It is at least forgivable in so far as the Nakba of '48 hadn’t happened yet and an interracial utopian socialist Middle East was functionally in the cards.
If anything, this is more the fault of Truman and the rush to mobilize into a Cold War footing. Had the US and Russia not pivoted into conflict after the war, the Israel/Palestine dispute could have been one of those disputes a peace-inclined UN hammered out before copious amounts of blood got spilled.
But there had been plenty of zionist violence in mandatory palestine by that point, yes?
Yes but it was a bit of a footnote in the colonial violence of the British mandate. The USSR in the 20s and 30s called out the Yishuv as an arm of British colonialism.
In the immediate post-war period the Soviets wanted the British mandate ended and the Arab-Jewish conflict “resolved” by making the territory a mandate for the UN Security Council collectively (effectively transferring the mandate to the big 3 in lieu of a permanent solution) but the British and Americans were against this which is when the Soviet policy became basically the “two state” solution.
There was already a significant Jewish population and deporting them all just a couple of years after the Holocaust would have been pretty unpalatable + there was sympathy for the idea of a Jewish homeland as a kind of compensation or repentence for the Holocaust so Jewish people living in Palestine was at this point a fait accompli to be accommodated somehow. But the Soviets were also against the colonialism of it all and respected the rights of Arab and Palestinians to have their self-determination as well.
If you take evicting the Jewish population off the cards, and once the “one state” solution initially managed as a UN Security Council mandate fails, then a two-state solution is the obvious next thing - at least without the benefit of hindsight.
It’s supporting the two-state solution that gets framed as supporting the creation of the state of Israel, and fair enough because that is what 2-state means but the framing makes it present as supporting a colonial project when I think the more accurate framing is they were supporting what they saw as a least-bad way of resolving a British-endorsed colonial project that had already been underway for decades.
It’s pretty incorrect to say the Soviets wanted Israel to exist prior to about 1948 since in 1946 they were still advocating some kind of one-state UN mandate and still attempting to establish a Jewish Autonomous Oblast as an autonomous Jewish republic within the USSR rather than Palestine.
At that point in time it was already clear that the zionists were not interested in peaceful coexistence with the indigenous population of Palestine. Even Theodor Herztel wrote about how he wanted to use economic pressure to push out indigenous Palestinians and on numerous occasions throughout the interwar years, organised Palestinian resistance had invited zionist organisations to join them with the expectation that they would be a part of a free post-colonial Palestine. The zionists rejected this.
I honestly think this post should be removed for being so incorrect
Literally the source is a right wing writer for the Spectator. Such a joke, if you read Wikipedia check the footnotes and sourcing
What source, it’s a picture. Can you please post it, and the wiki article?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin_and_antisemitism
[27] Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (1987) p. 527
Paul Johnson is a fervent anti communist
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Johnson_(writer)
This takes 2 seconds for anyone ever reading wiki. Look at the source
Gonna have to push back here for a few reasons: 1. Just because a historian is conservative or even anticommunist, does not mean they are liars and their writings, if skewed toward their own ideological preferences and those of their audience, isn’t based in fact. 2. I found A History if the Jews on Libgen, and the source that he cites is Howard Sachar, ‘The Arab-Israel Issue in the Light of the Cold War’, (Washington DC), 1966, 2.
I don’t know about Howard Sachar’s attitude toward communism, and I couldn’t find a copy of the book that was cited, but I did find Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War which contains about 150 pages about Rosa Luxemburg that casts her in a very good light from what I can tell. So not a guy with an axe to grind against communism.
Unfortunately I can’t find an independent resource supporting the original claim (although I swear I’ve seen one somewhere) but your argument is, at best, disingenuous and based on vibes
No evidence this is true, Stalin did not have a clear policy until postwar WW2, and survivors of the Jewish Eastern European community started proposing Crimea be the Jewish State.
At the Yalta conference in 1945 Stalin did not have a clear plan, but showed Roosevelt disappointment that his Siberian Jewish state was not succeeding. He also shared that he felt the ethnic tensions would cause problems postwar. EDIT: He specifically cited the creation of the KKK in post civil war america
He had a clear understanding of the difficulties of building a new Jewish homeland, and was scared he’d be forced to give up prime land in his own nation that just lost 25 million people.
We need to talk about how the bolsheviks botched the national question and its horrifically right wing outcomes decades later. There’s a reason all those eastern european nations went radically right wing the second the USSR was dissolved. Nationalism run wild
Gotta admit, Rosa kinda called it.
From Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution, Ch. 3: The Nationalities Question:
While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of “separation,” they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian Revolution, we have instead witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these “nations” used the freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian Revolution as its mortal enemy, and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself. The little game with the Ukraine at Brest, which caused a decisive turn of affairs in those negotiations and brought about the entire inner and outer political situation at present prevailing for the Bolsheviks, is a perfect case in point. The conduct of Finland, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic lands, the peoples of the Caucasus, shows most convincingly that we are not dealing here with an exceptional case, but with a typical phenomenon.
To be sure, in all these cases, it was really not the “people” who engaged in these reactionary policies, but only the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes, who – in sharpest opposition to their own proletarian masses – perverted the “national right of self-determination” into an instrument of their counter-revolutionary class politics. But – and here we come to the very heart of the question – it is in this that the utopian, petty-bourgeois character of this nationalistic slogan resides: that in the midst of the crude realities of class society and when class antagonisms are sharpened to the uttermost, it is simply converted into a means of bourgeois class rule. The Bolsheviks were to be taught to their own great hurt and that of the revolution, that under the rule of capitalism there is no self-determination of peoples, that in a class society each class of the nation strives to “determine itself” in a different fashion, and that, for the bourgeois classes, the standpoint of national freedom is fully subordinated to that of class rule. The Finnish bourgeoisie, like the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, were unanimous in preferring the violent rule of Germany to national freedom, if the latter should be bound up with Bolshevism.
The hope of transforming these actual class relationships somehow into their opposite and of getting a majority vote for union with the Russian Revolution by depending on the revolutionary masses – if it was seriously meant by Lenin and Trotsky – represented an incomprehensible degree of optimism. And if it was only meant as a tactical flourish in the duel with the German politics of force, then it represented dangerous playing with fire. Even without German military occupation, the famous “popular plebiscite,” supposing that it had come to that in the border states, would have yielded a result, in all probability, which would have given the Bolsheviks little cause for rejoicing; for we must take into consideration the psychology of the peasant masses and of great sections of the petty bourgeoisie, and the thousand ways in which the bourgeoisie could have influenced the vote. Indeed, it can be taken as an unbreakable rule in these matters of plebiscites on the national question that the ruling class will either know how to prevent them where it doesn’t suit their purpose, or where they somehow occur, will know how to influence their results by all sorts of means, big and little, the same means which make it impossible to introduce socialism by a popular vote.
On Ukraine:
Or take the Ukraine. At the beginning of the century, before the tomfoolery of “Ukrainian nationalism” with its silver rubles and its “Universals”[2] and Lenin’s hobby of an “independent Ukraine” had been invented, the Ukraine was the stronghold of the Russian revolutionary movement. From there, from Rostov, from Odessa, from the Donetz region, flowed out the first lava-streams of the revolution (as early as 1902-04) which kindled all South Russia into a sea of flame, thereby preparing the uprising of 1905. The same thing was repeated in the present revolution, in which the South Russian proletariat supplied the picked troops of the proletarian phalanx. Poland and the Baltic lands have been since 1905 the mightiest and most dependable hearths of revolution, and in them the socialist proletariat has played an outstanding role.
…
The best proof is the Ukraine, which was to play so frightful a role in the fate of the Russian Revolution. Ukrainian nationalism in Russia was something quite different from, let us say, Czechish, Polish or Finnish nationalism in that the former was a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition, since the Ukraine never formed a nation or government, was without any national culture, except for the reactionary-romantic poems of Shevschenko. It is exactly as if, one fine day, the people living in the Wasserkante[3] should want to found a new Low-German (Plattdeutsche) nation and government! And this ridiculous pose of a few university professors and students was inflated into a political force by Lenin and his comrades through their doctrinaire agitation concerning the “right of self-determination including etc.” To what was at first a mere farce they lent such importance that the farce became a matter of the most deadly seriousness – not as a serious national movement for which, afterward as before, there are no roots at all, but as a shingle and rallying flag of counter-revolution! At Brest, out of this addled egg crept the German bayonets.
(The entire chapter is quite short so it’s worth spending the 10 minutes reading it)
they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian Revolution, we have instead witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these “nations” used the freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian Revolution as its mortal enemy, and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself.
How tf was this written in 1909?
fairly sure this was written in 1918
edit; yeah
- Rosa Luxemburg
- The Russian Revolution
-Written: 1918.
- Source: The Russian Revolution, by Rosa Luxemburg.
- Publisher: Workers Age Publishers (New York), © 1940.
- First Published: 1922 by Paul Levi.
- Translated: Bertram Wolfe.
Not just nationalism but also our naivete to how states act, regardless of whether they are ‘socialist’ or not. So many of the USSR’s decisions prioritized the immediate interests/survival of the state at the expense of revolutions abroad and eventually those betrayals left it without the external support to survive the West’s onslaught.
