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Tuesday, 20 February 2018 09:24

ISRAEL SHOULD RECOGNIZE THE HOLODOMOR AS A GENOCIDE OF THE UKRAINIAN PEOPLE

Michael MacKay, Radio Lemberg, 20.02.2018 
 
The Holodomor of 1932-33 was a genocide of the Ukrainian people. It was planned and executed by the Soviet regime of state terror, which was the Russian occupation regime in Ukraine from 1920 to 1991. The Muscovy invader-occupiers of Ukraine carried out the Holodomor by engineering a famine that killed no fewer than three million and as many as 11 million people. “Holodomor” means “murder by hunger or starvation.”
 
Many countries have passed laws to officially declare the Holodomor to be a genocide of the Ukrainian people. These countries invariably have laws to officially declare the Holocaust to be a genocide of the Jewish people. Canada, for example has the “Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day Act” which became law in 2008. Every fourth Saturday in November is a day of solemn commemoration of the Holodomor in Canada. Canada has the “Holocaust Memorial Day Act” which became law in 2003. The law stipulates that “Yom ha-Shoah or the Day of the Holocaust, as determined in each year by the Jewish lunar calendar, is proclaimed as ‘Holocaust Memorial Day — Yom ha-Shoah.’”
 
The Knesset, the parliament in Israel, has before it a bill to officially commemorate the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people. In the name of justice and historical memory, the Knesset should pass this bill.
 
Russia strongly objects to Israel acknowledging the Holodomor. The reason is that Russia proclaims with pride that it is the successor state of the Soviet Union, is quietly reviving the cult of Stalin, and rejects decommunization. Ukraine, on the other hand, proclaims itself to be the successor to independent Ukrainian states going back a millennia, fought and won a Revolution of Dignity to put itself at the heart of the European home, and is undergoing a thorough decommunization. The propaganda and symbols of the Nazi and Soviet regimes of state terror are banned in Ukraine: there are no swastikas or hammer-and-sickles allowed.
 
Israel is of course the epicentre of Holocaust remembrance, as Ukraine is the epicentre of Holodomor remembrance. When Israel and other countries officially commemorate the Holocaust as a genocide of the Jewish people, there are no objections of any kind from Germany. Quite the opposite is true. Germany underwent denazification after the defeat of Hitler’s Reich and the end of the Second World War. Generations have grown up in Germany that are fully-aware of the Holocaust and who acknowledge Germany’s responsibility.
 
The Knesset in Israel should not take the objections of Russia into account, because they come from the moral failure of the Russians to understand the facts about and acknowledge Russia’s responsibility for the Holodomor. That other people than Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor is no more a valid objection than that other people than Jews were killed in the Holocaust: they were planned campaigns of mass-murder that targeted a group of people, and that’s genocide.
 
Volodymyr Ariev wrote an impassioned plea to the Israeli Knesset to pass the Holodomor commemoration bill. It was published as an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post. Volodymyr Ariev is a member of the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament of Ukraine, and is a Vice-President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He argues that the Holodomor and the Holocaust are distinct but that both meet the criteria of genocide, a term coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer from western Ukraine, Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin called “the destruction of the Ukrainian nation” the “classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification.”
 
Canada’s law says “the Holodomor was deliberately planned and executed by the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin to systematically destroy the Ukrainian people’s aspirations for a free and independent Ukraine, and subsequently caused the death of millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.” In the name of justice, historical memory, and common humanity, Israel should say the same.
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