Galina Nikitina's book is two books bound as one, and the seam is visible. The main narrative — nine chapters on the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate, the Yishuv, the partition vote, the 1948 war, five Knessets, the Sinai campaign, immigration policy, agriculture, industry, foreign trade, American aid and West German reparations — closes in 1967. An Afterword then carries the story to July 1971 through the June war, Security Council Resolution 242, the Rogers plans and the Four-Power consultations. The book's research apparatus is Israeli and Western almost throughout: the Statistical Abstract of Israel, the Bank of Israel Bulletin, The Israel Economist, The Jerusalem Post, Keesing's Contemporary Archives, the Israeli Government Yearbook, Weizmann's and Abba Eban's memoirs. This is a working Orientalist's monograph, not a pamphlet, and it should be read as one — which is exactly what makes its failures worth naming precisely.
Start with what holds up, because a good deal does.
The economic chapters are the best thing in the book and remain useful. Nikitina tracks American official and unofficial transfers to Israel from 1948 to 1962, the West German reparations agreement of September 1952 and its industrial destination, the balance of payments, the structure of the state budget, the concentration of banking capital, and the peculiar tripartite economy of state, private and Histadrut sectors. She does this from Israeli official statistics, cited by table and page. Her recurring thesis — that Israel's development was import-financed and externally underwritten rather than a "modern miracle," that "Israel is a capitalist state with all the contradictions inherent in it" — is unremarkable now but was worth establishing then, and she establishes it with figures rather than assertion.
Her treatment of immigration is genuinely good social science. Against the Zionist account of return, she argues that "Jewish immigration to Palestine was stimulated chiefly by external causes" — the persecutions in tsarist Russia, unemployment in Poland, "the genocide instituted in nazi Germany" — and she tests the claim the obvious way, by looking at where Jews actually went when they could choose. Between 1881 and 1930, 3,200,000 emigrated to the Americas; "only 120,000 went to Palestine." She then does something few writers on either side were doing in 1968: she counts the people leaving. Her Table 3 sets emigration against immigration year by year from the Mandate to 1969, arriving at 201,600 departures against 1,303,000 arrivals in twenty-one years, and notes drily that "Jews left the 'promised land' despite intensive Zionist propaganda." Yerida was a real and under-studied phenomenon. She saw it.
On Palestine she is, in the main, right, and right in ways that took mainstream Western historiography another decade or more to concede. The Balfour Declaration is treated as what it was — the outcome of negotiations between the World Zionist Organisation and a British government planning a Palestine campaign, an instrument of imperial policy issued as a letter to Lord Rothschild. She gives the land ownership figures at the moment of partition: "93 per cent by Arabs, and 7 per cent by Jews." She states that in 1948 "over 900,000 Arabs had to leave the country through fear of terrorist acts by Israeli extremists and, partially, under the influence of Arab nationalistic propaganda," that over 70 per cent of the Arab population of Palestine lost their homes, and that in 1967 "the Israeli invaders followed the pattern of the war of 1948–1949 by forcibly evicting the civilian Arab population." Israeli scholarship arrived at substantially this picture in the late 1980s, from the Israeli archives, and was denounced for it. Nikitina's numbers are high and her attribution of cause is tidier than the record allows, but the substance of the Nakba is in this book, in 1968, as fact. Her Afterword sets out Palestinian national rights in terms no revolutionary socialist need amend: self-determination, "the right of the refugees to return to their former places of residence and their right to self-defence," and against Israel "a policy of denying the Palestinian Arabs, expelled from their homeland and exposed to untold suffering, the right to national existence." The occupation after 1967, the settlement programme, the house demolitions and the deportations are described, and described accurately.
She also does two things a propagandist would not have done, both buried in footnotes. When she reaches 29 November 1947 she prints the division: "The voting was as follows: 33, including the Soviet Union and the USA, for; 13 against; and 10, including Britain, abstentions." And when Israel is proclaimed on 14 May 1948 she records, again in a footnote, that the USSR extended de jure recognition on 17 May — three days ahead of Washington's de jure recognition, which she correctly dates to January 1949. The inconvenient fact about her own state is admitted. It is admitted in six-point type, and the main text immediately reframes the war that followed as one which "Britain and the USA provoked," but it is admitted.
What is not admitted anywhere is the Czechoslovak arms deal. Czechoslovakia appears once in this book, as a member of the UN Special Committee on Palestine. The rifles, machine guns and Avia fighters that reached the Haganah from Czechoslovakia in 1948 with Soviet approval — the decisive foreign military supply of that war — are absent. So is any account of why Moscow made that choice. The reader is left with a USSR that consistently sought a binational federal solution and, failing that, an even-handed partition, and with a 1948 war conjured entirely by Anglo-American intrigue. This is not an error of detail. It is the removal of the single episode that would force the book to explain its own government's conduct.
The second and larger silence is Soviet Jewry. Every one of this book's discussions of emigration concerns emigration from Israel. Birobidzhan does not appear. The Leningrad trial of 1970 does not appear. The refuseniks do not appear. The exit taxes imposed as this English edition was being prepared do not appear. What appears instead is a single sentence in Chapter 9 asserting that Zionist leaders interfere in Soviet internal affairs "by making an issue out of a non-existent Jewish problem." A book of 120,000 words on the State of Israel, published in Moscow in English in 1973, resolves the question of Soviet Jews by declaring that there is none.
Which brings us to the line this book was written across, and where it sits on it.
Nikitina knows the line exists and says so. She rejects theories of "Jewish exclusiveness" in her opening pages on the ground that "Arguments of this kind have a dangerous and harmful racist hue." She writes that Zionism is used by racists and reactionaries as a foundation for stirring up anti-Semitism. And in Chapter 9 she states the principle outright: criticism of Zionism has "nothing in common with anti-Semitism." That is the correct position. It is also the position her own prose does not keep.
The World Zionist Organisation is described in Chapter 9 as an entity of which "It may be described as an octopus with numerous tentacles stretching throughout the world," and a few pages later the "Face to the Diaspora" campaign is said to be turning Israel "into a kind of octopus with arms stretching into all the countries of the world." The octopus straddling the globe is not a neutral figure of speech. It is one of the most heavily used images in the visual repertoire of European antisemitism, from tsarist cartoons through to the Nazi press, and it is being applied here to an organisation defined by Jewishness. Two pages further on, the diaspora Zionist bodies are said to constitute "a Zionist fifth column in other countries" — the dual-loyalty charge, the accusation that Jews abroad are agents of a foreign power, stated without qualification. The authority Nikitina cites for the claim that Israel's rulers are merely part of a "New York-based and US-controlled international Zionist concern" is an Izvestia article of 1 July 1967 by Y. Ivanov — on subject and date, the Yuri Ivanov who two years later published Beware: Zionism!, the central tract of the campaign that followed the break in relations. She reaches for the campaign's founding text, and inherits its imagery.
Then there is Kastner. In the middle of her chapter on domestic politics Nikitina writes that "The trial of Israel (Rudolf) Kastner in Budapest in May 1955" — a footnote adds that it exposed "the complicity of other Zionist leaders" — "confirmed the fact that prominent Israeli Zionist leaders had collaborated with the nazis in the criminal extermination of Jews during the Second World War, in Hungary in particular."
Almost every element of that sentence is wrong, and the errors run one way. There was no trial of Kastner in Budapest. The proceedings were held in Jerusalem, and Kastner was not the defendant: the Israeli state was prosecuting Malchiel Grünwald for criminal libel against him. Judge Halevi's judgment of June 1955 was devastating to Kastner and did bring down Sharett's government that month, which is the one thing Nikitina has right. She does not mention that the Israeli Supreme Court substantially overturned that judgment in 1958, nor that by then Kastner had been shot dead in the street in Tel Aviv. And a contested finding about the wartime conduct of one man negotiating with Eichmann's office over Hungarian Jewish lives — the hardest and least resolvable moral terrain of the entire catastrophe — is converted, in a single clause, into "prominent Israeli Zionist leaders" collaborating "in the criminal extermination of Jews." The move from the particular to the collective is the whole of the trick, and it is the trick that made the Soviet collaboration theme antisemitic rather than merely wrong.
The same logic governs her page on reparations. Having quoted an Israeli newspaper's anguish that German industry "produced machines to make soap from their fathers' bones," she concludes that "Israel had neither legal nor moral rights to such compensation because it does not represent the interests of all the European Jews who suffered from fascism." The premise is arguable, and was argued at the time inside Israel from several directions. The conclusion is not. To move from Israel does not represent all Jewish victims to no moral right to compensation is to make the murdered a debating point. Note too what has to be missing for that sentence to be written: Hitler is not named anywhere in this book, the word Holocaust does not occur, and the destruction of European Jewry enters chiefly as a push factor in a migration analysis and as a claim Israel exploits. And when Nikitina reaches for the sharpest thing she can say about the Israeli army in the occupied territories in 1967, what she writes is that "the aggressor is using nazi methods."
So the placement is this. The book is not a forgery and not a hate tract; it is a substantial piece of applied economics and political history whose author states the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and then, at four or five specific points, walks straight through it — with the octopus, with the fifth column, with the generalised collaboration charge, with the denial of moral standing to reparations, and with the erasure of Soviet Jews. Those points are not incidental decoration. They are where the book stops arguing and starts recruiting.
The reply was available in English at the time, and it did not require choosing between the two halves of the question. Intercontinental Press — the Fourth International's weekly of record in these years — carried both arguments simultaneously and without embarrassment. On 31 March 1969 (vol. 7, no. 12) it published extracts from the New Year's manifesto of the Israeli Socialist Organisation, the Matzpen group, demanding withdrawal from the occupied territories, defending the rights of the Palestinian refugees, and cataloguing the curfews, collective punishments, deportations and dynamited houses that gave the lie to the "liberalism" of the occupation. Two weeks later, on 14 April (vol. 7, no. 14), the same paper printed the protest that Sartre, Aragon, Beauvoir and Alfred Kastler had published in Le Monde against the Polish regime's campaign — a campaign conducted, in their words, under the pretext of anti-Zionism. In November 1969 (vol. 7, no. 37) it recalled that Rudolf Slánský and his co-defendants had been executed in Prague in 1952 on charges of "cosmopolitanism" and "Zionism," in a trial with unmistakable antisemitic overtones. And on 6 April 1970 (vol. 8, no. 13) Gerry Foley reviewed Ivan Shevtsov's new Moscow novel under the headline "Moscow Novel Attacks Trotsky as 'Zionist'," noting the revival of the Moscow-trial frame-ups together with the antisemitic slurs Stalin had used against the founder of the Red Army. Nikitina's book was in preparation while all four of those pieces were being written.
That is the position from which to read her. The Palestinians had, and have, a right to their land, their return and their state; the occupation was and is real; the Balfour Declaration was a colonial instrument and Nikitina is right about it. None of that requires the octopus. The Soviet state served neither cause: it voted for partition, recognised Israel first, armed it through Prague in 1948 when that suited its purposes, and after 1967 mounted an "anti-Zionist" campaign that reached back into the oldest inventory of European Jew-hatred for its images. Nikitina's book is the respectable edition of that campaign — footnoted, statistical, largely accurate on the economy, sound on Palestinian rights, and contaminated. Read it for the tables, and for the last pages, where the author notes the Israeli peace demonstrations under the slogan "Peace is dearer than territory" and the Black Panther march of May 1971 by "an organisation of Oriental Jews, the Sephardim" against discrimination — the moments when she looks at Israeli society and sees a class struggle rather than an octopus.