Why Russia remains stubbornly insignificant to the Middle East

In his address to the 81st session of the UN General Assembly last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov emphasised: "The time has also come to address the main issue in the Middle East - ensuring the Palestinian statehood on the basis of countless United Nations decisions."

Support for Palestinian statehood has been Moscow's position since the Soviet Union backed partition in 1947, and it has remained so since the Russian Federation's establishment in December 1991.

Rather than providing the Palestinians with substantial support against their Israeli colonisers, the Russian Federation has, since 1991, at best offered nothing more than empty diplomatic rhetoric in support of a defunct two-state solution while maintaining cordial relations with Israel.

Even after Israel openly aligned itself with the all-out western war against Russia through the war in Ukraine, the Russians have not abandoned their alliance with Israel. In that alliance, and in its pretence of "both-sidesism" through continued support for the defunct two-state solution, the Russian Federation has fared much worse than the USSR.

Aside from meaningless diplomatic declarations like Lavrov's last week, Russia's lukewarm support for Iran in the current war is hardly a major deviation from the Soviets' careful balancing act in the post-war period. The Soviet and subsequent Russian commitment to alienating the Arab public continues apace.

Far from forging a new path, the Russian Federation has refused to change its policies towards the Palestinians and Zionism, except by increasing trade and security coordination with Israel over the past three and a half decades. Its support for the Palestinian Authority (PA), which collaborates with Israel and the West, hardly counts as support for the Palestinians.

Given these realities, it is curious that no one in Russia's ruling circles has thought of radically changing its failed Middle East policy.

Soviet alternatives

The Russian Bolsheviks, both Christians and Jews, had all along vehemently opposed not only Zionism but even the anti-Zionist Jewish nationalism of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (known as the Bund), which called for non-territorial Jewish cultural autonomy.

It was after the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union that Bolshevik opposition to Zionism became state policy, while their earlier opposition to Bundist Jewish nationalism wavered. The Bund soon dissolved itself, and most of its members joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

Indeed, many former Bundists became officials in the party's Jewish Section (Yevsektsia), implementing Soviet cultural and linguistic (Yiddish) policies towards the union's Jewish population.

It was after the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union that Bolshevik opposition to Zionism became state policy

It was the Jewish Section of the CPSU that led the charge against Zionism in the country. Zionist organising became illegal in the USSR, and prominent Soviet Jewish and Christian figures railed against the settler-colonial movement in speeches and publications, describing Zionists as colonialists who aimed to subordinate indigenous Palestinian workers to British capital.

At the same time, the Soviets embarked on a policy that continued the tsars' sponsorship of Jewish agricultural colonisation inside the country, which dated back to the late 18th century.

Under the tsars, Russian Jews were dispatched to Siberia, southern Russia, the Caucasus and Crimea to establish agricultural settlements, a number of which were still prospering at the time of the Russian Revolution.

The onslaught of the tsarist White armies and their western European sponsors against the revolution devastated the Pale of Settlement, where most Jews had lived under the tsars, killing upwards of 100,000 Jews and destroying the livelihoods of the survivors.

It was in that context that the nascent Soviet government co-sponsored and co-financed a new project with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to establish more agricultural colonies for Jews in southern Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Volga region and Crimea. The project ran from 1924 until 1938, when the joint committee ran out of the funding to continue.

Soviet Zion

In 1934, the Soviets, who refused to create a "Jewish" province in Crimea because of opposition from the indigenous Crimean Tatars, created one in sparsely populated Birobidzhan. This was intended to satisfy anti-Zionist Jewish nationalists who saw the principled Soviet policies of fighting antisemitism and integrating Soviet Jews as the best riposte to settler-colonial Zionism.

While many Jewish officials opposed the project, a pro-Birobidzhan article in the Communist International's (Comintern) International Press Correspondence (Inprecor) declared:

Now proof has been furnished that the Jews, like all the other peoples, are able like pioneers, under the hardest physical conditions, to convert an undeveloped country into a country of socialist culture. There is no "Arab question", no conflict of imperialist interests, no flight from one anti-Semitism to another. That is the solution to the Jewish question by the Soviet Power.

The article, by an author identified only as MZ, was titled "Socialist Construction in the Soviet Union: Biro Bijan, an Autonomous Jewish Province" and appeared in Inprecor, volume 14, number 32, on 1 June 1934.

Indeed, it was the soft Zionist and hard anti-communist Hannah Arendt who admitted as much: "The Russian Revolution has dealt a blow to the first [Zionist] contention that the Jewish Question can be solved only in Palestine and that antisemitism is only to be eradicated by the building up of Palestine, in other words by the exodus of Jews from their former homelands."

Still, the majority of Soviet Jews remained anti-nationalist and supported assimilation into Soviet society. Only a small percentage moved to Birobidzhan or to the agricultural colonies, while the majority moved to large Soviet cities in Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine, spurning Jewish nationalism in all its guises - Zionist, Bundist and Soviet-sponsored alike.

By the Second World War, Jews were so integrated into Soviet society that more than 100 Jewish generals served during the war in the Red Army, which the Jewish Bolshevik Leon Trotsky had founded and led.

The Soviets and their Communist International defended the Palestinians' right to revolt against the British and the Zionists in both the 1920s and the 1930s, condemning the Zionists outright. In the wake of the 1929 Palestinian Buraq Wall uprising, Georgy Safarov, deputy director of the Comintern's Eastern Department, strongly condemned the "Zionist colonies in Palestine", describing "the Jewish community in Palestine [as] a British imperialist avant-garde".

By the end of the war and after the Holocaust, however, Stalin had made an about-face.

Zionist reversal

Zionist lobbying of Soviet embassies in Britain and Turkey helped, but was not the main reason. At the beginning of the Cold War, the reactionary Arab monarchies and the conservative Palestinian leadership were allied with the imperialist West. Their post-war alliances and hostility to communism did not endear them to the Soviets.

Zionist pretensions to being committed socialists and non-partisan in the Cold War helped convince the Soviets to support a one-state solution for Palestinians and Jewish settlers or, failing that, the partition of Palestine into two states - one for the settlers and the other for the indigenous population.

The Soviet ambassador to the UN, Andrei Gromyko, received new instructions from Moscow in April 1947 that upended the previous Soviet anti-Zionist position. Gromyko gave impassioned speeches in May and November 1947, defending the Jewish settlers' alleged right to establish a state in Palestine while blaming western European countries for failing to help Jews during the war.

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When Israel was proclaimed, the Soviets rushed to recognise it, earning the hostility of the majority of the Arab world and permanently alienating all Arab communist parties, which toed the Soviet line, from the Arab public. If the Soviets thought they had gained an ally in the Middle East by supporting the Zionists, they soon realised their miscalculation.

Still, under Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin as party leader the previous year, the Soviet legation in Israel was upgraded to an embassy in June 1954.

It was the Arab republics, however, that would prove the friendliest Arab regimes to the Soviets: Egypt from the mid-1950s, Iraq after 1958 and Algeria after 1962, followed by others.

The Soviets continued their diplomatic relations with Israel, while their support for the Arab republics remained lukewarm compared with western imperialism's support for Israel and the reactionary Arab regimes.

Israel's alliance with imperialism and hostility to the Soviets were such that it launched a campaign branding the Soviets, the first regime in the world committed to fighting antisemitism in word and deed, as "antisemites".

As Jews in western countries refused to move to Israel and immigration dried up, the Israelis sought to bring Soviet Jews to populate their settler-colony. That was the context in which they charged the Soviets with antisemitism for refusing to allow Soviet Jews to leave for Israel.

Diplomatic limits

The Soviets cut off relations with the Jewish settler-colony after the Israeli invasion of three Arab countries in 1967. Israel then intensified its campaign against Soviet "antisemitism" until the Soviets finally succumbed and allowed large-scale Jewish emigration from 1971 onwards. Half of those who left chose the US rather than Israel.

The relaxation was part of the Soviet attempt to maintain detente with the US, which led the anti-Soviet campaign on Israel's behalf. It was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev who relaxed emigration restrictions between 1987 and 1989, allowing a million Soviet Jews to leave the collapsing USSR for Israel, the only country that would readily take them.

Gorbachev re-established diplomatic relations with Israel in October 1991, and on 16 December that year, under US pressure, the Soviet Union voted to repeal the UN's "Zionism is racism" resolution, which the Soviets had supported in 1975.

Unless it radically changes its Middle East strategy, Russia will remain an insignificant factor in the ongoing struggle to end Zionist settler-colonialism and Israeli regional imperialism

If Stalin's about-face on Zionism was motivated by the Holocaust, the Cold War and the dearth of pro-Soviet Arab rulers, would the current western war against Russia, the genocide of the Palestinians and the anti-imperialism of Iran and the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance not be sufficient to prompt another reversal?

It is true that all the Arab regimes, including the collaborationist PA, are in the West's back pocket today, as they were in 1948. They are not, however, the only players in the political field.

Western support for the Zionist project was aimed, as the antisemitic Winston Churchill put it in his 1920 article "Zionism versus Bolshevism", at striking a blow against the Russian Revolution and "international communism", which he identified as a Jewish "world-wide conspiracy".

Britain's Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917 in support of what Churchill called the "National Jews", five days before the triumph of the Russian Revolution, was engineered to prevent Russian Jewish support for the revolution. The plan failed.

Under Gorbachev, however, the Soviet Union aptly cast one of its last votes at the UN to rehabilitate Zionism. By supporting the repeal of the "Zionism is racism" resolution days before the curtain dropped on the USSR, it erased the Soviet era's anti-Zionism once and for all.

In view of this history, the Russian Federation should expect little change in its standing in the Middle East. Unless it radically changes its Middle East strategy, it will remain an insignificant factor in the ongoing struggle to end Zionist settler-colonialism and Israeli regional imperialism.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.