by MICHEL REAL
The establishment of Israel owes much to the Soviet Union and the wide range of support — diplomatic, demographic and military — it offered the young state.
The USSR recognised the state of Israel on 17 May 1948, three days after it was created (1). This had taken many years of effort by the Zionist movement, which regarded it as a major victory. The first contact was in London early in 1941, when the Soviet Union was still an ally of Nazi Germany. The president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, who was campaigning for the creation of a Jewish state, met the Russian ambassador Ivan Maisky, and the future of Palestine was a subject of discussion from the start. Israel’s future prime minister David Ben Gurion, then leader of theYishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, became involved a few weeks later: the Communist movement was historically opposed to the Zionist project, but Ben Gurion made it clear that the new state would not hinder Soviet interests. Moscow still withheld its support until 1946.
The turning point was in May 1947 when Britain, which had held the League of Nations mandate over Palestine since 1922, decided to transfer the case to the recently established United Nations in order to resolve the territory’s future (2). Andrei Gromyko, the young Soviet deputy foreign minister, said that the USSR was willing to support the division of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab, if the one-state solution proved unworkable.
From then until 1949, Israel enjoyed the political, military and demographic support of Stalin’s Russia, even though Stalin was at that time repressing Russian Jews, mostly because of a struggle for power at the top of the party-state. The USSR was central to the adoption of the UN plan to partition Palestine on 29 November 1947. Besides its own vote, it also delivered those of its satellites, with the (still unexplained) exception of Yugoslavia. It also provided Israel with the resources it needed most — people and arms.
Demographic battle
The demographic battle was vital to the success of the Zionist leaders’ project. The Jewish population of Palestine in 1946 was 600,000, one third of the total. The balance needed to be shifted in their favour, and the USSR made a decisive contribution.
The USSR supplied people willing to settle in Palestine. In 1946 the Soviets allowed more than 150,000 Polish Jews to go to the British and American occupied zones in Germany, where they entered camps for displaced people. There were few alternatives to Palestine for Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps, or those with neither home nor family at the end of the war. Moscow deliberately exacerbated this problem, putting Britain, under strong pressure from the Zionist movement and the US, in a difficult situation. The US was unwilling to take these refugees in, but feared the impact on US public opinion of newsreels showing boats of illegal immigrants en route to Palestine being turned back by British forces.
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