What Links Hamas and Russia?

There are good reasons to link U.S. aid for both wars.

Congress will soon discuss funding measures that would link U.S. military assistance to Israel and Ukraine as they wage war against, respectively, Hamas and Russia. While such a move may strike some as simply a parliamentary maneuver to improve the bills' passage, there are ample reasons to link the two countries' aid and to see both as allies in a common cause. In his address to the American people on Oct. 20, President Joe Biden drew several parallels between Russia’s war on Ukraine and Hamas’ attack on Israel. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy — completely annihilate it,” Biden asserted. Since then, his administration has backed off from that kind of rhetoric, shifting to a more reserved tone while Democrats and Republicans push back against Biden's linking Israel and Ukraine. (READ MORE: On Foreign Policy, Dirty Joe Piles Up the Ls) Biden’s comparison correctly noted that both Russia and Hamas seek the elimination — not just the defeat — of a neighboring state. But in his analysis, he simply scratched the surface. The Goal of War Is Annihilation Russia and Hamas not only engage in attacks against democracies, nor are their aims limited to a military victory. They have each made abundantly clear in their rhetoric and actions that they are pursuing the eradication of cultures and peoples. Each openly and deliberately commit atrocities against civilians; the murders of Ukrainians and Israeli Jews are neither random nor accidental but instead deliberate, indeed central, to their ends. Integral to both Vladimir Putin’s and Hamas’ eliminationist ideologies are their claims that Ukraine and Israel, respectively, are artificial creations of the Western powers. This idea animates Putin’s infamous essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he claims that Ukrainian nationalism was devised by the Poles, reinforced by the Austro-Hungarian and G...