1 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:10,980 Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. Uh, there's a special personal delight in introducing a cover up thing to you. 2 00:00:11,730 --> 00:00:23,969 Um, but I'll keep it short. Professor Jaco Rabkin, um, teaches history at the University of Montreal in Canada, and among his many works, 3 00:00:23,970 --> 00:00:29,910 at least two deserve to be especially mentioned in the context of an Israeli studies seminar. 4 00:00:30,330 --> 00:00:35,760 First, his book, A Threat from Within a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, 5 00:00:36,360 --> 00:00:45,000 in which Professor Rapkin offers a detailed account of the history of Jewish opposition from ultra-Orthodox to Reform Judaism, 6 00:00:45,600 --> 00:00:53,220 to, uh, design his ideology and Zionism at large and to the State of Israel. 7 00:00:54,270 --> 00:00:59,340 Uh, this book won several prizes and was translated to at least 40 languages. 8 00:01:00,330 --> 00:01:06,090 And, uh, second, I mentioned his more recent book, What Is Modern Israel, 9 00:01:06,510 --> 00:01:16,290 in which Professor Rabkin sheds new critical light on some of the more fundamental tenets of the Israeli polity, and his most recently published book, 10 00:01:16,860 --> 00:01:23,700 his co-edited volume details of which are available on leaflets we put outside his accredited 11 00:01:23,700 --> 00:01:31,200 volume on the modernisation and the title of his talk today is Israel The Russian Connection. 12 00:01:31,230 --> 00:01:37,470 Professor Cohen, thank you for coming. Thank you. Well, it's an honour and a pleasure to be here. 13 00:01:38,070 --> 00:01:44,440 And I was told that I should be speaking for 35 minutes, which I will try to comply with. 14 00:01:47,460 --> 00:01:55,320 And to begin with, I would like to say that the adjective Russian has to be defined. 15 00:01:55,980 --> 00:01:59,520 I don't mean the the Russian Federation of Today. 16 00:01:59,910 --> 00:02:08,070 I rather mean the Russian empire of the turn of the 20th century, which included a large Jewish population. 17 00:02:08,100 --> 00:02:20,190 So when I say Russian, I don't mean either Russian ethnicity or the current state of Russia, but the the the borders of the Russian empire. 18 00:02:20,820 --> 00:02:28,530 As you know, the Russian empire had a tremendous diversity of of of confessions of peoples. 19 00:02:28,980 --> 00:02:34,860 But there were also a great diversity of Jews on the territory of the Russian empire. 20 00:02:34,860 --> 00:02:42,570 And you starting with Bukhara and Jews in Central Asia and then Georgian and mountain Jews in the Caucasus. 21 00:02:42,960 --> 00:02:52,260 But the protagonists of what we are going to talk about today are none of them, but rather the Jews in the pale of settlement. 22 00:02:53,760 --> 00:03:03,959 Or some people would call them the Yiddish land, the group of people who were united by common language with different accents and dialects. 23 00:03:03,960 --> 00:03:10,620 But the common language was Yiddish. And and they are the protagonists of the story. 24 00:03:11,670 --> 00:03:17,670 We have to understand that the non Ashkenazi Jews, not only in Russia but also elsewhere, 25 00:03:18,360 --> 00:03:24,720 played a very insignificant role in the Zionist movement in the 1930s. 26 00:03:25,200 --> 00:03:36,090 The share of non Ashkenazi members of the World Zionist Organisation where you had to pay a symbolic amount to be a member. 27 00:03:36,870 --> 00:03:45,950 The percentage of non Ashkenazi Jews was 0.37%, which is slightly more than one third of a percent. 28 00:03:47,790 --> 00:03:55,920 That gives you the whole picture that the Russian Jews in fact, will see why became the. 29 00:03:57,510 --> 00:04:01,590 Uh, the messengers of the Zionist idea. 30 00:04:02,220 --> 00:04:04,980 They spread the Zionist gospel around the world. 31 00:04:05,520 --> 00:04:14,880 So much so that, for example, in a book on the history of Moroccan Jewry and I was in Morocco promoting that book on Jewish opposition to Zionism. 32 00:04:16,170 --> 00:04:20,729 The author offered me his book, a very impressive book by Mohammed Habib, 33 00:04:20,730 --> 00:04:28,020 and he said in that book that the first Zionist cell in Morocco was started by Russian Jews from France. 34 00:04:29,250 --> 00:04:34,530 So we'll see why it is so important to understand the Russian dimension. 35 00:04:37,200 --> 00:04:45,059 As you know, because I think one of the speakers earlier talked about I must have talked about William Hefner, 36 00:04:45,060 --> 00:04:56,490 and he is the Anglican chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna who introduced Herzl to the Zionist idea, 37 00:04:56,490 --> 00:05:00,000 to the idea of, oh, this was in the Oxford centre of Hebrew and Jewish studies. 38 00:05:00,210 --> 00:05:01,260 It wasn't here. Okay. 39 00:05:01,650 --> 00:05:15,300 Well, so, but you know, the story that this essentially a Protestant idea became accepted by Herzl and his friends by the end of the 19th century. 40 00:05:15,630 --> 00:05:21,840 The idea of Ingathering, the Hebrews in the Holy Land by earthly means, 41 00:05:22,020 --> 00:05:29,010 without waiting for the Messiah, without expecting any miracles, just practically getting them there. 42 00:05:30,330 --> 00:05:37,700 And the. The founders of the Zionist movement, including Herzl himself. 43 00:05:39,180 --> 00:05:43,770 We're German speaking intellectuals of Jewish origin. 44 00:05:44,550 --> 00:05:58,890 Usually rather estranged from traditional Judaism, who had a very daring vision of what this Zionist project would be. 45 00:05:59,880 --> 00:06:10,680 Actually, the person who coined the term Zionism later became disillusioned with the movement and turned 46 00:06:10,680 --> 00:06:20,660 into what the media called ultra-Orthodox Jewry and became very critical of the Zionist movement. 47 00:06:20,670 --> 00:06:27,240 But the Zionist movement really was a general staff of German speaking intellectuals. 48 00:06:28,350 --> 00:06:35,730 But the general staff, when we talk about it, presupposes that the generals have an army and they didn't have it. 49 00:06:37,350 --> 00:06:48,720 They didn't have it because Jews in Austria, in Germany, in France, in Britain were either indifferent or actually hostile to to the Zionist idea. 50 00:06:48,730 --> 00:06:52,470 And what my namesake was just saying. 51 00:06:53,490 --> 00:06:58,770 The reasons were sometimes religious, 52 00:06:58,770 --> 00:07:04,679 but sometimes they were rather practical because many Jews in Western Europe and 53 00:07:04,680 --> 00:07:10,470 in the United States recognised an anti-Semitic motive in the Zionist message. 54 00:07:10,560 --> 00:07:20,190 Namely, the Jews are an alien element in European countries and they are eternally alien. 55 00:07:20,820 --> 00:07:26,490 It's an almost mystical estrangement from the country they live in. 56 00:07:27,960 --> 00:07:34,620 Of course they didn't like it, and that's why these generals remained without the army. 57 00:07:35,820 --> 00:07:39,090 Now, where were the soldiers? The foot soldiers of Zionism. 58 00:07:39,120 --> 00:07:45,390 Where did they come from? Well, as you might guess, they came from the pale of settlement in the Russian empire. 59 00:07:46,560 --> 00:07:54,150 And the reason they came from that is a special condition in which Jews, in the pale of settlement, found themselves. 60 00:07:56,240 --> 00:08:00,020 As I mentioned, they mostly were Yiddish speakers. 61 00:08:01,040 --> 00:08:09,830 They lived in the territory that was contiguous from the Baltic republics of today all the way to Odessa in the south. 62 00:08:10,790 --> 00:08:18,350 And they underwent partial modernisation. 63 00:08:19,480 --> 00:08:25,300 They became affected by the Jewish version of Enlightenment, the Scala. 64 00:08:25,870 --> 00:08:32,349 They many of them became irreligious. 65 00:08:32,350 --> 00:08:43,840 They abandoned Judaic practice. But unlike other Jews in France who would abandon Judaic practice, who would become secularised. 66 00:08:44,590 --> 00:08:57,100 But in France, the person could move to Paris from his little town and adjust and become a freethinker and totally erase his Jewish identity. 67 00:08:57,550 --> 00:09:03,280 That option was not available to Jews in the pale of settlement because with a few exceptions, 68 00:09:03,580 --> 00:09:09,430 they could not move to the capital cities of Moscow and St Petersburg and they had to stay where they were. 69 00:09:10,510 --> 00:09:21,910 So this unusual circumstance that they were in fact acculturated to largely to the Russian culture, 70 00:09:22,660 --> 00:09:26,800 they were secularised, but they did not have emancipation. 71 00:09:27,160 --> 00:09:34,570 They didn't have equal rights. That created a real identity issue. 72 00:09:35,170 --> 00:09:44,890 Who were they if they were no longer observing Judaism, but they were still speaking Yiddish and living in these Jewish shtetls? 73 00:09:47,650 --> 00:09:50,990 What were they? Of course, in Jewish tradition. 74 00:09:51,010 --> 00:10:03,550 We have a whole series of terms that could be applied to people who abandoned Judaic tradition in Russia because of Arian criminal transgressor. 75 00:10:04,270 --> 00:10:08,980 And none of these are very positive terms. You wouldn't like to be called that way. 76 00:10:09,610 --> 00:10:13,360 So the new identity emerged secular Jew. 77 00:10:14,320 --> 00:10:21,700 And this is a key notion, I think, to understand the success of the Zionist enterprise among Russian Jews. 78 00:10:22,480 --> 00:10:33,910 They became secular Jews and they fashioned their identity very much like people in their environment and who were in the environment, 79 00:10:34,450 --> 00:10:36,850 Ukrainians and Poles and Lithuanians, 80 00:10:37,390 --> 00:10:48,280 all the ethnic groups or national groups that didn't have political independence, that felt some of them felt oppressed by the Russian empire. 81 00:10:49,390 --> 00:10:56,440 And that is how they developed a national approach to national identity. 82 00:10:58,150 --> 00:11:05,710 And eventually when after the October revolution, they came to be known as Jewish nationality. 83 00:11:05,920 --> 00:11:17,230 This term was invented Jewish nationality, which was the same people actually from the Russian Empire who found themselves in Palestine. 84 00:11:17,920 --> 00:11:22,090 Translated it into Hebrew. It became longue vue de, which is Jewish nationality. 85 00:11:26,220 --> 00:11:40,650 So what triggered really the success, the future success of the Zionist project among Jews of the pale of settlement? 86 00:11:41,370 --> 00:11:53,340 Were events in the Russian Empire, namely the assassination of Alexander the second in in March 1881 in St Petersburg, 87 00:11:54,690 --> 00:12:01,980 and a wave of anti-Jewish violence that spread in the pale of settlement. 88 00:12:06,090 --> 00:12:15,810 In relative terms, the violence was much less significant than, say, the violence in Ukraine in the 17th century. 89 00:12:17,220 --> 00:12:20,610 However, the Jews were no longer the same. 90 00:12:21,690 --> 00:12:28,110 Even the 17th century, they interpreted this violence as divine punishment for their transgressions. 91 00:12:29,490 --> 00:12:37,290 These secularised Jews understood it in modern terms, and therefore they were frustrated. 92 00:12:37,380 --> 00:12:48,810 They were angry. They were shocked at the prospects of integration that they felt were coming were becoming more positive. 93 00:12:48,810 --> 00:12:52,920 And Alexander the second, who was a relatively liberal emperor. 94 00:12:54,150 --> 00:13:04,490 These prospects became dimmed. And this frustration expressed itself in a desire for for revenge, for pride. 95 00:13:06,710 --> 00:13:10,850 And that's how the first units of Jewish self-defence were formed. 96 00:13:11,090 --> 00:13:14,450 So it was a modern response to violence. 97 00:13:15,980 --> 00:13:26,990 Many Jews joined various revolutionary groups and became very experienced in revolutionary terrorism. 98 00:13:27,470 --> 00:13:31,400 I remind you that the word terrorism was not a negative term at that time. 99 00:13:31,670 --> 00:13:35,180 It was rather a proud term. 100 00:13:36,200 --> 00:13:42,860 People who were fighting against the officials of the terrorist regime proudly call themselves terrorists. 101 00:13:45,830 --> 00:13:54,020 So the. This is the environment in which the pale of settlement was living at that time. 102 00:13:54,500 --> 00:13:59,480 At the end of the 19th century, something else has to be mentioned. 103 00:14:03,300 --> 00:14:07,620 Some Jews could leave the pale of settlement. 104 00:14:08,550 --> 00:14:18,540 These were university educated Jews or Jews who had certain professions or were particularly important merchants. 105 00:14:19,590 --> 00:14:23,230 They could move to St Petersburg. They could move to Moscow. 106 00:14:23,250 --> 00:14:27,870 They could develop pretty much like their brethren in Berlin or Paris. 107 00:14:31,180 --> 00:14:35,830 And these Jews were not sympathetic to the Zionist message. 108 00:14:36,610 --> 00:14:46,390 So those who became activists in Zionist movement were almost without exception, Jews from small towns, from the shtetls. 109 00:14:47,650 --> 00:14:52,510 Now what characterised the shtetl was the threat of violence. 110 00:14:53,020 --> 00:14:56,320 That became very clear in the eighties, 1880s. 111 00:14:57,500 --> 00:15:02,600 And a mix of contempt and fear of the non-Jewish neighbours. 112 00:15:03,890 --> 00:15:08,090 In fact, the shtetls were largely segregated. 113 00:15:08,540 --> 00:15:16,159 If you look at the memoirs of Shimon Peres, you could clearly see that the non-Jews lived behind the forest. 114 00:15:16,160 --> 00:15:20,210 They were somewhere out there. They really didn't have much contact with them. 115 00:15:20,540 --> 00:15:26,090 They had no experience of mixed society, of mixed existence or coexistence, at least. 116 00:15:27,110 --> 00:15:40,830 And that's why they became so open to the idea of the Zionist project, not in the violence and frustration of the end of the 19th century. 117 00:15:41,420 --> 00:15:48,950 There were three collective solutions that Jews in the pale of settlement opted for. 118 00:15:49,400 --> 00:15:51,770 One, the most traditional one was immigration. 119 00:15:52,250 --> 00:16:03,830 And that's how almost 2 million Jews left the confines of the Russian empire and moved largely to the new world to South and North America. 120 00:16:04,460 --> 00:16:08,810 Some of them settled here in Britain. 121 00:16:10,670 --> 00:16:20,960 And except that there was some legislation promoted by Balfour that prevented them from settling here in 1905 of mistaken. 122 00:16:23,060 --> 00:16:28,100 So emigration was the most popular option. 123 00:16:29,060 --> 00:16:31,040 Another one was socialist revolution. 124 00:16:31,310 --> 00:16:39,620 And Jews in disproportionate numbers joined the boon to the Jewish socialist movement, the socialist revolutionaries, 125 00:16:39,620 --> 00:16:44,720 and, of course, the Social Democrats that later split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. 126 00:16:46,130 --> 00:16:53,990 And the Jews played a very important role in the October revolution in the running of the Soviet state in the twenties and thirties. 127 00:16:56,360 --> 00:17:09,070 And the third option was Zionism. In fact, out of the emigres from the Russian Empire, slightly less than 1% went to Palestine. 128 00:17:09,080 --> 00:17:13,520 So it's a very small group of people, 50, 55,000 maybe. 129 00:17:15,980 --> 00:17:20,910 And as I said, they were Jews, largely from the shtetls. 130 00:17:20,930 --> 00:17:25,670 With one exception, I have to mention, because we have an expert here, as are Putin's. 131 00:17:25,730 --> 00:17:30,020 He comes from a big city from Odessa, but he really didn't. 132 00:17:30,320 --> 00:17:33,650 He was evicted very soon from the Zionist leadership. 133 00:17:33,860 --> 00:17:46,790 Quite successful people who really ran the Zionist establishment in Palestine were all, practically all of them from the shtetls. 134 00:17:47,060 --> 00:17:57,590 Actually, I wonder if Jabotinsky would be resurrected today if Likud would accept him as a member because he was way too liberal for today's Likud. 135 00:17:58,820 --> 00:18:02,760 But we don't deal with history, so we'll leave it aside. 136 00:18:05,990 --> 00:18:12,020 The what characterise this Russian Jews in Palestine was their age. 137 00:18:12,030 --> 00:18:17,610 They were young by and large. They were mostly socialists of different views of from. 138 00:18:18,560 --> 00:18:27,860 Hard red to pink think they were ideologically committed to to building a new society and to building a new men. 139 00:18:28,640 --> 00:18:36,710 Very importantly, they were intrepid, radical and experienced in terrorism. 140 00:18:38,180 --> 00:18:45,280 So they knew that violence. Is a legitimate tool of attaining political goals. 141 00:18:47,110 --> 00:18:55,120 They also were affected by the Russian romanticism of agricultural labour, of special relationship with the land. 142 00:18:56,560 --> 00:19:00,910 Some were followers of Leo Tolstoy. 143 00:19:01,270 --> 00:19:07,280 Who. Preached communal life and and connection with the land. 144 00:19:08,870 --> 00:19:12,680 What they didn't have is the any exposure to liberal politics, 145 00:19:13,370 --> 00:19:21,050 any exposure to ideas of equality or to civic rather than national rather than ethnic nationalism, 146 00:19:21,710 --> 00:19:27,560 because they lived their experience was not that experience of Western Europe. 147 00:19:27,560 --> 00:19:30,710 It was experience of Eastern Europe in Russian empire. 148 00:19:32,540 --> 00:19:42,620 And as I said earlier, they did not have the experience of living in mixed society, 149 00:19:43,850 --> 00:19:48,440 where you have Jews and non-Jews collaborating and living as neighbours and peacefully. 150 00:19:50,030 --> 00:19:54,500 This had a very important impact on what Israel would become. 151 00:19:56,600 --> 00:20:00,710 What also united these people was a disdain for their own background. 152 00:20:01,400 --> 00:20:04,970 They wanted to build a new man and woman in order to build a new man. 153 00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:06,740 You have to disdain the old one. 154 00:20:08,630 --> 00:20:20,840 So if you read the writings of the Zionist public, intellectuals like Joseph Brenner or Mirabal de Chayefsky or David freshmen, 155 00:20:21,260 --> 00:20:27,830 it sounds like a list of street names in Tel Aviv, but they were real people. 156 00:20:28,040 --> 00:20:35,420 At one point you would find a very undisguised, very clear self-hate. 157 00:20:36,650 --> 00:20:40,250 They hated what they used to be, and they wanted to be something else. 158 00:20:40,520 --> 00:20:50,250 This romantic image of a new Hebrew who would prove that they're no longer yeshiva students. 159 00:20:51,440 --> 00:20:56,780 And I have a quote from Ben-Gurion of 1922. 160 00:20:57,590 --> 00:21:03,650 It's a very short quote. And he said, addressing a group of Zionist activists in Palestine. 161 00:21:04,370 --> 00:21:09,200 We are not yeshiva students debating the finer points of self-improvement. 162 00:21:09,860 --> 00:21:13,610 We are conquerors of the land. Facing a wall of irony. 163 00:21:13,910 --> 00:21:20,590 And we have to break through it. So this, you see, is a new Jew, a new Hebrew that emerges. 164 00:21:24,070 --> 00:21:31,600 This idea of being a conqueror and reliance and violence could be seen in poetry, 165 00:21:31,600 --> 00:21:37,990 in prose that was written at that time, but it could also see in mundane little details. 166 00:21:38,680 --> 00:21:46,360 If you open the memoirs of Ariel Sharon, you would discover that as a boy, he received a bar mitzvah gift. 167 00:21:46,360 --> 00:21:52,690 When the boy turns 13, he usually gets gifts and he becomes adult according to Jewish tradition. 168 00:21:53,200 --> 00:22:02,980 Well, usually it's Judaic books, or in the more modern version, he would get a trip to Florida or something for an iPhone. 169 00:22:04,420 --> 00:22:16,850 But Ariel Sharon received an engraved Caucasian dagger as a bar mitzvah gift, a dagger which is highly unusual as a bar mitzvah gift. 170 00:22:16,870 --> 00:22:23,020 To this day, I think. But it shows that the resort to violence was also educational. 171 00:22:23,740 --> 00:22:30,730 Educational in the sense that it helped to free Jews from Judaic moral strains, 172 00:22:31,120 --> 00:22:37,420 from emphasis on pacifism and compliance with the non-Jewish environment. 173 00:22:37,720 --> 00:22:44,380 It was educating the new Hebrew in the spirit of defiance and the willpower. 174 00:22:44,800 --> 00:22:56,530 And this was very important to the willpower, in spite of all the difficulties who became heroes of that group. 175 00:22:56,620 --> 00:23:05,650 Again, I'm talking about Russian Jews only Yosef Tom Baldo, who became a modern hero. 176 00:23:05,980 --> 00:23:10,660 I don't know if in today's Israeli schools he is still venerated, but he certainly was. 177 00:23:11,460 --> 00:23:22,630 A few decades ago. He was a veteran of the Russia Japanese war and he was decorated with four crosses of St George, which is a very high distinction. 178 00:23:23,950 --> 00:23:31,630 He was killed in a skirmish with a local population in Palestine in 1920 and a phrase is attributed to him. 179 00:23:31,660 --> 00:23:38,530 It's a variation of the Latin phrases, as a matter of fact, how good it is to die for the fatherland. 180 00:23:39,340 --> 00:23:45,160 Well, we don't really know what you said. His last moments, but that's what the legend says. 181 00:23:45,610 --> 00:23:56,770 And he became a hero. He's the person, the model that was held up for the new Hebrews that were being educated in Palestine. 182 00:23:58,960 --> 00:24:10,600 Another expression that found its way into the educational environment of the new Hebrew is in Hebrew. 183 00:24:10,600 --> 00:24:14,620 It says In Britain, there is no choice. We have to fight. 184 00:24:16,490 --> 00:24:19,700 There's no choice. We we are. We have to fight. 185 00:24:20,600 --> 00:24:32,270 And Russian Jews not only made the leadership of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, 186 00:24:32,840 --> 00:24:39,110 but they also became the most influential group among military leaders of the future state of Israel. 187 00:24:40,640 --> 00:24:48,020 The man who did more than anyone else to introduce terrorism into Palestine was, of course, a Russian Jew, Avraham Stern. 188 00:24:48,500 --> 00:24:52,909 And some of him of you may have heard of the Stern gang that the British didn't appreciate, 189 00:24:52,910 --> 00:24:58,610 particularly who was a member of several paramilitary groupings. 190 00:24:59,780 --> 00:25:07,580 But Russian cultural influence could be seen in the biographies of other military leaders. 191 00:25:08,270 --> 00:25:11,710 Moshe Dayan is the Weitzman. It's Huckabee and Arafat. 192 00:25:11,720 --> 00:25:16,940 Xavi. Rafael Epstein and of course, Ariel Sharon are all of Russian ancestry. 193 00:25:20,950 --> 00:25:24,550 And their propensity to use force is legendary. 194 00:25:25,980 --> 00:25:32,630 Um. And also what also characterises them is. 195 00:25:33,840 --> 00:25:37,530 A lack of interest and a disdain for local population. 196 00:25:38,760 --> 00:25:42,740 And that disdain was, in a way, equal opportunity disdain. 197 00:25:42,750 --> 00:25:46,110 It was addressed both to Jews and non-Jews in Palestine. 198 00:25:47,820 --> 00:25:52,230 Actually, they disliked local Jews even more than this list, like local non-Jews, 199 00:25:52,530 --> 00:25:57,720 because they embodied everything that they hated religious behaviour, 200 00:25:58,500 --> 00:26:08,100 compromise with the authorities, this pacifist attitudes which they considered cowardly and not dignified. 201 00:26:09,900 --> 00:26:14,540 So they wanted didn't want to integrate into Palestinian society. 202 00:26:14,580 --> 00:26:21,180 They wanted to create a separate society. And the word that they used was afraid to let me remind you of other terms. 203 00:26:21,180 --> 00:26:25,680 But I'm afraid that means separate development. That's exactly what it means. 204 00:26:26,670 --> 00:26:30,450 Another term, which I think is very important and I think it became a name. 205 00:26:31,170 --> 00:26:36,040 They re baptised the one of the ships of illegal immigration in the forties. 206 00:26:36,450 --> 00:26:42,450 I felt became in spite of everything, in spite of everything will our will will triumph. 207 00:26:43,140 --> 00:26:50,129 This idea of triumph of the will is extremely important that even an old sentence, 208 00:26:50,130 --> 00:26:56,640 that is a phrase which is attributed to Herzl, if you want it, it's not a dream. 209 00:26:57,300 --> 00:27:11,790 So again, if you will, it it's not a dream. So the Russian Jews, in fact, formed the political leadership of of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. 210 00:27:12,820 --> 00:27:26,050 And you could see that in the composition of the Israeli parliament 1960, which is for decades after all, immigration from Russia had stopped. 211 00:27:27,970 --> 00:27:32,680 In 1967, 70% of Knesset members were born in the Russian empire. 212 00:27:33,780 --> 00:27:37,800 And another 13 born in Palestine from Russian parents. 213 00:27:38,550 --> 00:27:43,170 So that makes 83 and that's 1960. 214 00:27:43,950 --> 00:27:52,260 And you wouldn't be surprised. Against this background that you would not find one Israeli prime minister who would not have Russian roots. 215 00:27:53,130 --> 00:27:57,460 Not one Russian meaning Russian empire. 216 00:27:59,110 --> 00:28:02,880 So the impact of Russian Jews is tremendous. 217 00:28:04,080 --> 00:28:11,360 And they were. Keeping that political monopoly rather successfully because, say, German Jews, 218 00:28:11,630 --> 00:28:18,170 in spite of their contributions to culture and industry in Israel, remained outside of power circles. 219 00:28:19,550 --> 00:28:24,920 Needless to say, numerically very important. Non Ashkenazi Jews were also kept away. 220 00:28:26,020 --> 00:28:36,130 So. Russian Jews, in fact, created the political culture of what is today Israel. 221 00:28:37,360 --> 00:28:47,349 And they also affected the international support for the for the Zionist project in the United States, 222 00:28:47,350 --> 00:28:55,630 particularly, uh, Jews of German descent were either indifferent or hostile to the Zionist project. 223 00:28:56,260 --> 00:29:02,469 But when the Jewish American Jewish establishment was replaced by Russian Jews, 224 00:29:02,470 --> 00:29:12,970 who by 1930s and forties became more wealthier and more active, uh, American Jewish community by and large supported the Zionist project. 225 00:29:12,970 --> 00:29:18,370 And that of course had a very important financial and political consequences. 226 00:29:18,940 --> 00:29:27,280 So here we talk about the I just talked about the Zionist project, the Zionist enterprise, the early years of the State of Israel, 227 00:29:27,280 --> 00:29:39,640 and the importance of that political culture that had the vestiges and traces of, uh, of the shtetl culture, of the Russian shtetl culture. 228 00:29:40,720 --> 00:29:49,720 Now, if we move forward in time, we look at Soviet emigration to Israel beginning in the 1970s, 229 00:29:51,220 --> 00:29:56,890 which brought to Israel about 1 million Russian speakers from the former Soviet Union, by and large. 230 00:29:58,840 --> 00:30:05,080 What characterises that population are some of the same traits that we mentioned earlier. 231 00:30:06,340 --> 00:30:12,220 Except they would be even amplified in the new immigration. 232 00:30:14,440 --> 00:30:21,190 They consider themselves member of the Jewish nationality because that's what Soviet official documents indicated. 233 00:30:21,490 --> 00:30:28,280 A Jew is a nationality. Locals Becker Ukrainian or Russian, for that matter, no. 234 00:30:28,720 --> 00:30:35,440 So they did not have. Any commitment or even knowledge of the Jewish tradition and Judaism. 235 00:30:36,490 --> 00:30:46,270 They were they were very secularised, and they had a commitment to strengthen the European nature of Israel. 236 00:30:46,510 --> 00:30:52,870 European, in their understanding, what European is after experience in the Soviet Union, 237 00:30:54,160 --> 00:31:03,100 they didn't have any more knowledge of liberal democracy than people who left Russian empire because Soviet Union was hardly a liberal democracy. 238 00:31:05,170 --> 00:31:15,970 Nor did they know about political correctness. What is important is that they were very committed to maintain and strengthen 239 00:31:16,870 --> 00:31:21,069 the Zionist nature of the state of Israel when they arrived in seventies, 240 00:31:21,070 --> 00:31:31,900 eighties and particularly in the nineties. They entered Israeli society much more successfully than other immigrant groups. 241 00:31:32,140 --> 00:31:42,860 If you compare it with Moroccan or Iraqi Jews who arrived en masse earlier, they didn't have a political impact that the Russian Jews have now. 242 00:31:42,930 --> 00:31:48,550 Today you have the chairman of the parliament is a Russian of Soviet origin. 243 00:31:49,330 --> 00:31:54,490 You have several, I think a good dozen members of the Knesset who are of Russian origin. 244 00:31:55,570 --> 00:32:02,350 And the Russian is a very important language in in today's Israel, as any immigrant group, 245 00:32:03,040 --> 00:32:08,560 you tried to adjust by adopting the values of the dominant society. 246 00:32:08,920 --> 00:32:14,080 You usually don't want to acculturate to it dominated group but to the dominant group. 247 00:32:14,620 --> 00:32:26,109 And so Soviet Jews became acculturated to this Israeli political culture and they adopted, 248 00:32:26,110 --> 00:32:31,329 for example, a certain denigration of the Arab and the ultra religious, 249 00:32:31,330 --> 00:32:40,090 the haredim, its militant ethnic nationalism and of course, the self-righteousness in discourse and behaviour. 250 00:32:40,630 --> 00:32:49,600 So these things are usually very easy to adopt when you arrive in a new country because that's what identifies you with the dominant group. 251 00:32:50,380 --> 00:33:02,140 And in that sense they are not exceptional. So the very of their political integration in Israel was remarkably fast and remarkably durable. 252 00:33:02,770 --> 00:33:07,660 By and large, they vote for the right or extreme right. 253 00:33:09,460 --> 00:33:12,550 And quite a few of them, as you may know, are non-Jews, 254 00:33:12,850 --> 00:33:20,080 because the Israeli law of return is very liberal in the sense of defining who is allowed to immigrate to Israel. 255 00:33:20,410 --> 00:33:26,140 It's it goes all the way to grant one Jewish grandparent is enough to. 256 00:33:27,030 --> 00:33:30,630 To authorise immigration to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. 257 00:33:31,620 --> 00:33:35,670 In fact, it's a variation of the Nuremberg laws of 1935. 258 00:33:38,040 --> 00:33:48,299 So quite a few are non-Jews, and some of them paraphrase a Russian writer, Alexei Nekrassov, 259 00:33:48,300 --> 00:33:56,880 who wrote while I quoted an English translation, You may not be a poet, but you must be a citizen. 260 00:33:56,910 --> 00:34:04,350 That was the motive. And today in Israel, you could hear you may not be a Jew, but you have to be a Zionist. 261 00:34:05,370 --> 00:34:14,130 And in fact, many of them are very brave and courageous soldiers and integrated in the in the Israeli mainstream quite successfully. 262 00:34:15,860 --> 00:34:25,520 Since we are talking about about 1 million of Russian Jews, it's not surprising that in today, 263 00:34:26,780 --> 00:34:33,200 tourist statistics, the largest group of visitors to Israel come from the former Soviet Union. 264 00:34:35,000 --> 00:34:38,210 Putin once said that Israel is a little bit of Russia. 265 00:34:40,580 --> 00:34:51,980 He visited there several times. There's a monument that he opened, inaugurated with Prime Minister Netanyahu to the heroes of the Second World War, 266 00:34:52,430 --> 00:34:56,780 not to the victims of the Holocaust, but it's in Netanya, in Israel. 267 00:34:57,590 --> 00:35:02,840 And there's quite important military and industrial cooperation between the two countries. 268 00:35:03,440 --> 00:35:17,210 And according to public opinion surveys, Russia is number one in terms among industrialised nations with positive opinion of Israel. 269 00:35:18,950 --> 00:35:24,920 It leads the other industrialised countries. So we are talking about. 270 00:35:26,320 --> 00:35:34,170 Uh. Impact that was important in the beginning of the Zionist project and continues to be very important today. 271 00:35:37,800 --> 00:35:44,520 Right wing or extreme right wing parties in Israel maintain links with the right wing groups in Russia itself. 272 00:35:45,720 --> 00:35:51,120 Just as Israel has become a role model for right wing movements across the world. 273 00:35:51,690 --> 00:35:55,350 I don't want to belabour the point, you know that yourselves. 274 00:35:58,050 --> 00:36:03,060 And in that sense, Israel is a very interesting case of partial modernisation. 275 00:36:03,420 --> 00:36:09,840 You remember half an hour ago I was talking about partial moral modernisation of Jews in the pale of settlement. 276 00:36:10,650 --> 00:36:14,100 And the Israel also is the case of partial modernisation, 277 00:36:15,000 --> 00:36:21,420 and that reflects Russian experience because all the Russian modernisers from Peter the Great to Stalin and TA, 278 00:36:22,440 --> 00:36:28,650 they wanted to modernise the country technically and culturally without political modernisation. 279 00:36:30,990 --> 00:36:38,790 And that's why Alexander Herzen, another Russian writer, dissident writer of the mid 19th century, 280 00:36:39,150 --> 00:36:43,110 was very much concerned about Genghis Khan with the Telegraph. 281 00:36:44,610 --> 00:36:49,530 Well, in today's terms, you could say with advanced surveillance techniques. 282 00:36:51,690 --> 00:37:04,560 That idea that you could have technical modernisation with political modernisation at the same time is what characterised some cases of development. 283 00:37:04,710 --> 00:37:13,110 And Israel, I think, fits that model in the sense that its political culture still carries the impact of ghettoised shtetls of Eastern Europe, 284 00:37:13,440 --> 00:37:26,290 this idea of ghettoised existence and the rejection of the new of the non Jew and technological and military modernisation of Israel. 285 00:37:26,700 --> 00:37:32,040 Start-Up Nation progresses apace with the modernisation of its political culture, 286 00:37:33,750 --> 00:37:44,970 because as you as Israel becomes more and more advanced in technology, particularly in military technology, its political modernisation is very clear. 287 00:37:45,990 --> 00:37:52,980 It has a disdain for public international law. It exemplifies reliance on military power. 288 00:37:54,300 --> 00:37:59,970 Israel supplies surveillance and military knowhow to most repressive regimes in the world. 289 00:38:01,320 --> 00:38:06,510 It practices overt discrimination that the new nationality law is very clear about it, 290 00:38:07,890 --> 00:38:19,260 and it inspires ethnic nationalism and and around the world, in fact, in Eastern Europe, in countries like Hungary, Baltic republics. 291 00:38:19,740 --> 00:38:23,640 Israel is hailed as an example of how a country should be run. 292 00:38:24,570 --> 00:38:35,820 It's run for the dominant group with excluded with the exclusion of the group, which groups which are dominated. 293 00:38:36,630 --> 00:38:40,320 Just to give you one example, and I'll stop there because I want to be disciplined. 294 00:38:42,990 --> 00:38:48,990 The recent elections three years ago, right in Israel, one of the parties, 295 00:38:48,990 --> 00:38:53,070 the United, are at least received 13 mandates, which is quite respectable number. 296 00:38:53,640 --> 00:38:57,210 They were not involved in coalition negotiations because they were, 297 00:38:58,020 --> 00:39:04,770 to use the expression, beyond the pale, literally, they would not be involved in that. 298 00:39:06,090 --> 00:39:13,550 Now, if you go somewhat North Latvia, the Baltic Republic of uh, 299 00:39:13,720 --> 00:39:21,540 where the Likud Party that gathered most votes in recent election was not involved 300 00:39:21,540 --> 00:39:26,490 in negotiations for coalition because they were considered pro-Russian party. 301 00:39:28,190 --> 00:39:40,580 So you have a certain similarity here that some a part of the dominant group and therefore legitimate and some internally remain beyond the pale. 302 00:39:41,180 --> 00:39:41,960 Thank you so much.