Thursday, April 19, 2018

Wishing to happy returns to Israel's 70th birthday

 Stalin was crucial to the establishment of the state of Israel. On Stalin's instructions, Czechoslovakia provided arms and training that enabled the fledgling Zionist armed forces in Palestine to win the war of independence in 1947-48. Stalin's motive was to undermine the position of Britain in the Middle East. For some years the Israeli government continued to rely on Soviet military and diplomatic support, while keeping silent about the persecution of Soviet Jews, then at its height. (For more on this episode, see Arnold Krammer, The Forgotten Friendship: Israel and the Soviet Bloc, 1947-53, University of Illinois, 1974.)
In 1953 the Israeli-Soviet alliance finally broke down. Israel switched to the other side of the Cold War, obtaining aid first from France and then from the US. Alliance with "the West" also entailed maintaining good relations with anti-semitic regimes, notably in Latin America. Consider Argentina: a disproportionate number of Jews were among those killed, imprisoned and tortured by the military junta that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983. Given the "anti-democratic, anti-semitic and Nazi tendencies" of the Argentine officer corps, we may assume that they were persecuted not merely as political opponents but also as Jews. Meanwhile a stream of Israeli generals passed through Buenos Aires, selling the junta arms. (See http://www.jcpa.org/jpsr/jpsr-mualem-s04.htm and http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/Argentina_STATUS.html; also Jacobo Timmerman's book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.)
 Israel is now a powerful, militaristic capitalist state and a nuclear power. It might have been hoped that the Jews' terrible history would have encouraged them to something more hopeful.

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