Yesterday my wife and I contributed to the New York public radio pledge drive. I do it because I listen to NPR a lot, and because I often trash NPR on this site. You got to pay the piper.
Then last night I was working on the new bathroom and I put the radio on a bench and listened to Gal Beckerman talking about his book “When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry” (reviewed on our site by Matthew Phillips). Beckerman was interviewed for 8 minutes by Guy Raz. I was in agony.
You’d think that after 25 years there might be some distance from the struggle to save Soviet Jewry. You’d think that when the name Avigdor Lieberman comes into a conversation– as someone who was saved from being a persecuted minority in the FSU– there would be some mention of his own efforts to transfer Palestinians who were born in Israel out of Israel? What kind of minority rights do Palestinians have? Then this:
Persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union started with a policy Joseph Stalin initiated in 1937. [Per Beckerman] Every Soviet citizen was required to carry an internal passport and under “nationality,” Jews were required to list “Jewish.”
Well the country many of them were going to, Israel, also requires Jews to have “Jewish” as “nationality” in their passports. What has that type of distinction done to minority rights in Israel?
I have no idea what kind of Zionist Gal Beckerman is. But he spoke admiringly of the “desperate” Zionists inside the Soviet Union, and their plot to hijack a plane to dramatize their cause, and lamented that they were sentenced to death even though they didn’t pull off the hijacking. (Can we apply that standard to the Yemenite plotters?) Desperation. You might think that Raz would have paused to contrast the million-times-honored Jewish law of return that grants a Ukrainian the right to Palestinian land, and the never-honored right of return that was supposed to allow Palestinians to regain property stolen from them, which has fostered desperation of its own…
The worst part was about Scoop Jackson. Henry Jackson the Washington Democratic Senator and gateway drug to the Establishment’s addiction to neoconservatism. Why did Jackson take up the cause? Raz asked, and then Beckerman responded by invoking principle.
Beckerman says Jackson’s interest in the movement was triggered in August 1972 when the Soviets started to let out some Jews, but was requiring them to pay a “diploma tax” for education they had received from the Soviet state. This bothered Jackson especially because, at the same time, they were involved with the U.S. in trade talks and seeking so-called “preferred trading status.”
“Henry Jackson said, ‘You know what, no. If they want these things — these goodies from the U.S. — they have to do something as well. And what we want from them in exchange is for them to change something about their internal policy that’s making Soviet Jews in particular suffer,’ ” Beckerman says.
Over the next decade, those sentiments had a profound influence on American foreign policy.
Could it have had anything to do with Jackson’s presidential ambitions? Could it have had anything to do with the role of the Israel lobby in our politics? I wonder how many other people were also persecuted by the Soviet Union…
