Ashkelon: A city of diversity in a geopolitical crossroad
Each time I visit Ashkelon in Israel, I am struck by its remarkable diversity. Few places can match its rich cultural and ethnic mix: East Europeans (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians), Maghrebians (Mizrahi), Georgians, Ethiopians, and others. One externally underestimated fact about Israel is just how diverse it truly is—a rainbow nation in its own right. In leftist discourse (including by Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappé), Israel is often portrayed as a homogeneous white settler colony, but when you walk through Ashkelon and take in the variety of facial features, skin colors, and cultural backgrounds, this image becomes difficult to reconcile with reality.
This diversity continues a tradition dating back to ancient Ashkelon, which was one of the Mediterranean’s largest and busiest seaports as early as the 3rd millennium BCE. Today, however, Ashkelon’s multiculturalism is largely the result of Israeli immigration policies, particularly those of the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, which directed waves of Jewish immigrants—especially after the Soviet Union’s collapse—to the city.
Despite its historical significance and modern appeal, Ashkelon remains somewhat underrated. It is not only a rich archaeological site but also a vibrant, green city, even winning the title of Israel’s greenest city a few years ago. However, my focus here is on Ashkelon in the context of current geopolitical tensions.
In 2022, immigration to Israel reached a 23-year high, driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since the war began in February 2022, more than 100,000 Russian and Ukrainian Jews have sought refuge in Israel, gaining citizenship under the Law of Return. Over half of these new immigrants are from Russia, while about one-fifth are from Ukraine. Ukrainians have fled the invasion, while many Russians have moved to Israel to escape conscription and economic decline under Western sanctions.
Yet what is truly remarkable is the lack of tension between the Russian and Ukrainian immigrant communities in Israel, as well as the broad consensus on the unjust nature of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Even more striking is the strong condemnation of the war among younger émigrés—the very generation most exposed to intense propaganda in their home countries. This is particularly notable given that both Russian and Ukrainian media remain freely accessible in Israel.
Furthermore, considering that most new émigrés are Russian speakers—many from the eastern regions of Ukraine, which have been hardest hit by the war—one might expect Russian propaganda to wield significant influence. After all, Israel has been home to the world’s largest Russian-speaking community outside the former Soviet Union since the early 1990s, with Russian speakers now making up about 15% of Israel’s nearly 10 million citizens. And yet, this influence is not materializing. Israeli society remains broadly critical of Russia’s aggression and firmly supportive of Ukraine.
Why Russian propaganda fails in Israel
Despite the widespread availability of Russian media in Israel, Russian propaganda has largely failed to take root. While selective information framing—what Herman and Chomsky describe as manufacturing consent—is present in Israeli media, the country’s diverse and highly competitive media landscape prevents the creation of an alternative reality, or simulacrum, in Baudrillard’s sense. In contrast to authoritarian states, where a single narrative can be imposed through strict media control, Israel’s media environment fosters pluralism, ensuring that propaganda is continuously challenged rather than internalized.
This media diversity is particularly striking when considering Israel’s large Russian-speaking population. With multiple Russian-language TV channels, radio stations, and newspapers, émigrés are exposed not only to Russian state narratives but also to Israeli, Western, and independent Russian media outlets. This multiplicity of perspectives makes it impossible for Russian propaganda to dominate public discourse.
Unlike in Russia, where dissenting voices are marginalized or outright repressed—as exemplified by the case of my colleague Boris Kagarlitsky, who was sentenced to five years in prison for publicly opposing the war—in Israel, propaganda competes with counter-narratives in an open information market. Of course, this market is only conditionally open, shaped by capitalist logic and prone to constructing hyperreal narratives of its own. However, even within this framework, contradictions inevitably surface.
Here, Lenin’s insight is particularly important. He observed that competition among capitalists, as well as between capitalists and remnants of the aristocracy, unintentionally exposes the contradictions and defects of the system, providing valuable material for political education. Applied to the present, the diversity of capitalist-owned media outlets in Israel—driven by commercial interests rather than ideological uniformity—ensures that no single narrative achieves total control. As a result, propaganda does not operate in a vacuum but is constantly challenged by alternative perspectives, whether motivated by profit, political rivalry, or journalistic scrutiny.
However, the failure of Russian propaganda in Israel is not only a product of media diversity—it is also a result of continuous social interaction among Israelis of different cultural and national backgrounds. Lenin argued that political education does not come solely from propaganda or party pronouncements. Instead, class consciousness— and, more broadly, political awareness—develops through direct engagement with social realities. In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin stressed that workers must gain a “clear picture” of the system and its class divisions not from books or ideological declarations alone but from lived experiences, shared discussions, and the unfolding of real events around them.
This insight is crucial to understanding why Russian propaganda loses its grip in Israel. It is not simply a matter of media exposure but of real-world interactions that allow individuals to compare narratives against their own experiences and the perspectives of those around them. Israeli society, particularly among younger generations, is shaped by constant interaction between people of different backgrounds—whether in the military, the workplace, social spaces like cafes and clubs, or public debates. These everyday exchanges forge a shared understanding of reality, creating an amalgam of perspectives that no single propaganda machine can override.
Unlike in authoritarian societies where propaganda operates in an echo chamber, Israeli citizens, including Russian-speaking émigrés, encounter firsthand experiences that challenge state narratives. A young Russian or Ukrainian immigrant might watch Russian state media at home, but the next day, they are in a workplace or university classroom engaging with peers who provide alternative viewpoints grounded in lived experience. They hear personal stories, witness direct consequences of war and politics, and are confronted with realities that propaganda cannot fully mask.
Moreover, the cultural context plays a crucial role. Israeli audiences are accustomed to navigating competing and often contradictory realities: Zionist and anti-Zionist, religious and secular, Western and Eastern, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, liberal and nationalist. This constant negotiation between opposing narratives fosters what might be called simulation literacy—an intuitive ability to read, decode, and critically engage with overlapping simulations of reality. In such an environment, no single media narrative—whether domestic or foreign—can be easily absorbed without question.
At this point, Baudrillard’s concept of the “implosion of meaning” becomes particularly relevant. In societies saturated with media and information, the problem is no longer censorship but excess—a constant bombardment of images, interpretations, and narratives that collapse into one another. As Baudrillard argued, when signs circulate endlessly without stable referents, meaning implodes. This is not the absence of meaning but its overproduction, which paradoxically renders everything equally meaningless. In such a hyperreal environment, even well-crafted propaganda struggles to penetrate, because it is not received as truth or lie, but simply as one more interchangeable message among countless others.
In many ways, Israel’s approach to Russian propaganda demonstrates the strength of an open society. Instead of banning Russian media outright—as some Western countries have done—Israel allows it to circulate freely, not out of indifference but because the very presence of propaganda invites scrutiny and opposition. The exposure to competing narratives inoculates rather than indoctrinates. By confronting Russian state narratives with alternative perspectives, Israeli society cultivates resilience rather than susceptibility to manipulation.
This phenomenon underscores a fundamental difference between authoritarian and democratic media systems. In authoritarian regimes, propaganda is effective because it operates in an environment of suppression, where dissenting views are blocked and alternative information sources are restricted. In Israel, however, the existence of Russian propaganda paradoxically weakens its influence. The moment propaganda enters a competitive information space, it ceases to function as absolute truth and becomes just one narrative among many—subject to critique, refutation, and debate.
Beyond simplifications: The complex reality of propaganda and society
I do not wish to portray Israeli society as an idyllic model of harmony, nor do I seek to underestimate the effectiveness of the Russian propaganda machine. Like any society, Israel is marked by divisions and prejudices—Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews, for example, continue to face social discrimination. Likewise, there are undoubtedly individuals who support Russia in its conflict with Ukraine, though in my experience, I have yet to meet anyone who does so unconditionally.
Moreover, some studies suggest that many Russian-speaking Israelis remain susceptible to Russian propaganda, particularly older immigrants who arrived in the early 1990s. According to these studies, many of these early émigrés never fully integrated into Israeli society and continue to rely on Russian-language media as their primary source of information. This claim may hold some truth, but only to a degree. As previously noted, Israel has several domestic Russian-language TV and radio stations, many of which present narratives that diverge sharply from the official Russian stance. Even those who primarily consume media in Russian do not necessarily rely exclusively on Kremlin-controlled outlets, making it difficult for Russian state narratives to maintain an unchallenged influence.
One area where Russian propaganda has had some success, however, is in its appropriation of historical symbols, particularly those related to the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazism. The portrayal of Ukrainians as Nazis taps into deep-seated collective memories among many older Israelis, some of whom personally endured the horrors of the Holocaust (just like my 95-year-old mother). For them, the Soviet anti-fascist legacy remains a powerful historical reference point, and Russian propaganda skillfully exploits this sentiment.
Here, the Baudrillardian concept of simulation is particularly relevant. Russian propaganda does not simply distort facts—it constructs a symbolic universe in which the existence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is magnified and abstracted until it becomes the dominant signifier of Ukrainian identity. This is not to deny the presence of far-right and ethnonationalist forces in Ukraine—they do exist, and they have had real influence on state institutions (as Marta Havryshko explains), just as similar groups exist in Russia itself. But the simulation of Ukraine as a “Nazi state” bears little resemblance to the broader social and political reality, where opposition to the Russian invasion spans a wide spectrum and includes large segments of the population with no ties to extremist ideologies. The sign (Nazi) no longer refers to a concrete political force—it becomes detached, floating free in a sea of symbolic manipulation, mobilized to justify violence and to reconstruct memory on ideological terms.
Yet, the prevailing sentiment I encounter among older Israelis from Russia is not one of blind allegiance to Russian narratives but rather disbelief—a profound inability to accept the reality of war between Russia and Ukraine. For those Russians (and Ukrainians) who were raised with the Soviet-era ideal of brotherhood between nations, the notion of a full-scale war between two historically intertwined peoples is simply incomprehensible, even when Ukraine is vilified in the official Russian narrative. This disbelief does not translate into support for the war but rather a cognitive dissonance, a refusal to fully process what is happening.
Lessons for Ukraine
- The dangers of ethnic gatekeeping
President Zelensky has frequently invoked the idea of Ukraine as a “new Eastern European Israel”—a nation defined by militarized resilience and an unyielding stance against external aggression, serving as a bulwark against Russian expansionism on behalf of Europe. Leaving aside the feasibility of this vision, it comes with a troubling corollary: an ethnonationalist approach that divides Ukrainian citizens into “genuine” Ukrainians and those deemed suspect due to their cultural or linguistic background.
Ukrainian researcher Volodymyr Ishchenko described it as “primordial ethnonationalism weirdly combined with teleological claims for the superiority of (neo)liberal democracy”. In particular, Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking community of about 20% is increasingly viewed as a potential fifth column, not on the basis of individual political stances but by mere association with the Russian language and cultural heritage. What begins as a legitimate desire to defend the nation from foreign aggression risks devolving into ethnonationalist exclusion when cultural or linguistic difference becomes grounds for suspicion.
Yet, if Israel offers a lesson, it is precisely that cultural diversity does not inherently threaten national unity. On the contrary, a strong state is one that transcends ethnic divisions and builds national cohesion based on shared interests rather than exclusionary identity politics. In contrast, Ukraine’s ethnonationalist policies—such as restricting Russian-language education, erasing cultural symbols associated with Russian heritage, and even prohibiting the use of the Russian language in public—risk alienating a significant portion of its own population. This approach has already strained relations with Ukraine’s Hungarian minority, leading to diplomatic tensions with Hungary. If left unchecked, it threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state among those who feel excluded from its new national narrative.
This contradicts the very principles that should guide a democratic and pluralistic Ukraine. As the Fourth International World Congress recently stated, a lasting peace in Ukraine is possible only when it is based “on the right of Ukraine and its constituent minorities to freely determine their future and develop their cultures, independent of external pressure, the interest of the oligarchs, neoliberal ruling regimes or extreme right-wing ideologies.”
- Who’s afraid of Tolstoy? Culture, identity, and the battle for meaning
A similar idea was expressed, in another context, by Ze’ev Khanin, Chief Scientist of Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, when describing the Russian-speaking community in Israel: “We have a Russian-speaking subculture, but this subculture is, first of all, Jewish; second, Israeli; and only third, Russian.”
Ukraine could adopt a similar logic. A Russian-speaking subculture in Ukraine is not a threat in itself—as long as it is understood to be Ukrainian first, democratic and inclusive second, and only culturally Russian in the third place. This ordering of belonging is not about diluting identity—it’s about rooting cultural difference within a shared civic framework that strengthens, rather than undermines, the democratic project.
It is curious how the tables have turned in modern Ukrainian historical-political discourse. Traditionally, this discourse has accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of ignoring Ukrainian cultural specificities and promoting Great Russian chauvinism under the guise of faceless uniformity (see my critique of these views here). Yet, today, a similar logic is being deployed in reverse: the modern Ukrainian state negates the same rights of cultural autonomy to its own minorities—particularly Russian speakers—under the guise of national security.
Lenin’s insight into positive cultural assimilation remains relevant here. He argued in Critical Remarks on the National Question that every culture contains both progressive and reactionary elements, and that a truly emancipatory national project does not reject entire cultures wholesale but rather selects and assimilates their most progressive contributions. This is precisely what Ukraine fails to recognize in its current cultural policies. It is self-defeating when, in modern Ukraine, a Tolstoy Street is renamed after Shakespeare, under the justification that Tolstoy was a “colonialist reactionary” while Shakespeare was a “progressive thinker.” Such logic collapses under scrutiny. After all, Shakespeare’s plays contain colonialist and even anti-Semitic elements—The Merchant of Venice, for example, portrays the Jewish merchant Shylock through a lens of stereotype and prejudice. Yet this has never been a reason to dismiss Shakespeare’s immense literary value. His works endure not because they conform to modern ideological purity but because they capture universal human experiences that transcend time and place. The same is true of Tolstoy.
Even more bizarre is the renaming of Tolstoy Street in the Transcarpathian town of Hust after former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Unlike Shakespeare, Johnson is not exactly known for his literary genius—unless one considers his columns and political memoirs on par with War and Peace. This decision seems less like a thoughtful engagement with history and more like an enthusiastic but misguided attempt to overwrite the past, replacing one of the greatest writers of all time with a foreign politician whose connection to Ukraine is, at best, fleeting. In Baudrillardian terms, this is no longer about cultural memory but about symbolic substitution—the erasure of history not through censorship, but through overwriting it with empty, ideologically convenient signifiers.
By contrast, Israel—despite being a society shaped by its own strong historical and national narratives—demonstrates a more pluralistic and confident approach to cultural memory. While most streets in Israel commemorate Jewish figures central to Zionist and national history, there are numerous examples of non-Jewish and non-Israeli figures being honored, not because of any direct connection to Israel, but because of their enduring contributions to global culture.
One striking example is Pushkin Street in Jaffa, named in 1956 after the great Russian poet. The street intersects with others named after international cultural icons like Pestalozzi, Michelangelo, and Maxim Gorky, and lies near streets honoring Eliza Orzeszkowa, Dante, Mickiewicz, Hugo, Romain Rolland, and even Vakhtangov. In the center of Tel Aviv, one also finds streets named after Korolenko and Émile Zola. These names are not acts of ideological endorsement or political allegiance; they are tributes to human creativity, universalism, and the global intellectual tradition. Israeli society, for all its contradictions, recognizes that being part of the world means acknowledging and preserving shared cultural legacies.
That is what makes the symbolic erasure happening in Ukraine all the more jarring. A nation at war may understandably seek to distance itself from the cultural symbols of its aggressor, but doing so indiscriminately—without nuance, without historical literacy—risks creating a caricature of patriotism, rather than a resilient, inclusive civic identity.
Ukraine should not fear Russian culture—nor should it attempt to erase it. A confident, democratic nation does not define itself by negation or exclusion but by its ability to incorporate and elevate diverse cultural influences. The irony of suppressing cultural diversity in the name of democracy is something even Western leaders have begun to recognize. In a recent speech at the Munich Security Conference, US Vice President J.D. Vance ridiculed European governments for imposing excessive restrictions on freedom of opinion under the pretext of defending democracy. He pointedly questioned the fragility of a democracy that could supposedly be undermined by just 800 TikTok accounts, referencing fears about foreign disinformation in Romania. If such a small number of social media accounts can shake the foundations of democracy, what does that say about the strength of that democracy?
This recalls the words of Aleksander Yakovlev, one of the architects of Soviet perestroika, who was accused of destroying Soviet ideology at a CPSU Central Committee meeting. His sarcastic response was devastatingly revealing: “What kind of ideology is it if it can be destroyed by one person in just one year?”
The same question applies to Ukraine’s cultural policies. If the mere existence of Russian literature, language, or historical references is seen as an existential threat to Ukrainian statehood, what does that say about the confidence of the Ukrainian state in its own identity? A strong, self-assured democracy does not fear ideas—it engages with them, debates them, and ultimately outcompetes them. By embracing the best elements of all the cultures that have shaped its history—including Russian culture—Ukraine would strengthen its national identity rather than weaken it.
A genuinely democratic Ukraine, true to its professed ideals, must ensure that all communities have the right to communicate and be educated in the language of their choice. Only through inclusion rather than suppression can Ukraine build a sustainable and resilient national unity, one based on shared citizenship rather than cultural conformity.