Published: 1 October 2024
Last updated: 7 October 2024
One day, when my father was still a young man, barely thirty, his friends in Odessa began crossing the road to avoid him, while our aggressively blonde neighbour Tanya, and Kolya, the neighbourhood plumber, would point fingers at him and yell, ‘Bloody Zionist!’
True, my father was a Zionist, and so am I. Our politics differ, but like most Jews everywhere, we’re both Zionists in the basic sense of this often-misunderstood word – we believe in Israel’s right to exist. Just as the UN did in 1947, voting Israel into existence. The Soviet Union, too, voted yes.
However, by the 1960s, the tide shifted. The then-KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, ‘elevated Zionism to the rank of USSR’s primary ideological nemesis,’ writes scholar of Russian history Izabella Tabarovsky, partly to fortify Soviet influence across Muslim countries.
Comments3
Mogile1 October at 09:24 pm
Thank you for an excellent piece articulating the “LIVED experience” of so many.
The world is sorely lacking people like you.
Thank you for simply documenting the TRUTH.
Too many today, even highly educated people, resort to the use of out of context quotes, sound bites and shorts to subvert the truth and virtue signal.
Robert Kaldor1 October at 11:43 am
Brilliant article Lee- proud to be part of the Zio600!
M McL1 October at 02:45 am
Professor Yakov Rabkin states, “Jews suffered the most as a group from discrimination in Tsarist Russia, but at the same time, largely embraced the secularization process which saw the weakening of religion as the foundation of social life. They partook of the anarchist assassinations of political leaders, including Tsar Alexander II, and Nicolas II. Stalin’s deportations of Tatars, Chechens and others during WWII were a template for Jabotkinsky’s project to rid Palestine of its natives. Though Stalin turned against Israel in 1948, he looms large in Israeli history”
One may recall that initially, since the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire was the only country in which a substantial number of Jews embraced the idea of political violence and recourse to force for the specific benefit of their own “national” group. This Russian Jewish heritage had an important role to play in the formation of Israel’s dominant culture as well as, ironically from today’s perspective, in the transfer of terrorist tactics to the Middle East.”