In “Israel’s Moment,” Jeffrey Herf, a professor at the University of Maryland and the author of several esteemed works of modern German history, presents a vivid portrait of this dramatic period and a trenchant analysis of the forces at work. Along the way, he reminds us of how contentious the debate was—within the U.N. itself and within the most powerful governments of the time.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Kremlin supported the Zionist cause. Eager to see the British expelled, Stalin pressed for the creation of Israel as a step toward that goal. No less a figure than the Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko delivered pro-Zionist speeches in 1947 and 1948, invoking the Holocaust and promoting an independent state as a place where Jews would always have a home. Mr. Herf, noting Stalin’s anti-Semitism—which would soon fully emerge, he says, in “anticosmopolitan” purges—calls such Soviet support “one of the great ironies of mid-twentieth century politics.” The U.S.S.R. was naturally joined by its satellites, including Poland, whose U.N. ambassador, Alfred Fiderkiewicz, was a non-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz.
