Israel preparing to evacuate 75,000 Ukrainian Jews

Russian armored vehicles on a highway in Crimea, Jan. 18, 2022
Photo: United With Israel

As tensions mount and Biden naps, Israeli officials have started to prepare for the possible evacuation of Ukrainian Jews because if the Russians invade Ukraine, the Jews will be in immediate danger. If it should come down to an evacuation, it will be the largest one in 30 years.

According to a Haaretz report, representatives from the office of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the foreign office, defense, diaspora affairs and transportation ministries, the National Security Council and the Jewish Agency met on Sunday. The discussion concerned the threat level currently being faced by Ukraine's Jewish communities. 

The meeting also included officials from Nativ, an organization that maintains ties between Israel and Jewish communities in the Former Soviet Union.

The groups assessed that approximately 75,000 Ukrainian Jews qualify for Israeli citizenship via the Law of Return. The largest concentrations of Jews are in and around the cities of Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk. It’s obviously not known how many Jews would choose to leave for Israel or move elsewhere, but those who decide to stay need to have their heads examined because there are signs that Putin is going to invade and heads will roll.

The problem is that at present Israel cannot know if evacuation would even be possible if war breaks out.

The report indicates that Israel had contingency plans in the late '80s for an emergency airlift of a large number of Jews from the Soviet Union, and these plans are being reconsidered and currently updated to suit the circumstances that now exist.

Unfortunately, Haaretz stressed that although there is an obvious threat of war, the Ukrainian Jews have not indicated a willingness to get out of Dodge, as it were.

The last time Israel had a major airlift was Operation Solomon, in May 1991. This was a covert operation that extracted 14,000 Ethiopian Jews within 36 hours during a civil war in the country.

The Ukrainian situation looks somewhat bleak. Russia has around 100,000 soldiers at their border and it's looking a lot like incursion as Putin clearly wants to seize large swaths of Ukraine and remove President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, and replace him with a comrade. Bernie Sanders has been considered for the job, but Putin decided he's too old and talks funny.

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Due to pressure from the person behind the curtain, Biden has put 8,500 ground troops on high alert for possible deployment to Europe. Biden has also told families of diplomats to leave the country and has basically evacuated the US embassy in Ukraine, like he did in Afghanistan, all in less than a year.

Putin and China's dictator, Xi, no longer worry that the US has an unpredictable president to deal with while they slowly expand their power and dominance globally. Trump is gone and now they have an old, confused, mumbling, bumbling "Puppet POTUS" who considers himself blessed when he finds his way from bed to the White House bathroom and makes it all the way before it's too late.

Finding his way back to bed takes longer, but that's when he's most useful to the nation.

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