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Evangelos Aragiannis's avatar

The most astonishing fact is that the whole world (except israeli firsters in the US) is merely watching, totaly unable to react to any of this, Russia and China (both superpowers) included.

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Summa Neutra's avatar

You mentioned Stalin accepting the creation of Israel: and yes, Stalin had a vision for Israel, and believed in the project, until the entrance of America. Labor Zionism had deep ties with the Soviet Union, and Stalin saw the Socialist or Labor Zionism, which is the one that actually builds up the actual state of Israel, and not the Anglo-Zionism, liberal and americanist, as the perfect solution for the diaspora fronts within the Soviet Union.

I would like to add that Stalin was, in fact, the first world leader to offer a territorial solution to the Jewish question within a socialist framework. In 1934, the Soviet Union established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in the Far East near the Chinese border, with Birobidzhan as its capital. The aim was to provide the Jewish people with a secular, socialist homeland, not in Palestine, but within Soviet territory. The project promoted Yiddish culture, not Hebrew, and deliberately excluded Zionist ideology. It was an attempt to solve the "Jewish question" through Marxist statecraft and centralized planning.

This was a state-sponsored territorial project, the first of its kind, predating the establishment of the State of Israel by more than a decade. However, it was largely unsuccessful. Few Jews were willing to migrate to a remote, swampy, and undeveloped region with no historical or religious significance for Jewish identity. Eventually, Stalin’s policies turned sharply antisemitic: Jewish institutions were dismantled, Hebrew was banned, and during the late 1940s, many Jewish intellectuals and political leaders were imprisoned or executed under charges of “cosmopolitanism” conspiracy, culminating in the Doctors’ Plot shortly before Stalin’s death.

Stalin did later support the UN Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, and the USSR was among the first countries to recognize the new State of Israel in May 1948. Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia played a critical role in supplying arms to the Haganah, which helped secure Israel’s survival in the 1948 war. But this brief alignment ended quickly when Israel refused to become a Soviet client state and aligned itself with the U.S..

This brings us to an important contrast: while Stalin offered a territory and a top-down state solution, another form of Jewish territorial nationalism had been developing from below, in Palestine itself.

While Stalin was promoting Birobidzhan, a very different socialist vision was flourishing in Mandatory Palestine: Socialist Zionism, a grassroots movement that combined Jewish nationalism with socialist ideals, was actively building a Jewish society on the ground.

The Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community) in Palestine was shaped largely by Labor Zionists, pioneers who saw the return to the Land of Israel not only as a national goal, but as a means of moral and social regeneration. They believed the Jewish people needed to be remade, into workers, farmers, and defenders, through collective labor, self-reliance, and secular nation-building.

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