As Trump lashes out at Zelenskyy, it’s clear: Ukraine is now to the far-right what Israel is to the left

Something about a recent episode of the far-right influencer Candace Owens’ podcast felt eerily familiar. Owens was railing against Ukraine — calling it corrupt, a globalist puppet state, an undeserving drain on American resources.

Her talking points felt awfully familiar: accusations of a small nation wielding outsized influence, and the West being manipulated into supporting an unjust cause. So did her moral absolutism, the sense she conveyed that Ukraine wasn’t simply a country at war, but rather the emblem of larger, sinister forces in the world.

In other words, it sounded like the way a lot of people have come to speak about Israel.

Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, Ukraine has become to the far-right what Israel is to the far-left — an ideological battleground, a proxy in a larger struggle that has little to do with them. (President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s public lambasting of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a February visit made these dynamics crystal clear, as has the administration’s continuing public criticism of Zelenskyy.) To those who subscribe to these ways of thinking, Ukraine is a globalist scheme and Israel is a colonial enterprise. The narratives differ, but the pathology is the same.

And just as the left’s obsession with Israel often curdles into antisemitism, so too does the right’s contempt for Ukraine.

When it comes to these two countries at war, people who claim to be ideological opposites somehow land in strikingly similar places. Their grievances may come from different places — say, the involvement of American resources in a drawn-out overseas conflict to which the U.S. is not a party — but their accusations often rhyme.

It’s a pattern as old as history itself, and a political idea known as the “horseshoe theory” explains why: the further apart two extremes believe themselves to be, the closer they actually get. The far-left and far-right may tell different stories, but those stories come to follow the same script — one in which Jews are either nationalist oppressors or globalist schemers, always pulling unseen strings, always responsible for the world’s ills.

For the far-left, Israel is not just a country; it is a projection of their own ideological struggles. A stand-in for every Western sin through history, foremost among them colonialism and racial injustice. It doesn’t matter that most Israeli Jews are descendants of Middle Eastern and North African refugees. Or that Israel was created after a genocide at an unprecedented scale left millions of Jews with no state, and no home. Or that Israel’s enemies openly call for its destruction.

The narrative has already been written. Israel must be the oppressor — white, colonial, committed to apartheid. And, as a parallel, the Palestinians must be flatly depicted as an oppressed people — indigenous and victimized. It’s that kind of thinking that lets Hamas, an openly genocidal terrorist group, become seen by some as a “resistance movement.” And those same people tend to also see the very idea of a Jewish state as an affront to justice.

For the far-right, Ukraine plays a similar role. Owens, for one, has explicitly framed American Jewish support for Ukraine as sinister. She consistently portrays Ukraine not as a nation fighting invasion but as part of a globalist plot, including by posting on X that the war is “just another way for globalists like Soros to control us” — invoking the omnipresent far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Jewish philanthropist George Soros. And she posted on X, shortly after Oct. 7, “Funny how Jews suddenly care about borders and sovereignty when it’s Ukraine,”  suggesting that because Jews, according to her warped vision, don’t care about Palestinian sovereignty, they must have ulterior motives for supporting Ukrainian sovereignty.

In this distorted worldview, Ukraine’s Jewish leader, Zelenskyy, becomes a villain, not a symbol of resilience. The far-right commentator Tucker Carlson has called Zelenskyy “rat-like” and a “persecutor of Christians” — because one antisemitic trope wasn’t enough.

They are somehow both far-right nationalists and globalist elites.

They are both warmongers and cowards.

They are both parasitic weaklings and existential threats.

The accusations change. The target does not.

But for all the distortions, Israel and Ukraine are not symbols. They are real countries, fighting real battles on the front lines of the free world.

Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia is the single most important fight for democracy today. It presents the greatest challenge to an expanding axis of autocrats — in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing and Pyongyang.

Israel, too, stands against those who wish to erase it. Against Islamist extremism. Against Iranian expansionism. Against the forces that have been trying to destroy the Jewish state since the day it was born.

To abandon either would be to hand victory to those who seek to replace a world of laws with a world of force.

But maybe — just maybe — the far-left and far-right are right about one thing. Israel and Ukraine are connected, but not as the global manipulators or colonial aggressors that they imagine. Rather, both are nations fighting for freedom from extremism. And that, after all, has always been a Jewish cause.

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