The influx of Jews from Arab lands, moreover, introduced a social tension
within Israeli society. The Zionist enterprise and the creation of the state was
an Ashkenazic endeavor, and the leadership of the new state was composed
almost exclusively of Ashkenazic Jews. Amid the highly syndicated nature of
Israeli society, this meant that Jews from Arab lands had far less access to the
best goods and services that the state had to offer; they lacked the protektsia
(connections) that most Ashkenazic Jews had. Thus, Jews from Arab lands
increasingly became a social underclass, submerged beneath a system domi-
nated by an Ashkenazic elite. This was ironic, given the utopian egalitarian
aims shared by the Israeli left and right.
By the same token, Israeli society offered ways around this disparity, par-
ticularly for second-generation immigrants. Army service, for example, had a
distinct leveling effect, in that it provided similar benefits to all those who
served. In addition, connections with one’s regiment and officers often trans-
lated into professional and social connections after military service was
completed. To a lesser extent, affiliation with a kibbutz offered similar oppor-
tunities. In any case, by the 1960s there had emerged a distinct Israeli
identity that, among other things, allowed Israelis to see themselves as dis-
tinct from – and often superior to – their fellow Jews in the diaspora.
The postwar Diaspora
The creation of the State of Israel had an impact that reverberated throughout
the Jewish world. In the Soviet Union, the creation of the state dovetailed
with a subtle change in the situation of Soviet Jewry that followed on the
heels of Soviet Jewry’s great moment of solidarity with Soviet society during
the Second World War. Jews participated in the great Soviet struggle against
fascism, embodied by the creation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
Developments during and after the war altered this situation. The addition
to Soviet Jewry of the several hundred thousand Polish Jews – those among
the 1 million Polish Jews who fled to the Soviet Union in 1939–40 – rein-
fused Soviet Jewry with some form of Jewish identity. After the war, Stalin
became increasingly suspicious of Jews. As the Cold War took hold, he sus-
pected Jews of being sympathetic to the West.
The creation of the State of Israel accentuated both of these developments.
In 1948, Golda Meir’s visit to the Soviet Union as an emissary of the State of
Israel revealed an unexpected extent and depth of Jewish solidarity and pas-
sion for Zionism among Soviet Jews. Initially, this fed into Stalin’s support
for the Jewish state. By the end of the 1940s, as it became clear that the State
of Israel had allied more with the United States than with the Soviet Union,
Stalin recast Zionism as anticommunist, and Jews qua Zionists as the enemies
of the state. This was a key element in Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges of the late
1940s. By the time of his death in 1953, Stalin had driven a wedge between
Soviet Jewry and the Soviet Union.
236 Jews in the postwar world