Soviet/Eastern Bloc involvment in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

[FreeFocus]

I'm currently reading The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe, where he details the brutal, disgusting operations that the Hagana, Irgun, etc, carried out in Palestine to expel Arabs prior to, and for some time after, the establishment of Israel. The historical patterns that emerge to enable this were the severe lack of preparation of Arab armies and Israeli acquisition of arms from the Eastern Bloc:


Weapons were scarce since the Arab armies' main suppliers were Britain and France, who had declared an arms embargo on Palestine. This crippled the Arab armies but hardly affected the Jewish forces, who found a willing furnisher in the Soviet Union and in its new Eastern bloc.


...the Israeli army had received a large shipment of modern, brand new 0.45-calibre cannons from the Communist Eastern bloc. Israel now possessed artillery unmatched not only by the Arab troops inside Palestine, but by all the Arab armies put together. It should be noted that the Israeli Communist Party was instrumental in arranging this deal.

It appears that the United States had a better position on Palestine at this point in the mid- to late 1940s than the Soviet Union, supposedly the "defender of world socialism." The US was pushing for the UN to delay the end of the Mandate (and therefore the unjust partition arrangement) for three months to contain the violence (Israeli Jews cleansing Palestine of Arabs) and suggested a five-year trusteeship of Palestine in lieu of a solution. Of course the US has never had the correct position on Palestine since, but the USSR had a far worse position on Palestine, even materially enabling this historic crime!

[Ismail]

Relations after 1949 quickly deteriorated though (relations were broken in 1952) and of course in the USSR and Eastern Bloc anti-Zionist trials occurred and an anti-semitic current began rising in intensity.

Before WWII the USSR had attempted to woo over Jews across the world with Birobidzhan, the socialist Zion. But this project never really got anywhere due to the backwardness and poverty of the area. After World War II the USSR basically portrayed itself as a glorious international bulwark in defense of Jewish interests. As noted in Stalin's Wars, p. 339: "In September [1948] Tel Aviv's first ambassador arrived in Moscow. Golda Meyerson (better known as Golda Meir and later became Prime Minister of Israel) reported home on 12 September that 20,000 people had celebrated the declaration of the State of Israel at a Moscow synagogue. On 6 October Meyerson reported that on Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) huge crowds packed the Great Synagogue in Moscow and that in the street she was met by thunderous cheers and 'cries' in Hebrew."

It sort of reminds me of Lenin providing arms and assistance to Atatürk against the British, even as Atatürk was massacring Turkish communists. "Soviet money and supplies began to pour over the Russo-Turkish frontier, in amounts still unknown, to aid the anti-Bolshevik nationalists. It was the first significant military aid that Soviet Russia had given to a foreign movement." (A Peace to End All Peace, pp. 429-430.)

For a Soviet Jewish view of events in 1949 see: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv12n2/ehrenburg.htm

Alexander R. wants to know what is the attitude taken in the Soviet Union to the State of Israel. This question can be answered briefly: the Soviet government was the first to recognise the new state, it protested energetically against the aggressors, and when the armies of Israel fought to defend their land from the Arab Legionnaires commanded by British officers, the sympathies of our people were all for the wronged, not for the wrongdoers. This is as natural as the fact that the Soviet people sympathise with the patriots of Viet-Nam and not with the French suppressors, with the patriots of Indonesia and not with the Dutch punitive forces....

We sympathise with the struggle of the toilers of Israel, they have the sympathies, not only of the Soviet Jews, but of all Soviet people – there are no admirers of Glubb-Pasha in our country. But every Soviet citizen is aware that a state is judged not only by its national character, but by its social system as well. A citizen of socialist society regards the people of any bourgeois country, and that means also the people of the State of Israel, as wanderers in a dark forest who have not yet found their way out. A citizen of socialist society can never envy the fate of people who carry the yoke of capitalist exploitation.

The future of the Jewish toilers of all countries is bound up with the future of progress, with the future of socialism. Soviet Jews, along with all Soviet people, are working to build up their socialist homeland. They are not looking to the Near East; they are looking towards the future. And I believe that the working people of the State of Israel, who do not share the mysticism of the Zionists, are now looking northward, to the Soviet Union, which is marching in the van of mankind towards a better future.As Grover Furr noted in the Yahoo Stalinist group list in 2008:

During World War 2 some Soviet Jewish leaders petitioned the Soviet government to establish a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Crimea, from which the Crimean Tartars had been deported for large-scale collaboration with the Nazis (we discussed this collaboration some time ago on this list). Molotov made some kind of promise to see about this. He was no doubt influenced by his wife, Zhemchuzhina, who spoke Yiddish and self-identified as Jewish, though she was of course an atheist. But in fact the Soviet government encouraged people of Jewish background to so self-identify.

When Israel was established, with the active support of the USSR, it caused big problems for the Soviets because a significant number of Soviet Jews began showing great loyalty to Israel, wanted to emigrate there, etc...

I'm sure that the Soviets also thought they could find an ally in Israel, since the Zionists were so hostile to the British imperialists there. That did not work at all, of course.

[gorillafuck]

Thanks for that, FreeFocus. I'm always kind of smirkish at the anti-racism of modern Stalinists who refuse to look into official racism in the Soviet Union, when the USSR certainly had a fairly racist touch to it. This being among the worst of it.

[Ismail]

Thanks for that, FreeFocus. I'm always kind of smirkish at the anti-racism of modern Stalinists who refuse to look into official racism in the Soviet Union, when the USSR certainly had a fairly racist touch to it. This being among the worst of it.Except, y'know, people turn around and talk about how Stalin wanted to deport all the Jews to Siberia and how he was massacring Jews and such after World War II.

In any case it's pretty obvious that the policy wasn't all that good. It's worth noting, though, that most opposition in Western Europe by non-leftists at that time had an anti-semitic tinge. Truman for instance called Jews "arrogant." It's also worth noting that support for Zionism quickly became unpopular since it became associated with American imperialist interests.

As I've noted, Lenin supported bourgeois nationalists too, and Atatürk has his critics in terms of relations with non-Turkish ethnic groups. Supporting a side with good intentions (the Soviets figured, "The Jews in Palestine have an organized labor movement and pro-Soviet inclinations, the Palestinian Arabs have reactionary mullahs and pro-British forces backing them") but said support backfiring has no great effect on the overall Soviet Union or its leadership, it's just bad decisions.

[Nolan]

A Trotskyist but nevertheless basically true article: http://www.marxists.de/middleast/wei.../13-powers.htm (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.marxists.de/middleast/weinstock/13-powers.htm)

This just comes up as file not found.

[Ismail]

This just comes up as file not found.Edit: I can't get the link to work with RevLeft. Fuck it, I'll just copy-paste:

One fact alone demonstrates that the Russian position, rather than being inspired by any sort of sympathy for Zionism, simply expressed Stalin’s desire to contribute to the collapse of the British Empire: Moscow also sent arms to Syria, which was at war with Israel at the time. Moreover, the USSR refused to recognise Transjordan’s territorial conquests in Palestine, considering that the Hashemite state was no more than a cover for the maintenance of the British presence.

The unconditionally pro-Israeli position of the Soviet Union in 1947 was therefore part of a general opportunist line and undoubtedly revealed an underestimation of the ties between the Zionist leaders and the United States. It was followed blindly by the local Communist Parties, which discredited the Arab Communists among the masses. All the more so in that the Kremlin, with characteristic Stalinist cynicism, totally disregarded the interests of the Arab liberation movement. Thus the Soviet delegate Jacob Malik, speaking in the Security Council on March 4th, 1949 (in the debate on Israel’s admission to the United Nations), flatly denied Israel’s responsibility for the tragedy of the refugees. It has to be said in this respect that the USSR was not content with noting the practical impossibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence in 1947-48 in the framework of a Palestinian state. It chose, in the words of Boris Eliacheff, the role of “Israel’s godmother”, with everything such a policy implies ...