Soviet-Israli relations

В монографии исследуется политика СССР по отношению к
созданному после окончания Первой мировой войны под эгидой Великобритании «еврейскому национальному очагу» в Палестине, проводившаяся в 1920-е–1930-е гг. Большое внимание уделено анализу «коминтерновского», «наркоминдельского» и «хозяйственного» направлениям советской политики. Работа основана на малоизвестных документах из российских архивов.

The monograph is devoted to the Soviet policy regarding the “national home of Jewish people” in Palestine established after the end of the First World War under the aegis of Great Britain, in the 1920-1930s. Much attention is paid to analysis of three Soviet policy areas: Comintern line, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
line and economic cooperation. The research is based on little-known documents from Russian archives.

The emigration movement among Soviet Jews is usually dated to the 1960s–1990s. This essay focuses on the premovement emigration in the 1950s, which prepared the ground for the massive departure of Jews and non-Jewish members of their families, primarily to Israel and the United States. The parameters for leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s were in many ways similar to the parameters for returning to Poland in the immediate post–World War II years. On paper, the basic pools of emigrants were the same: Jews who at the outbreak of World War II were Polish nationals. In reality, many repatriates of the 1950s were more Soviet than Polish, leaving the country where they had lived for up to twenty years, which often was a lion's share of their lives. Those—that is, the majority—who ultimately reached Israel went through two repatriation processes: first, as returnees to their pre–World War II homeland and, second, as Jews going back to their historical homeland. As this essay shows, the contemporaneous political and social climates in the Soviet Union and Poland, the nature of those countries' mutual relations and of their relations with Israel, not present on the map until 1948, framed a unique context for emigration in the early post-Stalinist period.

This paper aims at giving an explanation on the failures of the Eastern Bloc intelligence services in their attempts to futher infiltrate Israel in the 1960's beyond those who had already been in their payroll for a longer time. The surveillance brigades of the Sin-Bet proved to be very effective - not in itself but together with telephone tapping and mail interception and the widespread network of informants - hence, the KGB and the surrogate services could only lean on those who had been recruited before the Aliyah.

One fateful week in June 1967 redrew the map of the Middle East. Many scholars have documented how the Six Day War unfolded, but little has been done to explain why the conflict happened at all. As we approach its fiftieth anniversary, Guy Laron refutes the widely accepted belief that the war was merely the result of regional friction, revealing the crucial roles played by American and Soviet policies in the face of an encroaching global economic crisis, and restoring Syria’s often overlooked centrality to events leading up to the hostilities.

The Six Day War effectively sowed the seeds for the downfall of Arab nationalism, the growth of Islamic extremism, and the animosity between Jews and Palestinians. In this important new work, Laron’s fresh interdisciplinary perspective and extensive archival research offer a significant reassessment of a conflict—and the trigger-happy generals behind it—that continues to shape the modern world.