Beakerkin,

I am familiar with Ginor and Remez’s thesis (Foxbats over Dimona) regarding the Soviet role in instigating the Six Day War. I am also familiar with many of the reviews. In summary, it appears that the view of reviewers from a positive side is that the authors’ revisionist thesis is quite compelling and well argued. From the negative side criticisms are that evidence to back up the facts is scant and that the authors have engaged in speculation. There is a distinct whiff of a conspiracy theory in their thesis. That does not mean to say that the thesis is wrong.

For an alternate view, not as exciting, but important to read if you wish to get involved in discussing this area, see Yaacov Ro’i and Boris Morozov’s edited book, The Soviet Union and the June 1967 Six Day War. Cold War International History Project Series. (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008). In a review of this book, Vojtech Mastny (Slavic Review,Fall 2009) commented:

This work consigns to the realm of fiction the thesis argued by Isabel Ginor and Gideon Remez in the sensationalist Foxbats over Dimona (2007) on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence that the Soviet Union deliberately provoked the war in an attempt to knock out the Israeli nuclear program by direct military action. What Moscow really tried to do, however, was bad enough: to profit handsomely from bringing the two Middle East rivals to the verge of war – the thesis substantiated by Yaacov Ro’i and his colleagues from solid, if incomplete, archival evidence.

In the review in the Journal of Cold War Studies (July 2010), Galia Cohen commences:

This volume is the most authoritative study yet to appear on the Soviet Union’s attitude toward and involvement with the 1967 Six Day War. Based on Soviet and East European documents, the volume comprises a set of analyses by, for the most part, highly knowledgeable and astute researchers working under the exacting and skillful editorship of experts Yaacov Ro’i and Boris Morozov. The volume covers the topic from almost all angles: the perspective of Soviet leaders in the lead-up to, during, and in the aftermath of the war, but also Israel’s view of the Soviet role, the U.S. perspective, and the role of Eastern Europe (at least of Bulgaria).

In a thinly veiled side swipe at Foxbats over Dimona, Cohen concludes:

This book might not attract the fanfare that the more flamboyant conspiracy theories have been accorded, but it contains solid scholarship that honestly and critically weighs all the available and documented evidence. It should become the classic work on the Soviet Union and the 1967 war.

For a more general book on Soviet activities around the world in the Cold War period, not specifically on Israel and the Six Day War, but it does have some comments, I thoroughly recommend Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin’s book, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World.

Beakerkin,

I have not really published anything on that specific subject but the whole area of Soviet anti-Zionism and, indeed, antisemitism, is quite interesting:

I copy below an extract that might interest you:

when the Nazi invader was hammering at the doors of Leningrad and Moscow, Soviet authorities began to encourage nationalist and religious feeling among the non-Great Russian ethnic groups as a means of promoting unity and bolstering resistance to the enemy. A Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was organized in April 1942 to cultivate pro-Russian sentiments among Jews at home and abroad. The committee published a Yiddish periodical, Einikeit (Unity), and Jewish writers soon began to use Jewish images and themes in their writings. Contact with Jews all over the world was encouraged, and trips to the United States and other countries were arranged for the leaders of the Committee. Although the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was principally a tool for Soviet propaganda, it served to a certain extent as a rallying point for Jewish intellectuals and for contacts with Jews abroad. This continued in the first postwar years, during which time Soviet Russia’s attitude toward Zionism also changed, first from hostility to neutrality and later to support of the Jewish demands in the United Nations for partition of Palestine (1947) and official recognition of Israel after its founding on May 14, 1948. During these years a few Yiddish schools were also opened in the western regions acquired by the USSR. But in 1948, with the looming cold war, sharpening division between East and West, the Tito “heresy,” and the Zhdanovshchina, all this changed.

The change was heralded in an article by Ilya Ehrenburg published in Pravda and Einikeit on September 21 and 23, 1948. The article denied the existence of a Jewish “people,” condemned Jewish “nationalism,” dubbed Israel a bourgeois state and a tool of Anglo-American capitalism ineffectual in solving the Jewish problem (which could be done only within the Communist order of the Soviet Union). Soon after that the anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved, Einikeit was closed, Yiddish schools were liquidated, and Jewish writers and intellectuals were arrested and deported.

Source:

Bernard D. Weinryb, “A Note on Anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia (Post-Stalin Period),” Slavic Review, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Sep., 1966), pp. 523-527.

But Jews continued to be a nationality even post 1948 despite the fact that they were condemned for Jewish nationalism:

The situation of Soviet Jews can be comprehended primarily within the framework of Soviet nationalities policy. That policy, as reflected in Communist party directives, the Soviet Constitution and public law, is based on the ideological acceptance of the concept of national self- determination and on the legal recognition of the right of all nationalities within Soviet borders to cultural freedom. Actual Soviet policy toward the Jews clearly violates these principles. It is tantamount to a policy of discrimination for it denies to the Jews such ethnic- cultural rights as are generally accorded all other Soviet nationalities.

The Soviet Union officially recognizes Jews as a nationality. In the personal identification papers which all Soviet citizens carry (the internal “passport”), Jews must list their nationality as “Jewish” (Yevrei) just as other nationalities-such as Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and others-must list theirs. Thus, in the official Soviet census returns of 1959, published in Pravda on February 4, 1960, Jews are listed among the official nationalities. In all previous censuses, citizens were required to provide proof, in the form of their internal passport, of their claim to belong to one or another nationality. In 1959, for the first time, they were allowed to volunteer, without proof, the nationality with which they chose to be identified. Despite the possibility thus provided for Jews to “pass,” 2,268,000 people specified their nationality as Jewish (there are reasons to believe that the total number more closely approximates 3,000,000)…..

The Jews are also regarded, secondarily, as a religious group. This complicates their status and makes it even more precarious. For though their unique dual character is a natural outgrowth of Jewish history and tradition, it creates unusual difficulties for them under Soviet conditions. An assault upon the Jewish religion, for example, will inevitably be taken, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as an attack upon the Jewish nationality as a whole—upon Jews as such. And they have come increasingly to be considered an alien group
in a land where they have resided for more than a thousand years. Their vulnerability is increased by the fact that, unlike most other Soviet nationalities, which have their own geographic territories, the Jews are widely dispersed throughout the country. They are also the only Soviet nationality a majority of whose total world population lives outside the U.S.S.R. Because the Soviet Jewish minority has historic and” traditional ties of culture, religion and family with Jewish communities throughout the world outside the Communist bloc, it is subject to even greater suspicion.

Source:

Moshe Decter, “The Status of the Jews in the Soviet Union,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Jan., 1963), pp. 420-430.

For a general book dealing with this, I recommend:

Robert S. Wistrich (Ed), Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World, (The Macmillan Press/Institute of Jewish Affairs,1990)

The relevant chapters are the first two:

Zvi Gitelmam, “The Evolution of Soviet Anti-Zionism: From Principle to Pragmatism,” (pp. 11-25)

Theodore H. Friedgut, “Soviet Anti-Zionism: Origins, Forms and Development,” (pp.26-45).

Beakerkin,

I suspect that neither Mark Elf or Richard Seymour have any time for the Soviet position. You might be interested in this.

Beakerkin,

There is plenty more similar material in my files. On line one can find a copy of Yuri Ivanov’s, Caution: Zionism! The link to the English text of the document is to a Holocaust Denial site, but the document is one of most notorious Soviet so-called “anti-Zionist” texts that was ever published,