Between East and West: Israel's Foreign Policy Orientation 1948-1956 (review)

134 SHOFAR Between East and West: Israel's Foreign Policy Orientation 1948-1956, by Uri Bialer. London School of Economics Monographs in International Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 292 pp. $39.50. In the last decade or so a new school of Israeli historical revisionism has emerged, compelling a reexamination of some of the most critical axioms and widely accepted beliefs in Israel and elsewhere on the origins and early years of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Revisionism has been made possible by the declassification of Israeli government archives during the 1948-1956 period, and it is this documentation that is the primary source for this important and scholarly reexamination of Israel's early foreign policy in the cold war. Bialer, who teaches international relations at Hebrew University, is primarily concerned to find out why the Israeli government shifted from an early policy of neutrality in the East-West conflict to one of nearly complete identification with the West. In addition, at least by implication he addresses the question ofwhether this was a wise policy choice. As is well-known, the Soviet Union and its client states in Eastern Europe initially provided strong political and military support to Israel, before, during, and even for several years after the 1948 war of independence. The heavy arms provided by Czechoslovakia was particularly critical, for Bialer argues it "virtually saved the country" (p. 180). The standard explanation for Soviet policy has been that Moscow was opportunistically using Israeli independence to weaken the West in the Middle East, on the assumption that an Israeli victory would humiliate Britain and undercut its influence not only in Palestine but throughout the region. However, the now-released documentation shows that Soviet-bloc military assistance continued to flow to Israel in substantial quantities until at least 1950, long after independence had been firmly established and the British were on the way out. As Bialer suggests, then, the change in Soviet policy may have been in good part a consequence of the change in Israel's policy. Initially, Israel had decided upon a policy of neutrality because of the hope that Soviets would allow massive Jewish emigration from the USSR and Eastern Europe, because of the pro-socialist sympathies of Mapam and other left-wing Israeli political parties, and because it wanted to avoid being drawn into the emerging conflict between the Soviet Union and the West. However, as early as mid-1949 there were clear signs of an emerging Israeli shift to the West, motivated in part by anticommunism and the dominant pro-Western attitudes of most Israelis but more fundamentally because of the growing need for major military and economic assistance from the West. The crucial turning point was Israel's decision to support the American position in Korea, primarily through votes in the United Nations. It was only after mid-1950 that the Soviets definitively ended their policy of support for Volume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 135 Israel, and a few years later moved from non-involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict to active support for the Arabs. Bialer makes this connection explicit , arguing that the new Soviet policy "was related to Israel's foreign policy orientation to a greater degree than has hitherto been assumed; the USSR may have rewarded Israel for her non-alignment in 1949-50 by approving the Czech arms deal; she may have withdrawn that support once Israel altered her global foreign policy orientation" (p. 179). Still, Bialer concludes that there was never really an alternative to Israel 's "inevitable" tilt to the West, for only the West had the economic and military resources that Israel desperately needed. Perhaps so, but the cost has hardly been negligible: one of the reasons that the Arab-Israeli conflict became so resistant to political settlement was that the East-West conflict became superimposed on it, with the U.S. increasingly backing Israel, and the Soviets the Arabs. Was this development also "inevitable"? As Bialer points out, "Admittedly , the Kremlin did not actively side with the Arabs until the Middle Eastern conflict was well underway. In fact, almost half a decade separated Israel 's Korean decision from the Czech-Egyptian arms deal" (p. 281...