The Non-Jewish Jew by Isaac Deutscher

Author:Isaac Deutscher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

We should now briefly turn our attention to an act of Stalin’s foreign policy which may seem to contradict not only his own attitude towards the Jews, but also the whole traditional Bolshevik view of Zionism.

In 1948, when Israel was forming itself into a State we witnessed a curious situation in which the Russians and the Americans—the two super-antagonists—joined hands. Together they managed to dislodge the British from the Middle East; and together they acted as midwives in the act of birth of Israel.

Whatever Stalin’s calculations, it was to him that Israel, paradoxically, was indebted for its independent existence. And it was from Stalinized Czechoslovakia, from the Czech arms factories, that the main arsenal of the Haganah came. With these ‘tainted’ weapons the Jews in Palestine defeated the British and the Arabs. The assistance and the effective material help which Stalin was giving to the Jews seemed to the Western statesmen sinister, aroused resentment, and stirred a not inconsiderable amount of ill-feeling towards the Jews.

Then came the cold war. Israel, shaky in its foundations, surrounded by a hostile Arab world, terrified about its future, dependent on the economic aid of American Jews, allied itself in fact, if not quite explicitly in words, with the United States. This could not but provoke hostility from Russia. When Mrs. Golda Meir, the first Ambassador of the newly created State arrived in Moscow, Russian Jews greeted her with jubilation and loudly demonstrated their solidarity with Israel. Stalin, who might have watched the unusual scene from his window in the Kremlin, decided that the Jews were an unstable element, that Israel had repaid him with ingratitude (which was to some extent true), that the Jews in the Soviet Union were unreliable. Reckoning with the possibility of a conflict with the U.S.A., or even of a war between Russia and the West, he started to persecute the Jews denouncing them as people ‘without a Fatherland’, without roots, and again as ‘cosmopolitans’. Every Jew, it was whispered, had a relative in the West, most often in America. How could he be trusted as a truly Russian patriot? Could one be absolutely confident that in an emergency his allegiance would lie with the Soviet State? Such was undoubtedly the Stalinist viewpoint.

Analysing objectively and soberly the whole situation as it presented itself in the atmosphere of the cold war, one must admit that this kind of reasoning, alien as it is to me, was not completely devoid of logic. The Jews in Russia had a penchant, so to speak, for America and for their relatives there. If one could imagine, for instance, American armies marching into Russia, as the German armies had, they would probably have found a great deal of sympathy and quite a few collaborators among the local Jews. There is no need to deny this. What Stalin, in his crudity, never asked himself was the most fundamental question: How is it that so many decades after the revolution there were still people in Russia whose loyalty

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