Trudy Gold
Stalin, Zionism, and Israel
Summary
A remarkable exploration of Stalin’s complex role in supporting the creation of the state of Israel. When Israel declared its independence in May 1948, the Soviet Union was one of the first countries to recognize it, and this was seen as a victory for Zionism. However, Stalin’s support for Israel was short-lived. In the early 1950s, he began to view Israel as a pawn of Western imperialism and shifted his support to the Arab states.
Trudy Gold
Trudy Gold was the CEO of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and a founding member of the British delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Throughout her career she taught modern Jewish history at schools, universities, and to adult groups and ran seminars on Holocaust education in the UK, Eastern Europe, and China. She also led Jewish educational tours all over the world. Trudy was the educational director of the student resources “Understanding the Holocaust” and “Holocaust Explained” and the author of The Timechart History of Jewish Civilization.
Because he was seeing them as a Yiddish-speaking ethnicity, and it was on the Manchurian border. And he thought it would be a good idea to actually settle that area. But it was never serious. And those who got there, they were promised food stuff. It was to be an agricultural colony. It was way away from the cities. And there was huge corruption.
That was the labour organisation. The Bundists were a group of Russian Jews who wanted to fight for the revolution. And they wanted Jewish autonomy is, they wanted Jewish autonomy in Russia after the revolution.
Sure. Look, if you think about it, when Israel came into being, the Arab countries were all feudal states, either allied or subjected to the colonial powers. So he believed the more trouble he could make for the West, the better. I think Golda’s visit was a shock. Being Jewish is not dead in the Soviet Union. You see, the dream of communism was to create a space where all the differences between people would disappear. What is fascinating is all this anti-Israel propaganda is going to feed its way back into the Trotskyite organizations in the West, which were so anti-Stalin. And ironically, Trotsky, in a letter of 1938, he actually describes what’s going on. He said, “The world is divided up into those countries that won’t let the Jews in and those countries that don’t let the Jews live.” Even Trotsky, he still thought that the Soviet, of course, he thought that what had happened in Stalin’s Russia was completely ghastly and evil. But he never gave up the dream. I wonder if he’d lived to 45 and seen the shoah, whether he would’ve changed his mind.