Thread by @yungneocon

Reading ‘The Forgotten Friendship’ a history of Soviet Israeli relations. In 47, the UK oppose founding of Israel & armed the Arab league. The US supported then withdrew support bc the military & state department opposed Zionism & the USSR. The USSR saved the Yishuv.

Background on SOviet policy, which was skeptical of nationalism in Arab societies but sought cautious alliance to its reversal & Gromyko’s endorsement of Zionism at the UN.

The USSR rejected the Arab nationalist critique that it was imperialist, & argued Jews had a historical right to Palestine. Arab communists endorsed the USSR, & consequently they were banned & the movement collapsed.

The USSR, US, & Arab States were United in the belief that Jews were inherently attracted to communism & thus began to see Zionism as a potential or actual socialist plot. This prompted one of the many US’ reversals, as its NatSec establishment deeply disliked Zionism & the USSR

The USSR condemned the joint Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian & Syrian invasion of the newly declared state of Israel, and immediately began to arm the outgunned Haganah, who crucially would have lost without this support.

The USSRs support was fundamental & crucial, but afterward it grew reticent, as, an ironic consequence, Zionism became incredibly popular among Soviet Jewry. Golda Meir received a crowd of 10s of 1000s.

Outside of the catastrophic collapse of Palestinian Arab society, the hoped for destabilizing chain reaction of Israel’s founding did not happen (yet—it arguably did later) as Israel decisively won. So the USSR made great power considerations.

The USSR heavily influenced Both the conduct of the Haganah/IDF during the war with regard to expulsions & village expropriations, and toward Israel’s policy toward the refugees after the war.

As Joel Migdal points out in the main cadres of the MAPAI, and of the Yishuv’s elite were trained in the USSR, and schooled explicitly in its ideology (an irony of the USSRs many strong reversals on the issue over the years prior to 47)

I’ve cited it 100 times but Beinin’s book is a standard source for the role of socialism, Marxism, & the USSR in the history of Israel and the Arab world.

In ‘Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine’, Halper discusses the Israeli land collectivization regime.

From 1880s on, 80% of the Palestinian peasantry were landowners [2/3 small, 1/6 medium/large landlords) (see B Morris, ‘Origin of Refugees’, & Stein ‘Land Question’, in a thriving Ottoman capitalist society (see Seikally ‘Men of Capital’), by 1947, only 72% were still landowners

Then 47-49, in the midst of the civil war and then the joint war, the Nakba, the catastrophe of Palestinian society, where all state & public land, and most private land were nationalized, and 700,000 Palestinians were displaced mostly within Gaza, West Bank & Jordan.

Land expropriation and refugee non return policies were explicitly modeled on the USSR’s, as Knesset debates show. This is different from how they were *justified* in int’l law, by reference to the League of Nations sponsored Lausanne conference.

Communist party pamphlets calling for Arab Jewish unity were the inciting factor to the riots of the early 20s. Anti zionist pamphlets & petitions regularly emphasized its Bolshevist or socialist character.

This later produced ambivalence when communism gained force within the arab world. While they opposed fascism, they didn’t want Jewish refugees, socialist or not, from the Nazis flooding into the Middle East.

Concluding, aside from Pohl’s other 3 articles on the subject (snd I want to emphasize again how imperfect they are still), I end with three recommendations:
1. Levene’s ‘Harbingers of Disaster’ 2. Sharma’s ‘Home Rule’
3. Bashford’s paper on settler colonialism & immigration law

Levene traces the Holocaust & the Nakba both to the nation state form as it emerged in Europe, whether practiced by socialist or capitalist states. Sharma shows how the entire postcolonial order based on this form requires forced & restricted movement.

Bashford & Sharma both forcefully argue for the origin of immigration laws, even as adopted by socialist & postcolonial states, in settler colonialism. Pohl discusses forced movement, expropriation, ethnic policy & refugees in socialist societies.