Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 14:44:35 -0800
From: Bill Mandel <wmmmandel at EARTHLINK.NET>
To: SOCIALIST-REGISTER at YORKU.CA
As someone who has never been a Zionist, and has opposed Israeli policy since the 1956 joint attempt, with Britain and France to re-take the Suez Canal for the West (stopped by Eisenhower and Khrushchev for differing reasons)., I have to disagree with those who see the Jewish settlement of Palestine-Israel in the decade after World War II as imperialist. It was an attempt by the remnants of the Jews of Europe to safeguard themselves in which the only country that sought to save its Jewish population en masse was the Soviet Union (under Stalin). In the chapter, “The Jews,” in my SOVIET BUT NOT RUSSIAN, University of Alberta Press and Ramparts Press, 1985. I wrote:
“An Israeli scholar, Prof. Zev Katz, writes: ‘hundreds of thousands of Jews were evacuated to inner parts of the USSR, saved from extermination by the Nazis.’(1)
“Immediately after the war, at a press conference in New York, Chief Rabbi Mordecai Nurok of Latvia, a leader of the World Jewish Congress and of the world Mizrachi Organization, said, ‘It must be emphasized that several hundreds of thousands of Polish and other Jews found a haven from the Nazis in the USSR’.(2) There were no paved roads to speak of, no private vehicles, and the railroads were needed to move troops and munitions in the opposite direction.”
The United States, under Roosevelt, turned back at least one shipload of Jewish refugees.
For those who have forgotten the immense photographic history of Hitler’s extermination of Jews, I recommend the superb new German film, “Rosenstrasse.” It is not a recapitulation of the story of the death camps, but the record of an incident in Berlin during the war having to do with the fate of parties to mixed marriages (non-Jewish German women wedded to German Jews).
It is tragic that the Zionist governments of Israel have made the Jews of that country persecutors of Palestinians short of Hitlerism only in not having direct extermination or, as yet, universal ethnic cleansing.
To those who wonder at the emigration of Soviet Jews to the United States, Israel, and, in smaller numbers, to France, England, Italy and even Germany in the light of what I wrote above, there are three answers. First, most of the Jews evacuated under Stalin from Poland, the West Ukraine and the Baltic states had been businesspeople or independent professionals, occupations prohibited in the former instance and limited in the latter under Soviet socialism. Economically they adapted themselves well, but never lost their resentment. Secondly, when the USSR collapsed and living standards plunged, the vast majority of those who had connections elsewhere emigrated. I recently received a letter from a Kazakh woman who was able to move to Turkey because her daughter had married a Turk. Thirdly, the United States, to build Cold War sentiment, had adopted legislation permitting immigration on grounds of persecution, so Soviet Jews uniformly identified themselves as victims of anti-Semitism. Some of them unquestionably sincerely believed that, because the Communist affirmative action policies that had greatly benefited Jews in the early Soviet years in consequence of Tsarist policies of discrimination, as was the case in my own Moscow University class in 1932, had later benefited less-advanced peoples, such as Central Asians, to the disadvantage of Russians, Georgians, Armenians, and Jews. Think of the Bakke Case in the U.S., which began the reversal of affirmative action here, when a Jewish applicant for admission to the University of California at Davis sued because preference had been given to Blacks with lower high-school records.
William (Bill) Mandel
1) Zev Katz, ed., HANDBOOK OF MAJOR SOVIET NATIONALITIES, New York, Free Press, 1975, p.383
2) Cited in Henry Frankel, “Review of the Year 5706 – Eastern Europe, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, in AMERICAN JEWISH YEARBOOK (New York, Jewish Publication Society, 1947), pp.322-334.
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My autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by Howard Zinn), is a history of how the American people fought to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s (I'm 85) employing the form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one who was involved in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of efforts to prevent war with the USSR, civil rights South and North, women's liberation [my late wife appears on 50 pages], 37 years on Pacifica Radio [where I invented talk radio], civil liberties. You may hear/see my testimony before the three different McCarthy-Cold-War-Era witch-hunting committees [used in six films and a play]) on my website, http://www.billmandel.net I am the author of five books in my academic field, and have taught at UC Berkeley and elsewhere.
The book is available through all normal sources. For an autographed copy, send me $24 at 4466 View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611
-----Original Message----- From: Discussions on the Socialist Register and its articles On Behalf Of Hari Kumar Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 4:10 AM To: SOCIALIST-REGISTER at YORKU.CA0 Subject: Re: Sid and Arafat and displaced Palestinians
I find this very odd - british colonialism was certainly vicious. But the formation of Israel as a racist settler state was fundamental to both British & USA imperialism. How that in any way exculpates the Zionists in this matter escapes me. Hari
M. Lipshutz wrote:
"That way we can focus our discussions on the fact that it is Israel which displaced Palestinians in 1948 and has been suppressing them while occupying what was originally their land ever since"
I'm glad that we agree about Arafat being corrupt. No need for me to mention it again. Israel was not the only factor in Palestinian displacement. British colonialism played a role too. From 1948 on, Arab states could have played a larger role in improving lives of Palestinians if they wanted too. They didn't want to. They wanted Palestinian suffering around to use against Israel and to deflect populist demands for more democracy in their home countries.
Marion I. Lipshutz