Dahlia Scheindlin describes that relationship briefly. Israel officially became independence in 1948. The leaders of the Zionist movement in the early decades of the 20th century were willing to consider various partners in their quest for establishing a Jewish state.
David Ben-Gurion was the most important Zionist leader in the lead-up to independence:
Ben-Gurion was also a shrewd observer of [international] politics, and at points in the 1930s, he seemed to consider, or even gravitate toward, the Soviet sphere of influence - instrumentally. But overall, as fascism spread and World War II loomed, Yishuv [Jewish community in Palestine] leaders sought to convince global leaders that a new Jewish state would be an upright member of democratic society. (1)Scheindlin relates the developments in the 1940s:
Ben-Gurion still weighed Israel’s Western- or Eastern-bloc orientation. The [1942] Biltmore Program implies that the choice was made, but he retained a measure of neutrality. At the same time, the Zionist leadership had been wooing the Soviets, an unlikely courtship, given anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism under Stalin, as well as the Palestine Communist Party’s anti-Zionist position ...Scheindlin relates the developments in the 1940s:
Ben-Gurion still weighed Israel’s Western- or Eastern-bloc orientation. The [1942] Biltmore Program implies that the choice was made, but he retained a measure of neutrality. At the same time, the Zionist leadership had been wooing the Soviets, an unlikely courtship, given anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism under Stalin, as well as the Palestine Communist Party’s anti-Zionist position ...She discusses a Soviet policy that looked forward to weakening the British Empire after the Second World War, then still very much in progress in 1942. The Soviets had been pushing the US and Britain to open the “Second Front” against Germany in mainland Europe – which was what the 1944 Normandy landing represented - and regarded Churchill as impeding that decision. So, the Soviet shift on Palestine policy was surely encouraged in part by the consideration of pressuring Britain for the invasion of France.
But in 1943, the Soviets seemed to shift. Stalin apparently became intent on breaking what he saw as a British “stranglehold” on the Middle East. The Soviet deputy foreign minister visited Palestine, touring Jewish settlements in the hills outside Jerusalem, with Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, among others. In 1945, Ben-Gurion shocked the Histadrut [the Jewish community’s general trade union] with a sudden statement welcoming communists back to the Histadrut, apparently hoping to impress the Soviet delegation at an upcoming conference in London.The Zionist movement and certainly the Soviet government were familiar with the need to make coldly pragmatic alliances that may not have been entirely comfortable for their ideologies in order to achieve their larger strategic goals. The Soviet ideology has always condemned Zionism as a reactionary movement. But, as Wiebke Bachmann observes of the post-World War II situation, “For Moscow, only realistic considerations would be decisive in regard to a decision for or against Jewish national aspirations” in postwar Palestine. (2) He summarizes the description given in 1946 by a leading Soviet diplomat, Nikolaj Novikov:
The conclusion of this key document of the early phase of the Cold War was that British and American interests after the war would collide and lead to a rudimentary split in the imperialist camp [i.e., the US and the West]. While the two powers [Britain and France] have largely agreed [with the US] on spheres of interest in Asia, a compromise with regard to the Mediterranean region with all neighboring countries is so complicated due to the particularly strong geostrategic and economic interests of both countries that these differences can easily be exacerbated, and the Middle East could become "a center of Anglo-American antagonisms."The jargon Novikov used was Marxist, but the calculations he described were the pragmatic calculations of international power factors that characterized Soviet foreign policy before the Second World War.
[Direct quote from Novikov:] “The United States is not interested in providing aid and support to the British Empire in this vulnerable spot, but rather much more in its own penetration of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, to which the United States is attracted by the natural resources of the space, mainly oil." [my emphasis]
Scheindlin describes the situation in 1947 this way:
In February 1947, [British Secretary of State Ernest] Bevin announced that Great Britain was turning Palestine over to the UN General Assembly. The US still presumed that Stalin would oppose the Zionist aims. Instead, [Foreign Minister] Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet representative to the UN, made a surprising statement in May, recognizing the claims of both the Jews and Arabs in Palestine and supporting a federated state for both. If not, he conveyed, the Soviet Union would support partition [into Jewish and Palestinian states]. Bevin thought that the Soviet Union hoped to pour “indoctrinated” Jews into the region and turn it into a communist state.In the immediate postwar period, the Soviets (rightly) calculated that there would be tensions between the US on the one side and France and Britain on the other over countries that France and Britain had controlled under the colonial system.
The Soviet Union was also quietly helping the Zionist leadership in the way it needed most desperately - facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine, via Poland and the West. [my emphasis]
As she relates:
By contrast, following World War II but prior to Israeli independence, the US was still somewhat divided over the issue. President Truman broadly supported the Jewish cause, but the State Department was wary, and some of its staff outright opposed an independent Jewish state, concerned that it would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence. Yishuv leaders hedged their reliance on the US at that stage, and it was only in 1949, after Israeli independence, that Ben-Gurion stated: “In the ideological debate, Israel is democratic and anti-communist.” [my emphasis]Truman’s Administration was concerned about relations with Arab nations, which looked at the Zionist project of creating the State of Israel very negatively. The Zionist movement had influential supporters in the US who also lobbied the Administration to support Israeli independence.
Another factor in the policy mix is that the US was committed – albeit less than wholeheartedly – to decolonization after the Second World War. The reasons varied: out of principle; to stabilize the international order; and the recognition of the reality that European nations could not hold huge portions of what we now call the Global South as their colonial property indefinitely. In general, too, the reduction of the colonial presences of Britain and France were also conducive to a more safely dominant position of the US in the world and in Europe, in particular. And, as the Soviet diplomat Novikov accurately noted, access to oil was a central consideration in the US position.
Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia was the most important provider of arms to the Zionist forces during the War of Independence. “When the Jewish independence war began, the British were supplying arms to the Arabs while the United States announced an embargo on arms supplies to Jews and Arabs.” (3)
As the conservative Jerusalem Post reported in 2020:
One day after the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, a military coalition of Arab countries attacked the new state. David Ben-Gurion had expected the attack, and as the Jews in Mandatory Palestine desperately lacked arms, he had begun to seek them long before the UN November 1947 decision to establish the Jewish and Arab states. An international arms embargo was in force, and the only country willing to sell arms to a nascent Israel was cash-strapped Czechoslovakia, which also offered to train Israeli pilots and other specialists. The first deal between the Yishuv and Czechoslovakia was signed in January 1948 – and it was not cheap.Although relations between Israel and the USSR cooled after the war and a public impression was left that the, the weapons transactions with Czechoslovakia continued at least into early 1951, almost certainly with Soviet approval or at least toleration. Uri Bialer has pointed to one element of continuing commonality of Israeli and Soviet policy, even though Moscow was shifting to improving relations with Arab countries.
The Israelis obtained some 400 tons of mortars and other heavy machinery, aerial bombs, rifles, ammunition, machine guns, flamethrowers, explosives, tanks, and combat vehicles from the Czechs. A separate deal promised twenty-four Czech-built Avia S-199 fighters, a lesser version of the German Messerschmitt. ...
The first Israeli pilots and foreign volunteers arrived in Czechoslovakia before the Arab invasion, on May 11, 1948. The training was far from over when the War of Independence broke out; the fighter planes had to be hastily disassembled, sent to Israel, and reassembled. …
By January 1949, Czechoslovakia had trained some 200 Israeli specialists, paratroopers, and aircraft mechanics, including 82 pilots and 1,600 volunteers from Czechoslovakia and other European countries. Many of them chose to stay in Israel after the War of Independence.
... According to a 1952 report from Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Viliam Široký, Czechoslovakia received almost $14.5 million for its arms. It was an enormous amount of money for the State of Israel, but the Avia S-199s played a crucial role. In 1968, David Ben-Gurion said: “Czechoslovak arms saved the State of Israel, really and absolutely. Without these weapons, we wouldn’t have survived.” [my emphasis] (4)
While one can only speculate on Russian motives, the information that has come to light certainly supports the suggestion linking the changed Soviet attitude toward Israel with the latter's support of the American stand regarding Korea late in 1950 and its growing reliance on the US. In other words, Soviet aid was related to Israel's foreign policy orientation to a greater degree than has heretofore been assumed. This leads to the speculation that the USSR rewarded Israel for its non-alignment stand in 1949-50 with its approval of the Czech arms deal and withdrew their support once Israel changed its global foreign policy orientation. [my emphasis] (5)Bialer also notes:
The fact that the Czechs sold everything for US dollars, that they enforced a strict payment schedule, that by making the deals they were able to dispose of obsolete weapon systems, and that they sold them for a fixed period of time does not detract from the advantage of the deal to Israel. Czech military assistance became the obvious, tangible and unquestionable symbol of Soviet help to the creation of the state of Israel. Soviet and East European officials emphasized this endlessly when Israeli representatives complained about their negative response to other requests, mainly to those dealing with Jewish emigration.By the time the USSR concluded an important arms deal with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt in 1955, the diplomatic shift away from cooperation with Israel was basically complete. The USSR had broken diplomatic relations with Israel in February 1953 after a bomb injured three people in the Soviet legation in Tel Aviv. But with a shift of policy after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, “diplomatic ties were resumed [in] July, 1953. In June 1954 the Soviet legation in Tel Aviv and the Israeli legation in Moscow were raised to embassy level.” (Kahng)
Notes:
(1) Scheindlin, Dahlia (2023): The Crooked Timber of democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled, 33. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter.
(2) Bachmann, Wiebke (2011): Die UdSSR und der Nahe Osten. Zionismus, ägyptischer Antikolonialismus und sowjetische Außenpolitik bis 1956, 108. Munich: Oldenbourg Wessenschaftsverlag. My translation from German.
(3) Kahng, Gyoo-hyoung (1998): Zionism, Israel, and the Soviet Union: A study in the rise and fall of brief Soviet‐Israeli friendship from 1945 to 1955, Global Economic Review 27:4, 95-107.
(4) Zbavitelová, Gita (2020): The Czech arms that saved Israel: Czechoslovakia provided desperately needed weapons in 1948. Jerusalem Post 12/03/2020. <https://www.jpost.com/international/the-czech-arms-that-saved-israel-650710> (Accessed: 2024-16-09). Uri Bialer (see note 5) renders what may be the same quote as, “they saved the country, I have no doubt of that. The Czech arms deal was the biggest help we had then, it saved us and without it I very much doubt whether we could have survived the first month.” He cites it to the Hebrew edition of Ha’aretz of 05/03/1968.
(5) Bialer, Uri (2008): The Czech‐Israeli arms deal revisited. Journal of Strategic Studies 8:3, 307-315.
No comments:
Post a Comment