How Soviet Jews got zapped by Zionism
For the past few months, I’ve been digging into the American side of Israel’s covert op to bring Soviet Jews to Israel. I’m gonna take a bit of a pause on that and look at the Soviet side of the op.
Like I’ve said before, from the very beginning Israel’s Zionist leadership coveted the Soviet Union’s large Jewish population — which was anywhere between 2 and 3 million, and some even claimed it was up to 5 million. They saw these Jews as a vital asset in their settler project. They had just won a war and violently cleansed big chunks of land of hudnreds of thousands of Palestinians. The new Jewish ethnostate needed Jewish — or at least Jewish-passing — bodies to fill all that land and to build on top of Palestinian villages its soldiers had empties and razed to the ground. The Soviet Union contained all the Jews the Zionists could ever need or want. And these Jews were particularly favored by Israel’s Zionist founding fathers: they were “European” and not Middle Eastern or North African, like the Jews that that were coming to Israel from places like Yemen or Morocco. And so in 1952, four years after the successful creation of the State of Israel, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion established a dedicated spook division that answered directly to his office. Its mission: to do whatever it took to make this population transfer dream come true.
The agency was called Nativ and eventually developed two objectives that underpinned its main mission. One: awaken a sense of Jewish nationalism and Zionism among Soviet Jews. Two: agitate for the Soviet Union to allow its Jews to leave for Israel — which it did by mobilizing American Jews and getting America to flex its geopolitical muscles. To achieve the first part of its mission in the Soviet Union, Nativ worked to pump the Soviet Union full of Zionist propaganda: pamphlets, novels, magazines, Hebrew language books — anything that could fire up Jewish nationalist and Zionist identity among the country’s mostly apathetic Jews.
And it worked. The smuggled materials were passed around, translated into Russian and copied on typewriters. The literature quickly created a legion of converts, turning a whole generation of Soviet Jews into hardcore, messianic Zionists. Atheists whose ancestors had for centuries lived in Eastern Europe suddenly believed they had a religious right to have a pure ethnostate of their own in the Levant, restricted to Jews only.
Evgenia and I talked about this conversion process a bit a few episodes ago — and discussed how the domestic cultural trends of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s played right into Israel’s hand. People were becoming more and more disillusioned with Soviet society and searching for new identities. Zionism was thrust into the cultural mix at just the right moment. So Israel didn’t have to do much to get the process going before it ignited a full on Zionist fire.
One of my favorite — and most direct and funniest — descriptions of how this Israeli campaign could affect people comes via the memoir of Yakov Kedmi, a guy who played a fairly big part in the movement.
Yakov somewhere near Egypt fighting in the Yom Kippur War.
Yakov was born in Moscow in 1947 as Yakov Kazakov. He got zapped by Zionism at the age of 19 after reading a calendar about Israel that Nativ had smuggled into the country. As he retells it, that interaction — yes, with a Jewish fucking calendar — was enough to send him on a journey of spiritual Jewish awakening. A short time later, he was renouncing his Soviet citizenship, refusing to serve in the Soviet Army, and sneaking past KGB guards…
…This is a preview of a full letter that is only available to subscribers. Sign up and read it here.
—Yasha Levine