https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2017/11/who-saved-israel-in-1947/

After all, the Jewish people has been closely linked with Palestine for a considerable period in history. Apart from that . . . we must not overlook the position in which the Jewish people found themselves as a result of the recent world war. . . . The solution of the Palestine problem into two separate states will be of profound historical significance, because this decision will meet the legitimate demands of the Jewish people, hundreds of thousands of whom, as you know, are still without a country, without homes, having found temporary shelter only in special camps in some Western European countries.

The Soviet Union voted “yes” for partition, as did its satellites Belorussia, Ukraine, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. (Yugoslavia, another satellite, abstained.)

“They saved the country, I have no doubt of that,” Ben-Gurion would say two decades later. “The Czech arms deal was the greatest help, it saved us and without it I very much doubt if we could have survived the first month.” Golda Meir, in her memoirs, similarly wrote that without the arms from the Eastern bloc, “I do not know whether we actually could have held out until the tide changed, as it did by June 1948.”

  • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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    9 months ago

    I don’t really have much to add in the topic except small addendum to cfgaussian long post, that Soviets had their own problems with zionists inciting Jews against USSR and experimented with something zionists loudly demanded (autonomy), creating 5 autonomous districts in Ukraine and Crimea and ultimately Jewish Automous Oblast in Siberia. By 1948 those projects were at best limited success because turned out that zionists didn’t really wanted autonomy and equality with Soviet Republics like they were saying, they wanted their own ethnostate.