Soviet Motives in the Partition of Palestine, 1947-48

Abstract

Russian involvement in the Middle East follows a national tradition that has survived all the problems of internal struggles, ideology, religious differences, and innumerable failures interrupted by occasional dazzling success which mark the course of Russian history. After the revolution in 1917, however, territorial annexation ceased to be a prime motivating factor of Russian policy, and emphasis shifted to ideological conversion as an instrument for the extension of political influence.' At the end of World War II, though, after exactly three decades of ambivalence and mild interest in the lower Middle East, interrupted only briefly by her transient concern with the 1929 Palestinian riots, a smaller uprising in 1933, and the great Arab revolt of 1936-1939, Soviet Russia found herself without a single ally in the potentially explosive area. In 1946 and early 1947, Moscow supported, albeit half-heartedly, Arab independence movements and their demands for the withdrawal of Western troops from the area. In May 1947, the Soviet Union then astonished the diplomatic world by reversing her three decade support of the Arab world and placing herself on record as a supporter of Zionist aspirations for the establishment and consolidation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Equally astonishing was her ideological rationalization of this move in support of the Zionist movement, hitherto a major focal point of Soviet distrust as an ideology