Israel 1954

From the creation of the first volunteer paratroop unit shortly after the birth of Israel and of the Israeli Defense Force, this arm of service has been recognized as elite. They have also been the first choice for daring special missions, and it is mainly from their ranks that Israel's Special Forces units have been recruited. A unique aspect of the Israeli military is the cross-posting of officers from the airborne, armoured and other units, to ensure that all unit commanders share their aggressive qualities and thorough understanding of the capabilities of all arms. In this way the influence of the paratroop arm has been out of proportion to its size. This fully illustrated study is a complete history of Israeli paratroopers from its creation to the present day, including relevant developments in their role and organization, as well as their achievements and setbacks in conflicts such as the Six Days War and Yom Kippur War.

The Soviet Union executed an apparent about-face in its traditional anti-Zionist position when the Palestine issue came before the United Nations in 1947. In addition to political support at the UN from May 1947 to May 1949, important military assistance was rendered to the Jewish Palestinian Yishuv throughout 1948 by the Eastern bloc. Toward the end of that year, however, indications of change became apparent, and the Soviet Union began criticizing Israel. This book studies the USSR's attitude toward the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in the immediate post-World War II period and toward Israel in the first years of its existence, and it investigates the complex of considerations that caused the initial apparent reversal of traditional Soviet anti-Zionism. The author contends that this support for Israel contributed considerably to the evoking of Soviet Jewry's enthusiastic reaction to the establishment of the State. But this very reaction resulted in turn in Moscow changing its tactics again, since it could not allow its Jewish citizens to identify with a state outside the Soviet Union and the Communist orbit. During the few years after the Israeli War for Independence, in which the Arab-Israeli conflict was relatively low key, the USSR adopted a position of seeming neutrality between two sides—while quietly wooing the Arab nations. Ro'i examines how toward the end of the Stalin period the Jewish problem again intervened with the infamous' 'Doctor's Plot," and how early in 1953 the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations with Israel. One year later the USSR cast its first two pro-Arab vetoes in the UN Security Council, and from this point on Soviet-Israeli relations openly became a function of the increasingly cordial Soviet friendship with the Arab world.

A comprehensive analysis of the development of Israel's foreign policy during the critical years of the 1950s, particularly relations between the Jewish state and three Western powers--the United States, Great Britain, and France. Drawing extensively on recently declassified archival materials, Zach Levey challenges traditional accounts of the nature and success of Israel's policy goals.

In The Academic Middle-Class Rebellion, Bareli and Cohen expose the attempts of nascent Israel's European professional elite to maximize wage gaps between themselves and the new Oriental Jewish proletariat, and the successful resistance of the socialist ruling party, Mapai, to those ambitions.

Making Endless War is built on the premise that any attempt to understand how the content and function of the laws of war changed in the second half of the twentieth century should consider two major armed conflicts, fought on opposite edges of Asia, and the legal pathways that link them together across time and space. The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli conflicts have been particularly significant in the shaping and attempted remaking of international law from 1945 right through to the present day. This carefully curated collection of essays by lawyers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political geographers of war explores the significance of these two conflicts, including their impact on the politics and culture of the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America. The volume foregrounds attempts to develop legal rationales for the continued waging of war after 1945 by moving beyond explaining the end of war as a legal institution, and toward understanding the attempted institutionalization of endless war.

This book, spanning the years 1954-1957, is the first in a four-part collection of documents from the archives of the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israel State Archives portraying relations between the Soviet Union and the State of Israel. Most of the documents are communications composed by successive Soviet ambassadors in Israel and Israeli ambassadors in Moscow and their respective staffs. They illustrate the way Soviet ideology placed Israel irreparably in the enemy, western camp in the Cold War. Moscow's attempt to manipulate Israel into a seemingly neutral position in the international arena was therefore a ploy, the failure of which was a foregone conclusion. Israel's efforts to normalize relations between the two states were by turns genuine and unserious and similarly doomed to fail, both because of ongoing Soviet arms supplies to Egypt and Syria--which Israel perceived as a major threat to its security--and because the Israeli government and public felt a commitment to the well-being of the Soviet Jewish minority that they saw as deprived of basic rights. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Soviet foreign policy, Israel's formative years, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Soviet Jewry, and it will be a must for university libraries.