Abstract
On 10 April 1946, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin sent a note to Prime Minister Clement Attlee in which he gave his view of what the Soviet Union was up to: “The Russians have decided upon an aggressive policy based upon militant Communism and Russian chauvinism and seem determined to stick at nothing short of war, to obtain their objectives. At the present time Russia's aggressive policy is clearly directed to challenging this country everywhere” (The National Archives of the United Kingdom, FO 800/501/SU/46/15).One of those places was the Near East, especially Palestine, where since April 1922 Great Britain had ruled through a Mandate of the League of Nations. The Mandate obligated Britain to encourage the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people; that is, a Jewish state.In 1939, with war imminent, the British abandoned this policy, fearing that the Arab world might turn against them otherwise. Over the next five years Jewish immigration to Palestine was limited to 75,000; after that it depended on the permission of the Arabs. The Zionist dream of a Jewish state seemed to be over. The Zionist leader, David Ben-Gurion, called the British volte-face the worst betrayal the civilized world had ever seen.In the following years, the Zionists turned to the United States for help—which U.S. leaders agreed to provide. This willingness stemmed partly from domestic politics. In supporting the establishment of the state of Israel, U.S. politicians hoped to win the votes of Jewish Americans.Jewish lobbying in Washington was successful and well known. Not so well known is the Jewish lobbying that took place in Moscow, which was also very successful, as Wiebke Bachmann shows. Without Moscow's support, there would have been no Israel.What did the Soviet Union want in Palestine? The main objective, as Bevin had rightly discerned, was to weaken British influence in the Near East (p. 122). Soviet leaders hoped that the new Jewish state would lean toward socialism and become a partner of the Soviet Union. That is why the Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin let some 200,000 Jews move from Eastern Europe to Palestine in one of the most dramatic illegal operations against the British.In early 1947 Britain relinquished its role and handed back the Palestine Mandate to the United Nations (UN). In subsequent months, the Soviet Union surprised many by backing the Zionist cause in favor of the partition of Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly approved partition.Although U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized de facto the provisional government of Israel just eleven minutes after Israel's independence took effect at midnight local time on 14 May 1948, the Soviet Union was the first to recognize Israel de jure: on 17 May 1948. Moscow also provided the new state with infusions of weapons to fight the Arabs in the so-called war of independence.Drawing mostly on Soviet archival material, Bachmann shows how things changed later in the year after Israel demanded the release of Jews in the Soviet Union (p. 138). By mid-1950, after Israel took out a loan in the United States (p. 139) and supported the West in the Korean War, Israel had definitely become a lost cause for Stalin.After Stalin turned forcefully against Israel, Egypt steadily gained favor in the Soviet Union. In 1955, Egypt received large quantities of armaments from Moscow, the first Arab country to receive Soviet weapons. The book ends with the 1956 Soviet Communist Party Congress. So we learn nothing about the crucial months leading up to the Suez Crisis, to say nothing about Moscow's role before and during the Six-Day War in 1967.
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