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The Secret Israeli-Soviet "War"

Discussion in 'Military History' started by GRW, Jan 11, 2020.

  1. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Well, you live and learn.
    "In 2004, a student at Bar-Ilan University discovered a fascinating episode that the Israeli public is not that familiar with: a secret war between Israeli and Soviet forces during the War of Attrition in 1970. An interview with a Soviet army veteran living in Siberia in a local paper about a Soviet-Israeli battle caught the eye of the student, Boris Dolin.
    “Soviet missiles took off in a storm of smoke and sand and turned toward Israeli Phantoms, which were tearing through the skies. The Israeli air force hit the Soviet units on the ground hard,” Dolin read, completely taking him aback.
    “I was sitting there in front of the screen, when I read that Israel fought against the Soviet Union. That’s about like reading that we fought aliens,” he said this week. “I’d never heard about it before, and the whole story sounded totally unbelievable.”
    But he subsequently came across more and more testimonies from the Russian side, and decided to expand the search. “I scoured the internet for former Soviet soldiers who fought against us that accursed summer, and I flew to Moscow to meet with some of them,” he says. They were waiting for him at a club for Soviet veterans in a Moscow suburb, crowded into a small office. Some of them gave him memoirs they had written. Others spoke with him about their experiences. To his surprise, he learned that they held an annual reunion, with representatives from the Egyptian Embassy and the Russian Defense Ministry in attendance, but when he tried to join the event, he got the distinct impression that he would be an unwanted guest.
    He also went to the Israel National Archives, where he sat and went through crates packed with documents, searching for testimonies from a half-century ago in Israelis sources.
    When the dots connected, he had uncovered an episode highly relevant to recent developments in the Middle East. While the mostly forgotten War of Attrition pitted Israel and Egypt against each other, in the summer of 1970 Israel found itself in direct confrontation with a superpower for the first time."
    www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-secret-israel-soviet-union-war-nobody-knew-about-1.8379133?fbclid=IwAR2WaYM9nCPXm8HPK1jPaZedw6JtjurkwG10-2LxW9XnJB5QE7HIemBcfNQ
     
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  2. bronk7

    bronk7 Well-Known Member

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    ....kind of ridiculous of the Russians to berate Israel for defending herself
    ...so, of course, it wasn't Russian ground forces fighting Israeli ground forces?
    ...the Israeli Air Forces did have problems intitally in the Yom-Kippur War..also they had problems with the Russian AT missiles ....but I thought they eventually readjusted to the SAMS --and! they won that war also.....so the Soviets, and Soviet ''system'''/ ''systems'' lost
    Malyutka (AT-3 Sagger) Anti-Tank Guided Missile | Military-Today.com

    ..the Israelis were at a huge disadvantage in all the wars:
    outnumbered in all categories
    more or less surrounded --by much larger countries--
    many fronts to defend
    had a very narrow front that should've been easily cut in half
    --yet they won!!
    here on the map you can barely see tiny Israel

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jan 12, 2020
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  3. Jack B

    Jack B Active Member

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    Interesting! I'd not heard about that incident.

    I think Stalin was initially pro-Israel, hoping the new state would be socialist and undermine British interests. He then reversed himself and started supporting Arab interests.

    Russia and the USSR have a deplorable history of anti-semitism, no surprise that Israel wasn't popular with the USSR (or Russia today). And no surprise that Russian was one of the most common languages spoken by Israelis at one point.
     
    Last edited: Jan 13, 2020
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  4. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Yeah, the original headline is a bit misleading. The Israelis go into every war knowing they're fighting for their very survival, so I suppose that gives them an edge.
     
  5. wm.

    wm. Well-Known Member

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    Israel allied itself with Russia's enemies so reasonably the USSR abandoned it.

    Even more, at that time the USSR supported freedom and anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa. That was reasonable too.
    Israeli cooperation with the somewhat imperialistic US and with the British and French colonial empires was incompatible with that.
    The tripartite aggression (Israel, Britain, France) on Egypt in 1956 was a good example of that. Israel basically acted there as a lapdog of colonial powers.
     
  6. Jack B

    Jack B Active Member

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    I think Israel was acting in it's own interests there in '56. Israel isn't the kind of dog you want on your lap.
    The USA stood against the Tripartite actions in that case. Partly because it was also objecting to the USSR's 'support' of Hungary's 'freedom'.
     
  7. wm.

    wm. Well-Known Member

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    You are right, the lapdog thing was too much, it was an alliance of equals.
     

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