Russia Is Arming the People Trying to Kill Israelis. Israel Is Buying Stolen Ukrainian Grain, From Russia.
Why I'm done pretending Israel's posture on Putin is defensible
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Before I get into it, let me say the quiet part out loud: it is okay to criticize Israel. It is okay to disagree with the Israeli government — its strategy, its tactics, its choices about who it stands with and who it stands against. Allies do that. Pretending otherwise is how you end up rationalizing things you shouldn’t, and I am not pretending.
I’ll go further. I think Israel fought the war in Gaza badly. After October 7th, the right answer was a ground invasion paired with a serious, disciplined counterinsurgency — the slow, miserable, painstaking work of separating fighters from civilians, clearing Hamas’s tunnels and command nodes block by block, and putting the population under Israeli pressure without putting it under Israeli rubble. Instead, Israel leaned heavily on standoff bombing, flattened neighborhoods to root out terrorists, and produced a generation of new enemies. You can support Israel’s right to defend itself — I do, fully — and still say plainly that you do not end terrorism by killing the cousins, neighbors, and children of the next terrorist. We learned that lesson twice in twenty years. Israel didn’t have to relearn it from scratch.
Now to the subject I actually want to talk about, which is Russia.
Israel has spent four years tiptoeing around Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. For a long time, the official excuse was Syria. Russia controlled the airspace, the IDF needed deconfliction to keep hitting Iranian targets, and so Jerusalem could not be seen on the wrong side of Moscow. I never quite bought it as sufficient — democracies don’t get to outsource their conscience to a runway in Latakia — but I understood the logic, sort of.
That excuse is dead. Assad is gone. The Russian footprint in Syria is a fraction of what it was, and the deconfliction hotline is no longer the fulcrum of Israeli air operations. And yet Israel’s posture toward Russia has not moved toward Ukraine. It has moved toward Russia.
In February 2025, Israel joined Russia in voting against a U.N. General Assembly resolution whose offense was reaffirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It was the first time Israel voted with Russia and against Ukraine since the invasion began. That same year, Putin and Netanyahu spoke on the phone four times — up from zero the year before. Israel finally delivered a single Patriot battery to Ukraine in September 2025, three and a half years late, and one good moment doesn’t redeem the four bad years that surrounded it.
And then there is the grain.
Russia has industrialized the theft of Ukrainian grain from occupied territory — more than two million tons in 2025 alone, laundered through Crimean ports, relabeled, and shipped out as “Russian.” Egypt, of all countries, has now told Kyiv it will stop accepting these shipments. Israel has not. On April 12, 2026, the Russian bulk carrier Abinsk — which had been sitting outside Haifa since March 23 — finally docked and unloaded more than 43,000 tons of wheat traceable to occupied Ukraine. When Ukraine asked Israel to seize the ship, Jerusalem reportedly told Kyiv it was too late, because the vessel had already left the port. Haaretz published a full investigation last week laying out the smuggling pipeline in detail, with Israel as a willing endpoint.
Israel can fix this with a phone call. Reject the next ship. Inspect the cargo. Tell Russian shippers their grain will be detained if it traces to Ukrainian soil. Do what Egypt did. It is not complicated, and it is not expensive, and the only reason not to do it is that somebody in Jerusalem has quietly decided that staying in Putin’s good graces is worth more than standing with a fellow democracy fighting for its life.
That brings me to the part of this that should sting the most for any serious Israeli strategist.
Russia is not a neutral party in Israel’s neighborhood. Russia is the logistics arm of Iran. The Shahed drones that Russia has used to terrorize Ukrainian civilians came from Tehran first; now Russia mass-produces them at Alabuga and ships components and upgrades back the other way. During the 2025 Israel–Iran war, Russia handed Iran intelligence on U.S. and Israeli military positions, supplied Krasukha electronic-warfare systems, and — according to leaked Russian planning documents — committed to delivering Iran air-to-air missiles through 2027 and Su-35 fighters meant to make the next round harder for the IDF. Russia is, in plain English, helping rebuild the Iranian military that just fired ballistic missiles at cities.
And it is not just Iran. When the IDF moved into southern Lebanon in late 2024, soldiers reportedly found that 60 to 70 percent of Hezbollah’s stockpiled weapons were Russian-made — Kornets, Metis, Konkurs, Sagger and Fagot missiles, much of it siphoned from Assad’s arsenals with Moscow’s blessing. Russia openly cultivates relationships with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Analysts at MEI and Jamestown now describe Russia’s outreach to Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance” as an explicit strategy: arm the people trying to kill Israelis, in order to pin down American weapons that would otherwise go to Ukraine.
This is what Israel is being neutral about. This is who Israel is letting unload grain ships at Haifa.
I said something close to this in March 2022, when I was still in Congress. I tweeted that Israel needed to pick a side, that “Israel doesn’t have a special exemption,” and that its posture on Ukraine would and should have a bearing on future U.S. aid. The pushback from American friends of Israel was immediate and loud. I was told repeatedly: you don’t understand, Israel is threatened, Israel can’t spare the materiel, Israel has to coordinate with Russia in Syria, you don’t get it.
October 7th proved the threat is real. I have never pretended otherwise, and I will not start now. But October 7th also clarified something that some of those same voices keep missing: this is a long, generational struggle between countries that believe in democracies and rules and countries that believe in raw power and the boot. Iran is in the second camp. Russia is in the second camp. They are coordinating. They are arming each other. They are arming the people firing rockets at Tel Aviv and digging tunnels under Israel’s northern border.
You do not win a generational fight against that axis by buying its grain, voting with it at the U.N., and taking Putin’s calls four times a year while Ukrainian cities burn under Iranian drones that Russia perfected.
Israel should be Ukraine’s loudest ally in the Middle East. It should be sending air defense — more than one Patriot battery delivered grudgingly after years of refusal — sharing electronic-warfare expertise honed against the very Iranian systems Ukraine now faces, and refusing to launder a single bushel of stolen Ukrainian wheat through Haifa. Not because Ukraine is owed it, though it is. Because Israel’s enemies are Russia’s friends, and Israel’s friends are Russia’s enemies, and at some point they need to see that.
It is okay to say this out loud. It is okay to expect better.
Slava Ukraini.
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