Passion & Pressure

Non-Communist members of the Israeli delegation to last summer's Moscow Youth Festival returned to Jerusalem full of the "ravenous passion" they found for Israel among Russian Jewry. Notwithstanding 40 years' indoctrination that was supposed to have turned them into good, godless Communists, Russian Jews traveled as far as 4,000 miles to see the delegates, swarmed about them in their hotel, paid 50 rubles for an Israeli festival emblem (other delegations' emblems sold for a ruble each), bought up all the tickets for the Israeli singing and dancing performances. "By the end of our tour," says Singer Rena Samsonov, "we were completely exhausted by the feeling of strain communicated by the tense Jewish audiences."

Last week the Israeli Foreign Office reported a sinister followup. A Moscow embassy attache vacationing on the Black Sea was hustled out of a Jewish friend's Odessa apartment one night and interrogated for 26 hours by secret police agents, apparently convinced that the Youth Festival outbursts could not have been spontaneous and must have been organized with embassy help. He was told that if he did not cooperate, "You will simply disappear and your clothes will be found upon the beach."

Double Same. Shortly after this clumsy pressure play, Pravda printed a long article on Israel designed to prove that it was a place no one would want to live in. (Sample: "The real income of the Israeli workers has gone down by 50% since 1949.")

At one time Russia was a supporter of Zionism, if only as a stick with which to beat British "colonialism" in Palestine. The Israeli forces could hardly have defeated the Arab armies in the Palestine war without the arms which Soviet-satellite Czechoslovakia sold them. Moscow and Washington tumbled over each other to be the first to recognize the new state the day it proclaimed itself a nation (the U.S. won), and the telegram of congratulations that Israel's Premier Ben-Gurion later sent Stalin on his 70th birthday remains one of the least attractive passages in Israel's diplomacy.

Israel's ambiguity towards Russia stems from mingled hopes and fears about the Jews in Russia. Even though Moscow has elected to plunge heavily on the Arab side in the Middle East, it is still not averse to playing a double game between Arabs and Jews. Just before the Youth Festival, Nikita Khrushchev told a Western visitor: "If the Israelis agreed to follow a policy of neutralism, and if the U.S. called off the cold war in the Middle East, perhaps we would open our gates and let the Jews leave."

Open House. Though an Israeli official dismissed Khrushchev's hint as "too hypothetical to consider," his government is officially dedicated to the proposition that it welcomes all Jews, and Israel is sentimentally committed in particular to Russia's Jews, since Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett and many other Israeli leaders were born in Russia. When Ben-Gurion said last August: "The survival and peace of the state of Israel require the addition of at least 2,000,000 Jews in the near future," he was thinking of Russia's 3,000,000 Jews--because nowhere else in the world are there so many Jews eager and willing to go to Israel.

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