Recent soviet writing on the Palestinians

Abstract

Several years ago, Galia Golan, Professor of Political Science and Russian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published a book entitled The Soviet Union and the Palestine Liberation Organization: An Uneasy Alliance.1 This solid research work describes and analyses Soviet attitudes towards the PLO, as they evolved towards the opening of a PLO office in Moscow in 1976, 'Arafat's audience with Bryedzhnyev in 1977, and the official Soviet recognition of the PLO as 'the sole legitimate representative' of the Palestinians in 1978 (the end of the period covered by the book). 'Uneasy alliance' or not, close Soviet relations with the PLO continue and a wealth of publications illustrate them constantly. We shall select several of these writings for examination and attempt to evaluate their significance. To a very great extent, the Soviets' support of the Palestinians is obviously only one side of their Middle Eastern policy while the other is their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist campaign. Soviet writing on Israel has already been discussed previously;2 anti-Israel tendencies have intensified since, as has the all-out attack on Zionism. Indeed, D.I. Soyfyer, in his Krakh Sionistskikh tyeoriy, The Bankruptcy of the Zionist Theories (Dniyepropyetrovsk: Promin's Press, 1980; 192 pp.) roundly accuses Zionism of chauvinism and anti-communism; while A.B. Doyev's Sovryemyenniy Iudaizm i Sionizm, Contemporary Judaism and Zionism (Frunze: Kirgizstan Press, 1983; 68 pp.) devotes an entire chapter to 'Zionism's anti-Sovietism'. From this perspective, it is not surprising that many other works on Zionism deal, at varying length, with the Palestinians and their national movement. One such book is Myedzhdunarodniy Sionizm: istoriya i politika (sbornik statyey), International Zionism History and Politics: A Collection of Articles (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1977; 176 pp.) Its title notwithstanding, the volume contains several laudatory papers, by various authors, concerning the Palestinians and their political struggle. This approach is even more obvious, perhaps, in an annual, published since 1982 in Russian, with a parallel English edition entitled Zionism: Enemy of Peace and Social Progress. Volume 2 of this work (1983) comprises a paper by I. Zvyagelskaya (authoress of a book in Russian on the Israeli military elite in politics), entitled 'Who Is Obstructing the Settlement of the Middle East Conflict' (pp. 137-68). Volume 3 (1984) has another, by Ye. Dmitriyev (a prolific writer on the Arab-Israel conflict), entitled 'Zionist Ideas as Reflected in Israeli Government Policy on A Middle East Settlement in the Early 1980s' (pp. 205-19). Both argue forcefully the case of the Palestinian Arabs.