Point of View | The ‘Russian street’. The place and significance of immigrants from the former USSR in Israel

7 POINT OF VIEW 6/2021 INTRODUCTION The presence in Israel of around one million immigrants from the for- mer USSR, Russian- speaking politicians who are members of the gov- ernment and of the Knesset, Russian -language media, the Victory Day marches held in the streets on 9 May and the fact that the language of Pushkin is spoken in the public space all contribute to the impression that the commun. [...] As  a  result of the rise of the Internet, the crisis affecting traditional media outlets and the gradual integration of the ‘Russian street’ into the mainstream of Israeli society, the number and importance of the Russian- language media has decreased (for example, not a  single Russian- language daily is currently being published). [...] In addition, the newcomers were critical of the insufficient knowledge Israeli society had regarding the details of the conflict (aside from the aspect of the Holocaust) and the many hundreds of thousands88 of Soviet Jews who had fought in the ranks of the Soviet army. [...] Simply put, they intended to expand the martyrological narrative of the Holocaust by adding to it a heroic account of the armed struggles con- tributed by the Jews to the victory over Nazi Germany, and by promot- ing the fact that the establishment of the State of Israel was an indirect result of the Allied victory (with the USSR being the most important of those Allies). [...] Following the period in which the ‘Russian vote’ had been fluctuating between the left and the right, at the beginning of the twenty -first cen- tury most of the 750,000–800,000 new voters permanently switched to support the parties of the right -wing bloc; this has contributed greatly to the hegemony of the right that has been ongoing for almost 20 years.