‘A real opportunity’

Israel is keen on bringing in Ukrainian Jewish refugees for the purpose of maintaining Jewish demographic "supremacy" over the Palestinian population, academics and analysts say.

Since the outbreak of the war with Russia on February 24, the Israeli government has called on Ukrainian Jewish refugees to immigrate to Israel and removed bureaucratic hurdles to secure their arrival as quickly as possible. Israeli officials said some 10,000 are expected to arrive in the coming weeks.

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Last month, the World Zionist Organization's Settlement Division  announced the building of 1,000 housing structures for Ukrainian Jews in both Israel and settlements in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

"Israel is seeing in the Ukraine crisis a real opportunity to bring Jewish people to increase the number of Jews in Israel," Lana Tatour, professor of settler-colonialism and human rights at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, told Al Jazeera.

On Tuesday, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh warned against promoting Israeli settlements in the West Bank with Ukrainian Jews, reported Asharq Al-awsat website.

"Demography is the central aspect of Zionism. The whole idea of Zionism is to bring together all the Jews of the world and transfer them to Palestine," political analyst Awad Abdelfattah told Al Jazeera.

Awad noted there has been no significant Jewish immigration to Israel since the resettlement of some one million Russian Jews following the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, making the Ukraine crisis beneficial to Israel.