this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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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, that started in the 20s or so IIRC
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.