The harsh winter of early 1947 was accompanied in England by the most serious fuel crisis in the country's history. The industry practically stopped, the British were desperately freezing. The British government, more than ever, wanted good relations with Arab countries - oil exporters. On February 14, Foreign Minister Bevin announced London's decision to transfer the question of a mandated Palestine to the United Nations, as British peace proposals had been rejected by both Arabs and Jews. It was a gesture of despair.
NOW THE WORLD WILL NOT BE HERE
On March 6, 1947, Soviet Foreign Ministry advisor Boris Stein handed over to First Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky a note on the Palestinian issue: “Until now, the USSR has not formulated its position on the question of Palestine. The transfer by Great Britain of the question of Palestine to the discussion of the United Nations presents for the USSR an opportunity for the first time not only to express its point of view on the question of Palestine, but also to take an effective part in the fate of Palestine. The Soviet Union cannot but support the demands of the Jews to create their own state on the territory of Palestine."
Vyacheslav Molotov, and then Joseph Stalin, agreed. On May 14, Andrei Gromyko, the USSR's permanent representative to the UN, voiced the Soviet position. At a special session of the General Assembly, he, in particular, said: “The Jewish people suffered exceptional calamities and sufferings in the last war. In the territory where the Nazis ruled, the Jews underwent almost complete physical extermination - about six million people died. The fact that not a single Western European state was able to ensure the protection of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and protect them from violence by the fascist executioners explains the desire of the Jews to create their own state. It would be unfair to disregard this and deny the right of the Jewish people to realize such an aspiration."
"Since Stalin was determined to give the Jews his own state, it would be foolish for the United States to resist!" - concluded US President Harry Truman and instructed the "anti-Semitic" State Department to support the "Stalinist initiative" at the UN.
In November 1947, Resolution No. 181 (2) was adopted on the creation of two independent states on the territory of Palestine: a Jewish and an Arab one immediately after the withdrawal of British troops (May 14, 1948). On the day of the adoption of the resolution, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Jews were mad with happiness, took to the streets. When the UN made a decision, Stalin smoked his pipe for a long time, and then said: "That's it, now there will be no peace here." “Here” is in the Middle East.
Arab countries did not accept the UN decision. They were incredibly outraged by the Soviet position. The Arab Communist Parties, which are accustomed to fighting against "Zionism - the agents of British and American imperialism," were simply at a loss, seeing that the Soviet position had changed beyond recognition.
But Stalin was not interested in the reaction of the Arab countries and local communist parties. It was much more important for him to consolidate, in defiance of the British, diplomatic success and, if possible, to join the future Jewish state in Palestine to the world camp of socialism that was being created.
For this, a government "for the Jews of Palestine" was prepared in the USSR. Solomon Lozovsky, a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), former Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, director of the Soviet Information Bureau, was to become the prime minister of the new state. Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, tanker David Dragunsky was approved for the post of Minister of Defense, Grigory Gilman, a senior intelligence officer of the USSR Navy, became Minister of Naval Affairs. But in the end, a government was created from the International Jewish Agency, headed by its chairman Ben-Gurion (a native of Russia); and the "Stalinist government", already ready to fly to Palestine, was dismissed.
The adoption of the resolution on the partition of Palestine served as a signal for the beginning of the Arab-Jewish armed conflict, which lasted until mid-May 1948 and was a kind of prelude to the first Arab-Israeli war, called the "War of Independence" in Israel.
The Americans imposed an embargo on the supply of weapons to the region, the British continued to arm their Arab satellites, the Jews were left with nothing: their partisan detachments could only defend themselves with homemade guns and rifles and grenades stolen from the British. In the meantime, it became clear that the Arab countries would not allow the UN decision to enter into force and would try to exterminate Palestinian Jews even before the state was declared. After a conversation with the Prime Minister of this country, the Soviet envoy to Lebanon, Solod, reported to Moscow that the head of the Lebanese government expressed the opinion of all Arab countries: “If necessary, the Arabs will fight for the preservation of Palestine for two hundred years, as was the case during the crusades..
Weapons poured into Palestine. The sending of "Islamic volunteers" began. The military leaders of the Palestinian Arabs, Abdelkader al-Husseini and Fawzi al-Kavkaji (who recently served the Fuehrer faithfully) launched a widespread offensive against the Jewish settlements. Their defenders retreated to coastal Tel Aviv. A little more, and the Jews will be "thrown into the sea." And, no doubt, this would have happened if not for the Soviet Union.
STALIN PREPARES THE BOARDWEAR
By personal order of Stalin, at the end of 1947, the first shipments of small arms began to arrive in Palestine. But this was clearly not enough. On February 5, a representative of Palestinian Jews, through Andrei Gromyko, made a persuasive request to increase supplies. Having listened to the request, Gromyko, without diplomatic evasions, busily asked if it was possible to ensure the unloading of weapons in Palestine, because there is still an almost 100,000 British contingent there. This was the only problem that the Jews in Palestine had to solve, the rest was taken over by the USSR. Such guarantees have been received.
The Palestinian Jews received weapons mainly through Czechoslovakia. Moreover, at first, captured German and Italian weapons were sent to Palestine, as well as those produced in Czechoslovakia at the Skoda and ChZ factories. Prague made good money on this. The airfield at České Budějovice was the main transshipment base. Soviet instructors retrained American and British volunteer pilots - veterans of the recent war - on new machines. From Czechoslovakia (via Yugoslavia), they then made risky flights to the territory of Palestine itself. They were carrying disassembled aircraft, mostly German Messerschmites and British Spitfires, as well as artillery and mortars.
One American pilot said: “The cars were loaded to capacity. But you knew - if you sit in Greece, they will take away the plane and the cargo. If you sit in any Arab country, they will simply kill you. But when you land in Palestine, poorly dressed people are waiting for you. They don't have weapons, but they need them to survive. These will not allow themselves to be killed. Therefore, in the morning you are ready to fly again, although you understand that each flight may be the last."
The supply of weapons to the Holy Land was often overgrown with detective details. Here is one of them.
Yugoslavia provided Jews not only with airspace, but also with ports. The first to load was the Panamanian-flagged Borea transporter. On May 13, 1948, he delivered cannons, shells, machine guns and approximately four million rounds of ammunition to Tel Aviv, all hidden under a 450-ton load of onions, starch and cans of tomato sauce. The ship was already ready to moor, but then the British officer suspected contraband, and under the escort of British warships "Borea" moved to Haifa for a more thorough inspection. At midnight, the British officer glanced at his watch. “The mandate is over,” he told the captain of the Borea. - You are free, continue on your way. Shalom! " The Borea became the first ship to unload in a free Jewish port. Following from Yugoslavia, other transport workers arrived with similar "stuffing".
Not only future Israeli pilots were trained on the territory of Czechoslovakia. In the same place, in Ceske Budejovice, tankers and paratroopers were trained. One and a half thousand infantrymen of the Israel Defense Forces were trained in Olomouc, another two thousand - in Mikulov. They formed a unit that was originally called the Gottwald Brigade in honor of the leader of the Czechoslovak communists and the leader of the country. The brigade was transferred to Palestine through Yugoslavia. Medical personnel were trained in Wielké Štrebna, radio operators and telegraph operators in Liberec, and electrical mechanics in Pardubice. Soviet political instructors conducted political studies with young Israelis. At the "request" of Stalin, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria refused to supply arms to the Arabs, which they did immediately after the end of the war purely for commercial reasons.
In Romania and Bulgaria, Soviet specialists trained officers for the Israel Defense Forces. Here, the preparation of Soviet military units began to be transferred to Palestine to help Jewish military units. But it turned out that the fleet and aviation would not be able to provide a swift landing operation in the Middle East. It was necessary to prepare for it, first of all to prepare the receiving party. Soon Stalin realized this and started building a "Middle East bridgehead." And the already trained fighters, according to the memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, were loaded onto ships to be sent to Yugoslavia in order to save the "brotherly country" from the presumptuous Tito.
OUR PERSON IN HAIFA
Along with weapons from the countries of Eastern Europe, Jewish warriors who had experience of participating in the war against Germany arrived in Palestine. Soviet officers also went to Israel in secret. The Soviet intelligence also had great opportunities. According to General of State Security Pavel Sudoplatov, "the use of Soviet intelligence officers in combat and sabotage operations against the British in Israel was already begun in 1946" They recruited agents among Jews leaving for Palestine (mainly from Poland). As a rule, these were Poles, as well as Soviet citizens who, taking advantage of family ties, and in some places and forging documents (including nationality), traveled through Poland and Romania to Palestine. The relevant authorities were well aware of these tricks, but received a directive to turn a blind eye to it.
True, to be precise, the first Soviet "specialists" arrived in Palestine shortly after the October Revolution. In the 1920s, on the personal instructions of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first Jewish self-defense forces "Israel Shoikhet" were created by the resident of the Cheka Lukacher (operational pseudonym "Khozro").
So, Moscow's strategy called for an increase in clandestine activities in the region, especially against the interests of the United States and Great Britain. Vyacheslav Molotov believed that these plans could be implemented only by concentrating all intelligence activities under the control of one department. The Committee of Information was created under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, which included the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Ministry of State Security, as well as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces. The committee was directly subordinate to Stalin, and was headed by Molotov and his deputies.
At the end of 1947, the head of the department for the Near and Far East of Komiinform, according to information, Andrei Otroshchenko, convened an operational meeting, at which he announced that Stalin had set the task: to guarantee the transition of the future Jewish state to the camp of the USSR's closest allies. To do this, it is necessary to neutralize the ties of the Israeli population with American Jews. The selection of agents for this "mission" was entrusted to Alexander Korotkov, who headed the department of illegal intelligence in Komiinform.
Pavel Sudoplatov wrote that he had allocated three Jewish officers for secret operations: Garbuz, Semenov and Kolesnikov. The first two settled in Haifa and created two agent networks, but did not take part in sabotage against the British. Kolesnikov managed to organize the delivery from Romania to Palestine of small arms and faust cartridges captured from the Germans.
Sudoplatov's people were engaged in specific activities - they were preparing the very bridgehead for a possible invasion of Soviet troops. They were most interested in the Israeli military, their organizations, plans, military capabilities, ideological priorities.
And while at the UN there were disputes and behind-the-scenes negotiations about the fate of the Arab and Jewish states on the territory of Palestine, the USSR began to build a new Jewish state at a shock Stalinist pace. We started with the main thing - with the army, intelligence, counterintelligence and police. And not on paper, but in practice.
The Jewish territories resembled a military district, raised on alert and urgently embarked on a combat deployment. There was no one to plow, everyone was preparing for war. By order of Soviet officers, people of the required military specialties were identified among the settlers, brought to the bases, where they were quickly checked by Soviet counterintelligence, and then urgently taken to ports, where the ships were unloaded in secret from the British. As a result, a full crew got into the tanks that had just been delivered from the side to the pier and drove military equipment to the place of permanent deployment or directly to the place of battles.
Israel's special forces were created from scratch. The best officers of the NKVD-MGB took direct part in the creation and training of the commandos ("Stalin's falcons" from the "Berkut" detachment, the 101st intelligence school and the "C" department of General Sudoplatov), who had experience in operational and sabotage work: Otroshchenko, Korotkov, Vertiporokh and dozens of others. In addition to them, two generals from the infantry and aviation, a vice admiral of the Navy, five colonels and eight lieutenant colonels, and, of course, junior officers for direct work on the ground, were urgently sent to Israel.
Among the "juniors" were mainly former soldiers and officers with the corresponding "fifth column" in the questionnaire, who expressed a desire to repatriate to their historical homeland. As a result, Captain Halperin (born in Vitebsk in 1912) became the founder and first head of the Mossad intelligence, created the Shin Bet public security and counterintelligence service. In the history of Israel and its special services, "the honorary pensioner and faithful heir of Beria", the second person after Ben-Gurion, entered under the name Iser Harel. Smersha officer Livanov founded and led the foreign intelligence service Nativa Bar. He took the Jewish name Nehimia Levanon, under which he went down in the history of Israeli intelligence. Captains Nikolsky, Zaitsev and Malevany "set up" the work of the Israel Defense Forces special forces, two naval officers (names could not be established) created and trained a naval special forces unit. Theoretical training was regularly reinforced by practical exercises - raids on the rear of the Arab armies and the cleansing of Arab villages.
Some of the scouts found themselves in piquant situations, if they happened elsewhere, dire consequences could not be avoided. So, one Soviet agent infiltrated the Orthodox Jewish community, and he himself did not even know the basics of Judaism. When this was discovered, he was forced to admit that he was a personnel security officer. Then the council of the community decided: to give the comrade a proper religious education. Moreover, the authority of the Soviet agent in the community has grown sharply: the USSR is a fraternal country, the settlers reasoned, what secrets could there be from it?
Immigrants from Eastern Europe willingly made contact with Soviet representatives, told everything they knew. Jewish military men especially sympathized with the Red Army and the Soviet Union, did not consider it shameful to share secret information with Soviet intelligence officers. The abundance of sources of information created a deceptive sense of their power among the staff of the residency. “They,” we quote the Russian historian Zhores Medvedev, “intended to secretly rule Israel and, through it, also influence the American Jewish community.”
The Soviet special services were active both in the left and pro-communist circles, and in the right-wing underground organizations Lehi and Etzel. For example, a resident of Beer Sheva, Haim Bresler in 1942-1945. was in Moscow as part of the representative office of LEKHI, was engaged in the supply of weapons and trained militants. He has photographs of the war years with Dmitry Ustinov, the then Minister of Armaments, later the Minister of Defense of the USSR and a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, with prominent intelligence officers: Yakov Serebryansky (worked in Palestine in the 1920s together with Yakov Blumkin), General of State Security Pavel Raikhman and other people. The acquaintances were quite significant for a person included in the list of heroes of Israel and veterans of Lehi.
"INTERNATIONAL" SING IN CHOROM
In late March 1948, Palestinian Jews unpacked and assembled the first four captured Messerschmitt 109 fighters. On this day, the Egyptian tank column, as well as the Palestinian partisans, were only a few tens of kilometers from Tel Aviv. If they had captured the city, the Zionist cause would have been lost. The troops capable of covering the city were not at the disposal of the Palestinian Jews. And they sent everything that was - these four planes into battle. One returned from the battle. But when they saw that the Jews had aircraft, the Egyptians and Palestinians got scared and stopped. They did not dare to take the virtually defenseless city.
As the date of the proclamation of the Jewish and Arab states approached, passions around Palestine were heating up in earnest. Western politicians vied with each other to advise Palestinian Jews not to rush to declare their own state. The US State Department has warned Jewish leaders that if the Jewish state is attacked by Arab armies, the United States should not be counted on for help. Moscow, however, strongly advised - to proclaim a Jewish state immediately after the last British soldier leaves Palestine.
Arab countries did not want the emergence of either a Jewish state or a Palestinian state. Jordan and Egypt were going to divide Palestine, where in February 1947 lived 1 million 91 thousand Arabs, 146 thousand Christians and 614 thousand Jews, among themselves. For comparison: in 1919 (three years before the British Mandate) 568 thousand Arabs, 74 thousand Christians and 58 thousand Jews lived here. The balance of power was such that the Arab countries did not doubt their success. The Secretary General of the Arab League promised: "It will be a war of annihilation and a grand massacre." Palestinian Arabs were ordered to temporarily leave their homes so as not to accidentally fall under the fire of the advancing Arab armies.
Moscow believed that Arabs who did not want to stay in Israel should settle in neighboring countries. There was also another opinion. It was voiced by Dmitry Manuilsky, Permanent Representative of the Ukrainian SSR to the UN Security Council. He proposed "to resettle Palestinian Arab refugees to Soviet Central Asia and create an Arab union republic or autonomous region there." Funny, isn't it! Moreover, the Soviet side had the experience of mass migrations of peoples.
On the night of Friday 14 May 1948, amid a salute of seventeen guns, the British High Commissioner of Palestine sailed from Haifa. The mandate has expired. At four o'clock in the afternoon in the museum building on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, the State of Israel was proclaimed (Judea and Zion also appeared among the variants of the name.) Future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, after persuading the frightened (after the US warning) ministers vote for the proclamation of independence, promising the arrival of two million Jews from the USSR within two years, read the Declaration of Independence prepared by "Russian experts".
A massive wave of Jews was expected in Israel, some with hope and some with fear. Soviet citizens - retirees of the Israeli special services and the IDF, veterans of the Israeli Communist Party and former leaders of numerous public organizations in unison argue that indeed in post-war Moscow and Leningrad, other large cities of the USSR, rumors of "two million future Israelis" were spreading intensely. In fact, the Soviet authorities planned to send such a number of Jews in the other direction - to the North and the Far East.
On May 18, the Soviet Union was the first to recognize the Jewish state de jure. On the occasion of the arrival of Soviet diplomats, about two thousand people gathered in the building of one of the largest cinemas in Tel Aviv "Ester", about five thousand more people stood on the street who listened to the broadcast of all the speeches. A large portrait of Stalin and the slogan "Long live friendship between the State of Israel and the USSR!" Were hung over the presidium table. The working youth choir sang the Jewish anthem, then the anthem of the Soviet Union. The whole audience was already singing "Internationale". Then the choir performed "March of the artillerymen", "Song of Budyonny", "Get up, the country is huge."
Soviet diplomats declared in the UN Security Council: since the Arab countries do not recognize Israel and its borders, Israel may not recognize them either.
ORDER LANGUAGE - RUSSIAN
On the night of May 15, the armies of five Arab countries (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as "seconded" units from Saudi Arabia, Algeria and a number of other states) invaded Palestine. The spiritual leader of the Muslims of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, who was at one with Hitler throughout the Second World War, addressed his followers with the admonition: “I declare a holy war! Kill the Jews! Kill them all! " "Ein Brera" (no choice) - this is how the Israelis explained their readiness to fight even in the most unfavorable circumstances. Indeed, the Jews had no choice: the Arabs did not want concessions on their part, they wanted to exterminate them all, in fact, declaring a second Holocaust.
The Soviet Union "with all its sympathy for the national liberation movement of the Arab peoples" officially condemned the actions of the Arab side. In parallel, instructions were given to all law enforcement agencies to provide the Israelis with all the necessary assistance. A massive propaganda campaign in support of Israel began in the USSR. State, party and public organizations began to receive a lot of letters (mainly from citizens of Jewish nationality) with a request to send them to Israel. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) has actively joined in this process.
Immediately after the Arab invasion, a number of foreign Jewish organizations turned personally to Stalin with a request to provide direct military support to the young state. In particular, special emphasis was placed on the importance of sending "Jewish volunteer pilots on bombers to Palestine." “You, a man who has proven his sagacity, can help,” said one of the telegrams of American Jews addressed to Stalin."Israel will pay you for the bombers." It was also noted here that, for example, in the leadership of the "reactionary Egyptian army" there are more than 40 British officers "in the rank above the captain."
Another batch of "Czechoslovak" aircraft arrived on May 20, and after 9 days a massive air strike was launched against the enemy. From that day on, the Israeli Air Force seized air supremacy, which largely influenced the victorious conclusion of the War of Independence. A quarter of a century later, in 1973, Golda Meir wrote: “No matter how radically the Soviet attitude towards us changed over the next twenty-five years, I cannot forget the picture that presented itself to me then. Who knows if we would have resisted if it had not been for the weapons and ammunition that we were able to buy from Czechoslovakia”?
Stalin knew that Soviet Jews would ask to go to Israel, and some (needed) of them would receive a visa and leave to build a new state there according to Soviet patterns and work against the enemies of the USSR. But he could not allow mass emigration of citizens of a socialist country, a victorious country, especially its glorious warriors.
Stalin believed (and not without reason) that it was the Soviet Union that saved more than two million Jews from inevitable death during the war. It seemed that the Jews should be grateful, and not put a spoke in the wheel, not lead a line contrary to Moscow's policy, not encourage emigration to Israel. The leader was literally enraged by the news that 150 Jewish officers officially appealed to the government with a request to send them as volunteers to Israel to help in the war with the Arabs. As an example to others, they were all severely punished, some were shot. Did not help. Hundreds of soldiers, with the help of Israeli agents, fled from groups of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, others used a transit point in Lvov. At the same time, they all received fake passports with fictitious names, under which they later fought and lived in Israel. That is why there are very few names of Soviet volunteers in the archives of Mahal (the Israeli union of internationalist soldiers), the well-known Israeli researcher Michael Dorfman, who has been working on the problem of Soviet volunteers for 15 years, is sure. He confidently declares that there were many of them, and they almost built the "ISSR" (Israeli Soviet Socialist Republic). He still hopes to complete the Russian-Israeli TV project, interrupted by a default in the mid-1990s, and in it "tell a very interesting, and possibly sensational story of the participation of Soviet people in the formation of the Israeli army and special services.", in which "there were many former Soviet military personnel."
Less known to the general public are the facts of the mobilization of volunteers into the Israel Defense Forces, which was carried out by the Israeli embassy in Moscow. Initially, the employees of the Israeli diplomatic mission assumed that all the activities to mobilize demobilized Jewish officers were carried out with the approval of the USSR government, and the Israeli Ambassador Golda Meerson (since 1956 - Meir) sometimes personally handed the lists of Soviet officers who had left and were ready to leave for Israel to Lavrentiy Beria. However, later, this activity became one of the reasons for “accusing Golda of treason,” and she was forced to leave the post of ambassador. Under her, about two hundred Soviet servicemen managed to leave for Israel. Those who did not succeed were not repressed, although most of them were demobilized from the army.
How many Soviet soldiers left for Palestine before and during the War of Independence is not known for certain. According to Israeli sources, 200,000 Soviet Jews used legal or illegal channels. Of these, "several thousand" are military personnel. In any case, Russian was the main language of "interethnic communication" in the Israeli army. He also occupied the second (after the Polish) place in the whole of Palestine.
Moshe Dayan
The first Soviet resident in Israel in 1948 was Vladimir Vertiporokh, who was sent to work in this country under the pseudonym Rozhkov. Vertiporokh later admitted that he went to Israel without much confidence in the success of his mission: firstly, he disliked Jews, and secondly, the resident did not share the leadership’s confidence that Israel could be made a reliable ally of Moscow. Indeed, experience and intuition did not deceive the scout. The political emphasis changed sharply after it became clear that the Israeli leadership had refocused its country's policy towards close cooperation with the United States.
The leadership, led by Ben-Gurion, from the moment the state was proclaimed, feared a communist coup. Indeed, there were such attempts, and they were brutally suppressed by the Israeli authorities. This is the shooting on the raid of Tel Aviv of the landing ship Altalena, later called the Israeli cruiser Aurora, and the uprising of sailors in Haifa, who considered themselves followers of the case of the sailors of the battleship Potemkin, and some other incidents, the participants of which did not hide their goals - the establishment of Soviet power in Israel on the Stalinist model. They blindly believed that the cause of socialism was triumphant all over the world, that the "socialist Jewish man" was almost complete and that the conditions of the war with the Arabs had created a "revolutionary situation." All that was needed was an order "strong as steel", said a little later one of the participants in the uprising, because hundreds of "red fighters" were already ready "to resist and oppose the government with arms in hand." It is no accident that the epithet of steel is used here. Steel was then in vogue, like everything Soviet. A very common Israeli surname Peled means "Stalin" in Hebrew. But the "cry" of the recent hero of "Altalena" followed - Menachem Begin called on the revolutionary forces to turn their weapons against the Arab armies and, together with Ben-Gurion's supporters, to defend the independence and sovereignty of Israel.
INTERBRIGADES IN JEWISH
In a continuous war for its existence, Israel has always evoked sympathy and solidarity from Jews (and non-Jews) living in different countries of the world. One example of such solidarity was the voluntary service of foreign volunteers in the ranks of the Israeli army and their participation in hostilities. All this began in 1948, immediately after the proclamation of the Jewish state. According to Israeli data, approximately 3,500 volunteers from 43 countries arrived in Israel then and took direct part in hostilities as part of the units and formations of the Israel Defense Forces - Tzwa Hagan Le Israel (abbreviated as IDF or IDF). By country of origin, the volunteers were divided as follows: approximately 1000 volunteers came from the United States, 250 from Canada, 700 from South Africa, 600 from the UK, 250 from North Africa, 250 each from Latin America, France and Belgium. There were also groups of volunteers from Finland, Australia, Rhodesia and Russia.
These were not accidental people - military professionals, veterans of the armies of the anti-Hitler coalition, with invaluable experience gained on the fronts of the recently ended World War II. Not all of them had a chance to live to see victory - 119 foreign volunteers died in the battles for Israel's independence. Many of them were posthumously awarded the next military rank, up to the brigadier general.
The story of each volunteer reads like an adventure novel and, unfortunately, is little known to the general public. This is especially true of those people who, in the distant 20s of the last century, began an armed struggle against the British with the sole purpose of creating a Jewish state on the territory of mandated Palestine. Our compatriots were at the forefront of these forces. They were the ones in 1923.created a paramilitary organization BEITAR, which was engaged in military training of fighters for Jewish units in Palestine, as well as to protect Jewish communities in the diaspora from Arab gangs of pogromists. BEITAR is an acronym for the Hebrew words Brit Trumpeldor ("Trumpeldor's Union"). So she was named in honor of the officer of the Russian army, Knight of St. George and the hero of the Russian-Japanese war, Joseph Trumpeldor.
In 1926, BEITAR entered the World Organization of Zionist Revisionists, headed by Vladimir Zhabotinsky. The most numerous combat formations of BEITAR were in Poland, the Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Hungary. In September 1939, the command of ETZEL and BEITAR planned to carry out the operation "Polish landing" - up to 40 thousand BEITAR fighters from Poland and the Baltic countries were to be transferred by sea from Europe to Palestine in order to create a Jewish state on the conquered bridgehead. However, the outbreak of the Second World War canceled these plans.
The division of Poland between Germany and the USSR and its subsequent defeat by the Nazis dealt a heavy blow to the formations of BEITAR - together with the entire Jewish population of occupied Poland, its members ended up in ghettos and camps, and those of them who found themselves on the territory of the USSR often became objects of persecution by the NKVD for excessive radicalism and arbitrariness. The head of the Polish BEITAR Menachem Begin, the future Israeli prime minister, was arrested and sent to serve time in the Vorkuta camps. At the same time, thousands of Beitarians fought heroically in the ranks of the Red Army. Many of them fought as part of the national units and formations formed in the USSR, where the percentage of Jews was especially high. In the Lithuanian division, the Latvian corps, in the Anders army, in the Czechoslovakian corps of General Liberty there were entire units in which commands were given in Hebrew. It is known that two pupils of BEITAR, sergeant Kalmanas Shuras from the Lithuanian division and warrant officer Antonin Sokhor from the Czechoslovak corps were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for their exploits.
When the State of Israel was created in 1948, the non-Jewish part of the population was exempted from compulsory military service on an equal basis with the Jews. It was believed that it would be impossible for non-Jews to fulfill their military duty due to their deep kinship, religious and cultural ties with the Arab world, which declared total war on the Jewish state. However, already in the course of the Palestinian war, hundreds of Bedouins, Circassians, Druze, Muslim Arabs and Christians voluntarily joined the ranks of the IDF and decided to forever link their fate with the Jewish state.
The Circassians in Israel are the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus (mainly Chechens, Ingush and Circassians) who live in villages in the north of the country. They were drafted into both the IDF combat units and the border police. Many of the Circassians became officers, and one rose to the rank of colonel in the Israeli army. "In the war for Israel's independence, the Circassians joined the Jews, who were then only 600,000, against 30 million Arabs, and since then they have never betrayed their alliance with the Jews," said Adnan Kharhad, one of the elders of the Circassian community.
PALESTINE: ELEVENTH STALIN'S IMPACT?
The debate is still ongoing: why did the Arabs need to invade Palestine? After all, it was clear that the situation at the front for the Jews, although it remained quite serious, nevertheless improved significantly: the territory allotted to the UN Jewish state was already almost completely in the hands of the Jews; Jews captured about a hundred Arab villages; Western and Eastern Galilee was partially under Jewish control; Jews achieved a partial lifting of the blockade of the Negev and unblocked the "road of life" from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The fact is that each Arab state had its own calculation. King Abdullah of Transjordan wanted to take over all of Palestine - especially Jerusalem. Iraq wanted to get access to the Mediterranean Sea through Transjordan. Syria has become obsessed with Western Galilee. The influential Muslim population of Lebanon has long glanced greedily at Central Galilee. And Egypt, although it did not have territorial claims, was worn with the idea of becoming the recognized leader of the Arab world. And, of course, in addition to the fact that each of the Arab states invading Palestine had their own reasons for the "campaign", they were all attracted by the prospect of an easy victory, and this sweet dream was skillfully supported by the British. Naturally, without such support, the Arabs would hardly have agreed to open aggression.
The Arabs have lost. The defeat of the Arab armies in Moscow was regarded as a defeat for England and were unspeakably happy about this, they believed that the positions of the West had been undermined throughout the Middle East. Stalin made no secret of the fact that his plan was brilliantly implemented.
The armistice agreement with Egypt was signed on February 24, 1949. The front line of the last days of fighting turned into an armistice line. The Gaza Strip remained in the hands of the Egyptians. No one disputed Israelis' control of the Negev. The besieged Egyptian brigade left Fallujah with weapons in hand and returned to Egypt. She was given all military honors, almost all officers and most of the soldiers received state awards as "heroes and victors" in the "great battle against Zionism." On March 23, in one of the border villages, a truce was signed with Lebanon: Israeli troops left this country. An armistice agreement with Jordan was signed on Fr. Rhodes on April 3, and, finally, on July 20, on neutral territory between the positions of the Syrian and Israeli troops, an armistice agreement was signed with Damascus, according to which Syria withdrew its troops from a number of areas bordering with Israel, which remained a demilitarized zone. All these agreements are of the same type: they contained mutual obligations of non-aggression, defined the demarcation lines of the armistice with the special proviso that these lines should not be considered as "political or territorial boundaries." The agreements did not mention the fate of Israel's Arabs and Arab refugees from Israel to neighboring Arab countries.
Documents, figures and facts give a definite idea of the role of the Soviet military component in the formation of the State of Israel. No one helped Jews with weapons and immigrant soldiers, except the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. Until now, one can often hear and read in Israel that the Jewish state withstood the "Palestinian war" thanks to "volunteers" from the USSR and other socialist countries. In fact, Stalin did not give the green light to the volunteer impulses of the Soviet youth. But he did everything so that within six months the mobilization capabilities of the sparsely populated Israel could "digest" the huge amount of supplied weapons. Young people from the "nearby" states - Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, to a lesser extent, Czechoslovakia and Poland - made up the conscript contingent that made it possible to create a fully equipped and well-armed Israel Defense Forces.
In general, 1,300 km2 and 112 settlements, which were allocated by the UN decision to the Arab state in Palestine, were under Israeli control; under Arab control were 300 km2 and 14 settlements, by the UN decision, assigned to the Jewish state. In fact, Israel occupied a third more territory than was envisaged in the decision of the UN General Assembly. Thus, according to the terms of the agreements reached with the Arabs, Israel was left with three-quarters of Palestine. At the same time, part of the territory assigned to the Palestinian Arabs came under the control of Egypt (Gaza Strip) and Transjordan (since 1950 - Jordan), in December 1949.which annexed the territory, which was named the West Bank. Jerusalem was divided between Israel and Transjordan. Large numbers of Palestinian Arabs fled from war zones to safer locations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as to neighboring Arab countries. Of the original Arab population of Palestine, only about 167,000 remained in Israel. The main victory of the War of Independence was the fact that already in the second half of 1948, when the war was still in full swing, one hundred thousand immigrants arrived in the new state, which was able to provide them with housing and work.
In Palestine, and especially after the creation of the State of Israel, there were exceptionally strong sympathies for the USSR as a state that, firstly, saved the Jewish people from destruction during World War II, and, secondly, provided enormous political and military assistance to Israel in his struggle for independence. In Israel, humanly loved "Comrade Stalin", and the overwhelming majority of the adult population simply does not want to hear any criticism of the Soviet Union. “Many Israelis idolized Stalin,” wrote the son of the famous intelligence officer Edgar Broyde-Trepper. "Even after Khrushchev's speech at the XX Congress, portraits of Stalin continued to adorn many government institutions, not to mention kibbutzim."
