Soviet prisons as a Jewish ‘refusenik’, was among those who warned that Israel should not let Russia bully him into threatening the agency, a group he helped lead for a decade.
“We need to protect our interests in a way that doesn’t rely on abandoning our moral positions,” Sharansky wrote Friday in a Facebook post. “The Jewish Agency is doing very important work in Russia, and I hope it will continue to do so. Nevertheless, it behooves us to remember that Israel knew how to fight for immigration even when the Jewish Agency and all Israeli diplomats were excluded from Soviet Russia.