Russia is investigating this morning the unprecedented pogrom that took place last night at the airport of the capital of Dagestan, Makhachkala. Reminder: About 1,500 people participated in the serious riots in the Russian regional republic in the North Caucasus. They arrived at the airport waiting for a flight from Tel Aviv to land and searched for Jews.
Incited mob breaks into Makhachkala airport in search of passengers from Israel // Social networks
Outside the port, the mob stopped cars and "checked documents", but inside the port a real pogrom ensued, when the incited mob, some with Palestinian flags, broke into the various offices and even approached the parked planes dangerously. Following the events, 60 rioters were arrested and several dozen more have been identified and are expected to be arrested. Nine policemen were injured. Russian authorities opened an investigation and announced that all those responsible would be prosecuted.
"Look, the last thing the federal and local authorities in Russia want right now is a pogrom against the Jews," Prof. Valery Dimshitz of the European University in St. Petersburg, who has been studying Caucasian Jewry for almost thirty years, told Israel Hayom.
"Such a pogrom scares them a lot, and rightly so. There are two reasons for this. First, this contradicts the official line of brotherhood of nations and inter-sectarian peace in the Russian Federation. This is literally the Russian slogan. This contradicts the message that 'Russia is fighting Nazism in Ukraine': it is difficult to do this when in your own country there are pogroms against Jews. These are very bad PRs. The authorities understand that the state should have a monopoly on power, and once there is such a rampage, it looks very bad."
Dagestan (archive), photo: Ariel Bolstein
Many in Israel were surprised by the intensity of the hatred and the scenes of the pogrom. To what extent can we talk about anti-Semitism in Dagestan?
"In any society that is in a process of modernization that has not yet been completed, that is, a society in which the migration of the rural population to the cities continues, there are always phobias and hidden conflicts – inter-sectarian and inter-religious, on class grounds, or between the new urbanites and the older ones."
"As for anti-Semitism, yes, in this region it always has been. However, this is similar to the bacterial population in the body: in normal times we live symbiotically with them, but when the body is weakened, disease breaks out. Now there is an escalation in the form of the war against Israel, which is a reason why these hidden phobias will burst out." According to Dimshitz, Jews were murdered in Dagestan during the Russian Civil War (after the dissolution of the Russian Empire), there were blood libels in the 1960s (which fortunately did not ripen into a pogrom), but things reached a low point after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Mobs "checking documents" near the port in Makhachkala, Dagestan // Social networks
"In the early nineties, when crime was rampant and local government was very weak, there was a monstrous outbreak of violence against Jews, as a result of which several thriving communities disappeared from the face of the earth. Today there are two Jewish communities in Dagestan, in Makhachkala and Derbent, which was once the largest and most important with 17,000 Jews and today there are two thousand left. There were three other large communities – in Khasyurt, Kizliar and Boinsk, but due to criminal pressure of an anti-Semitic nature they disappeared within a year."
"For example, in Boinsk there were 4,000 Jews. All of them, down to the last one, fled because of murders, kidnappings and the like. From then until yesterday's events, there were only isolated incidents. Jews who remained in the North Caucasus lived a comfortable life. Today there are between 10,000 and 15,000 Jews in the area."
Angry mob roams the airport - passengers on a flight at the port of Makhachkala are smuggled back to the plane // Social networks
In previous rounds of fighting between Israel and Gaza, there were no such outbreaks in the North Caucasus
, because now the scope of coverage of the events is completely different, and the scope of military activity is also different. It is also important to pay attention to where the outbreak took place: in Makhachkala. Dagestan is a rather poor and socially unstable region, with a very large number of unsolved problems and certainly not only Jewish. Officially, Makhachkala has 600,<> inhabitants, but in practice there are a million. It's a Muslim region, with a great influence of Islam, including radical Islam, and it's an area with a high unemployment rate. Makhachkala is a city with immigrant suburbs where there are plenty of unemployed young people who may well be under the influence of radical Islamic preachers. It's clear that war can ignite."
Poll: About a quarter of the world's population is antisemitic,
So is it possible to speak of a religious-Islamist background?
"These developments have a complex character. When they succeeded in removing the masses and restoring order, it turned out that the port had been looted completely – they removed all the contents of the shops. I don't think the shops were looted because of religious hatred. I want to say that every pogrom has a headline, but along the way they also loot, they also prove the joy of youth, they show that we are not good in this world and justice must be restored."
As the Russia investigation continues, the head of the Dagestan region, Sergei Malikov, was quick to accuse Ukraine of trying to destabilize the province. However, since the massacre by Hamas operatives near Gaza, official and semi-official Russian media have been quite pro-Palestinian, with state television claiming in some cases that reports of Hamas atrocities were "fabricated."
Shelling in Gaza City. Iron Sword War, Photo: AP
Dimshitz: "We can talk about a very indirect responsibility related to the fact that internal socio-economic tensions have accumulated in Dagestan, that the population is frustrated and takes out their frustration in this way, we can talk about the ambiguous position of the Russian regime regarding the war, and some have misunderstood the signals. But you can't talk about direct political responsibility, let alone incitement."
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