The March 20 speech by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before members of the Israeli Knesset provoked quite a lot of criticism from the Israel political echelon. Zelenskyy’s emphasis on the similarity of Ukraine’s suffering at the hands of the Russians to the extermination of Europe’s Jewry by the Nazis united many on the political left and right — in harsh condemnation of his analogy.

The memory of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis binds Israel’s fractious society, which regards the Holocaust as a unique event without parallel in modern history. Reportedly, some Israeli experts advised Zelenskyy to limit comparisons to the Holocaust in his speech given the pervasive sensitivity of Israeli public opinion to commemoration of the Holocaust. Evidently, Zelenskyy did not adopt this advice.

While official Israel did not request Zelenskyy to limit his speech in any way, this advice was given to him for a reason. It was prompted by his previous utterances by Zelenskyy and some of his associates equating the horrors of the Russian invasion with the Holocaust in a bid to mobilize Israeli public opinion. Evidently, they believed such an approach would exert pressure on the Israeli government to provide Ukraine with defensive weapons and equipment. Zelenskyy and his associates assumed that appealing to the broadest Israeli common denominator — the memory of the Holocaust — would serve this goal.

Israel’s recent controversial decisions to limit the number of Ukrainian refugees prompted Ukraine’s Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk to convene an angry news conference March 1 in a bid to mobilize Israeli public opinion. “We believe that you remember the times of World War II, when Ukrainians were saving the lives of Jews during the Holocaust,” he said. The ambassador rebuffed references on the part of some officials to illegal Ukrainian labor migration to Israel as an explanation of Israeli policy. “We’re talking about people who have family in Israel that could help them,” he said.