Former National Security Council official Fiona Hill says Russia-Israel ties soured after Oct. 7

Kevin Huggard, who conducted the interview, asked Fiona Hill what Russia’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was before October 7, 2023, and what its approach to Hamas had been. The interview is part of the Center for Middle East Policy’s Israel-Gaza interviews series at the Brookings Institution. Hill said Russia’s position had changed over time. During the Soviet period and the Cold War, she said, Moscow was highly hostile toward Israel, a stance tied to domestic antisemitism and to the Kremlin’s suspicion that Soviet Jews had divided loyalties after Israel’s creation in 1948. The USSR, she said, actively blocked Soviet Jews from leaving to settle in Israel or elsewhere, and it cultivated the Palestine Liberation Organization and Arab states opposed to Israel. It also offered educational opportunities to Palestinian and other Arab students.

Hill said that in the 1990s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev co-hosted with U.S. President George H.W. Bush the March 1991 Madrid conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that Russia took part in international efforts toward a two-state solution. Relations with Israel nonetheless remained very tense. After the collapse of the USSR, restrictions on emigration were lifted, and a large wave of Jewish migration followed, most of it to Israel and the United States, with some going to Europe. Hill said this sustained emigration eventually shifted Moscow’s perspective.

By the time Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Hill said, more than one million Israelis had some kind of heritage from the former Soviet Union, and many were predominantly Russian-speaking. She said Putin saw this population as an opportunity, and she noted his personal ties to Jewish families in Leningrad, later St. Petersburg, during his childhood. Hill said Putin often spoke of “our Jews” (nashi Yevrei) when referring to Russian-speaking Israelis, viewing them as a link between the two countries and a possible source of investment, particularly in high technology. She said he encouraged Jewish emigres to return to Russia to invest and become more active. Putin built a museum of Judaism in Moscow and described himself as the “patron of the Jews,” and he designated Judaism as one of Russia’s official indigenous religions alongside Orthodox Christianity and Islam. Hill also described tensions over archives held in Moscow, including the library of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, which some emigre Jewish groups wanted transferred to their communities. Putin, she said, refused because he considered the materials part of Russian heritage.

Hill said Putin also used the relationship to strengthen Russia’s position in the Middle East, where he regarded Israel as a key partner alongside Iran and Saudi Arabia. She said Putin claimed Russia’s 2015 intervention in the Syrian civil war was partly meant to protect Israel from Iran and Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah and the Islamic State, and she said a deconfliction channel was set up in which Israel informed Russia of planned strikes on Iranian proxies in Syria. Hill said she heard Israeli contacts refer to Russia as “our neighbor to the north.” In June 2019, she said, a tripartite meeting of national security advisers took place in Jerusalem, attended by John Bolton, whom Hill identified as the U.S. national security adviser at the time, Israeli National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat, and Russian National Security Advisor Nikolai Patrushev.

Hill said that relations were thrown into disarray after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. She said the Kremlin began calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, a Nazi, and that this offended Israel. She said Israel had handled the Ukraine issue carefully, partly because many Russian-speaking Israelis came from Ukraine and Belarus. She said the larger issue for Israel was Russia’s growing dependence on Iran for drones and other military and political support after early battlefield setbacks, as Moscow turned to Iran’s Shahed drones. In Hill’s account, Russia’s ties with Israel soured further as Moscow leaned on Tehran.

Hill said October 7, 2023 marked a final break. She said Putin made antisemitic comments she had not previously made, pulled back from the close relationship he had maintained with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that the Kremlin afterward criticized Netanyahu and Israel. She said Russia quickly renewed public relationships with representatives of Hamas and other Palestinian groups, ties that had been muted over the previous decade out of deference to Netanyahu. Hill also drew a comparison to Russia’s wars in Chechnya between 1994 and 2009, which she said had cost roughly 250,000 lives, including combatants and civilians, and in which Grozny was largely destroyed. She described it as “not a direct parallel,” but said the legacy of Chechnya shaped Putin’s attitudes toward Gaza. She also described an October 29, 2023 incident in Makhachkala, Dagestan, in which several hundred young Muslim men rioted and entered the airport seeking an Israeli plane and Jewish passengers arriving from Tel Aviv, an event that she said alarmed Moscow. Hill said Russia’s stance toward Hamas and Israel was now tied to managing its own Muslim population and preventing inter-ethnic and religious violence at home (Psalm 82:3).

Hill said the largest shift in Russia’s relationship with Israel was rooted in Moscow’s closer security ties with Iran, which she said placed the United States and Europe in a difficult position. She said Russia was now engaged with Iran in both Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict, and that this relationship drew the two conflicts into a single geopolitical frame. Huggard then asked whether Hill believed Putin envisioned a role for himself in post-conflict diplomacy or reconstruction in Gaza.

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