IMAGE The Feeling for Israel
The Feeling for Israel IT IS not surprising that the Jewish community, isolated as it is, has developed special feelings of warmth for and interest in the State of Israel during the past decade. A...
...Upon their return home, a spate of "eye-witness" anti-Israel articles appeared in the press...
...The article revealed, by an evident slip-up, that the Soviet Embassy in Uruguay had been supplying the press with "informational" material about Soviet Jewish cultural life, and it added: "A Press Bureau dealing with this matter in Moscow is sending information and photographs concerning Jewish cultural activities in the Soviet Union to the various Soviet embassies abroad, and they in turn distribute it to the press of the various countries...
...But this latest twist in the anti-Israel campaign shows no more signs of success than its earlier versions...
...In the letter, the signers state that they are of Russian origin...
...they bitterly complain of conditions in Israel and express a desire to return to the Soviet Union...
...And so the vicious circle closes...
...These reactions are, at least in part, the result of persistent Soviet anti-Israel propaganda, which Soviet Jews inevitably feel also reflects on themselves...
...A further shift in the nature of the propaganda effort, evidently reflecting the imperviousness of Soviet Jews to this "persuasion," was inadvertently revealed in the second half of 1958: the establishment of a special propaganda bureau to deal with Jewish affairs...
...Entitled "The Victims of Zionist Propaganda," it purported to be the text of a letter from 107 individuals in Israel to Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet...
...Two of the vast number of such articles that might be mentioned were "Hell in the Israeli 'Paradise' " by P. Yulski, published in the March 25, 1958 issue of Sovietskaya Kultura, and "The Price of Recovered Sight" by N. Nedialkov, in the July 26, 1958 issue of Pravda Ukrainy...
...Ten Days in Israel," two articles by S. Fry in Trud, November 27-28, 1958...
...For early in 1958, the nature of this campaign changed, and Soviet Jews began to be overwhelmed with a barrage of articles, news items, radio broadcasts and letters to the editor, seeking to persuade them that East European Jews who had migrated to Israel were suffering horrible conditions...
...A striking instance was provided by the spontaneously demonstrative reaction of Soviet Jews to the appearance at the Moscow synagogue of Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir in 1948...
...Significantly, all these tourists were Jews...
...The Truth About the Israeli 'Paradise'" by P. Zhurba, in the Minskaya Pravda (Minsk, White Russia), November 18, 1958...
...Among these articles were the following: "Myth and Reality About 'Flourishing' Israel" by G. Plotkin, in the popular Moscow evening paper, Vechernaya Moskva, August 8, 1958...
...Analysis of the unprecedented Soviet propaganda campaign against Israel since 1948conducted primarily in the Russian, White Russian and Ukrainian languages in provincial organs most widely read by local populations^ reveals that it has far less to do with the Middle Eastern situation than with the attitudes and position of Soviet Jewry...
...The campaign was capped by a document that appeared in Trud on May 26, 1959...
...The import of the whole campaign addressed to Soviet Jewry at this time had the effect of warning"However badly off you may consider yourselves here, you would be worse off there...
...It must have become apparent to Soviet authorities, however, that the violent and persistent descriptions of Israel as an enemy of the Communist world and a link in the "imperialist" chain only served to attract the alienated Soviet Jewish community further to Israel...
...The existence of such an agency came to light in Vnzer Freint, a Yiddish Communist newspaper in Montevideo which published an article called "A Jewish Parcel from the Soviet Union" in its issue of August 2, 1958...
...A Journey to Israel," a two-part article by G. Plotkin in Literaturnaya Gazeta, August 26, 30, 1958...
...It seems likely that it was this office that embarked on the next stage of the effort to influence Soviet Jewish attitudes on Israel...
...It is also known, from cautiously formulated private letters written by Soviet Jews, that meetings of Soviet Jews were drummed together in various cities to hear lectures by these tourists...
...In the summer of 1958, a group of more than a dozen "tourists" applied for visas to visit Israel...
...The violent attacks on Israel and Zionism that characterized "the Black Years" from 1948 to 1953 are of a piece with the above-mentioned 1957 article, "Behind the Screen of Zionism," by A. Leonidov...
...They reacted similarly to Israel's Zionist delegation (as distinguished from its Communist delegation) at the 1957 Moscow Youth Festival...
...Yet the Soviet need to present Israel in the worst possible light is itself based on the official assumption of the alien, hostile and suspect character of the Jews and on the concomitant conviction that the new State of Israel would serve as a magnet of attraction for this group...
...All the tourists' articles engaged in systematic vilification of Israel and conditions of life there...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 33
