By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — The ideology of antisemitism is not dying, it is changing forms somewhat, but the imagination of the ideologues does not go far enough. It uses the experience accumulated by the technologists of the witch trials. Blaming the Jews of the Diaspora for the creation and policies of the state of Israel has become a well-liked and popular form of international antisemitism.
The new state, formed in May 1948, was attacked by every Arab country that existed at the time. The U.N. resolution of November 29, 1947, establishing Israel was not a reliable way to protect the Jewish state from aggression. No international treaty in the Middle East was strong enough to prevent war. Military force was necessary. And such military force was delivered to Israel. It was not “aid,” but the sale of arms at speculative prices, much higher than those on the world arms market. The Israelis were paying such a high price because the U.N. imposed an embargo on the sale of arms to their country. The embargo was broken by Czechoslovakia. During World War II, Czechoslovakia, occupied by the Nazis, produced small arms and aircraft for the Wehrmacht. After the defeat of Germany, many weapons piled up in Czechoslovak factories unnecessarily. Suddenly the need to sell these weapons arose because of the mortal threat to the existence of the Jewish state and the need of the new Czechoslovakia for foreign currency. On the Israeli and Czechoslovakian sides there were enterprising people, mostly Jews, who successfully organized the sale and transport of weapons for the defense of Israel. The perpetrators were to be punished for saving the Jewish state. The natural perpetrators of what happened were Czechoslovak Jews.
On November 20, 1952, the trial of the “anti-state center” began in Prague. There were 11 Jews, two Czechs and one Slovak in the dock. All of them were accused of Zionism and espionage, of trying to change the state system and tear Czechoslovakia away from the socialist camp. The defendants, prominent Communist Party figures and government officials at the level of ministers and deputy ministers, were accused of plotting to overthrow the Communist regime and to restore capitalism. The main accused was the former General Secretary of the Communist Party and Deputy Chairman of the Czechoslovak Council of Ministers, Rudolf Slansky (Salzmann). The pronounced anti-Semitic orientation of the trial was evidenced by the nationality of most of the defendants — only three of the accused were not Jewish — and the nature of the charges brought against them.
On November 20-27, 1952, in Prague, the court found all 14 persons involved guilty of the alleged crimes (high treason, disclosure of military secrets, subversion, economic sabotage and sabotage, and attempts on the lives of Party and state leaders), sentenced 11 of them to death and three to life imprisonment.
From other trials held in the last years of Stalin’s life in the Soviet bloc countries (Laszlo Raik in Hungary, Traycho Kostov in Bulgaria), Slansky’s trial was characterized by an unprecedentedly blatant anti-Jewish bias. Its Jewish roots, like its bourgeois origins, were emphasized in every possible way, and most often it was associated with the alleged crimes of the accused. During the interrogations, the public prosecutors and the judges were not satisfied with only confessions of hostile acts against Czechoslovakia made under torture, but they also demanded that the accused confess that the interests of the Czech and Slovak working people were foreign to them as the Jews. The Jewish background of the vast majority of the accused was also referred to as a factor that facilitated the establishment of conspiratorial links.
At Slansky’s trial a particularly negative assessment of Zionism was given. The indictment stated that the traditional definition of Zionism as a reactionary-nationalist ideology and a political current of the Jewish bourgeoisie was insufficient. The court immediately agreed with the chief prosecutor who said that Zionism had become “a faithful servant of the most reactionary, militaristic and misanthropic circles of world imperialism and therefore involvement in Zionism must be regarded as one of the gravest crimes against humanity.” The accusation also included the claim that a Jew cannot help but be a Zionist and that there is a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, as alleged in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. All of the accused Jews who until recently had fought against Zionism and its influence in Czechoslovakia were forced under torture to declare that they still had Zionist beliefs and connections and that they were conducting activities hostile to Czechoslovakia at the behest of the Zionist world centers. In the Slansky trial, the object of fierce attacks and accusations was the state of Israel, which was presented as a tool of the warmongers of the new world war and imperialist pretenders to world domination.
The state of Israel, its government, and diplomatic representatives in Prague were also accused of hostile acts directly against Czechoslovakia. It was obvious from the confessions of the defendants that the government of Israel, through its official representatives in the capital of Czechoslovakia, established criminal conspiratorial contacts with Slansky and other defendants as early as 1948. It systematically interfered in the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia and it organized the illegal removal of weapons for the Israeli army from that country in a manner that was against the interests of Czechoslovakia. Among the witnesses who spoke at the trial, who fully corroborated all these charges, were two Israeli citizens — Oren, one of the leaders of the Mapam party, and Orenstein, a former employee of the Israeli diplomatic mission in Prague, then a businessman.
Arrested by Czechoslovak security authorities as early as 1951, they testified not only against the accused, but also against themselves, confessed to espionage and other crimes, but especially denounced in detail the “sinister role” of the State of Israel in the world. In 1953, a Czechoslovak court sentenced them both to life imprisonment, but they were released in 1954. Later in their books they described in detail how they were forced to give the testimony the court wanted.
Stalin was an expert on the national question and knew well the Communist Jews in the USSR and in Czechoslovakia. All of the Jews convicted in Prague, led by Slansky, were ardent supporters of the Kremlin. Stalin relied on Czechoslovak Jewish communists immediately after World War II, for he knew that they were cosmopolitans and most likely not Czechoslovak patriots who sought the country’s independence from the USSR. Their devotion to internationalism, that is, to the USSR, was stronger than their attachment to the Czechoslovak Republic. The hope for Israel’s transition to the socialist camp did not materialize. In Stalinist terms, the Czechoslovak Jews, who were the easiest to tie to the Jewish state, were to answer for this failure. Therefore, the chief prosecutor at the Slansky trial, Josef Urwalek, stated, “the involvement of the accused in Zionism must be regarded as one of the gravest crimes against humanity.” The prosecutor argued that Israeli representatives established “criminal connections with Slansky and the other accused, systematically interfering in the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia and obtaining trade agreements profitable for Israel and predatory for Czechoslovakia, and organized the secret export of weapons for the Israeli army from the country, contrary to the national interest.”
The Slansky case shook Czechoslovak Jewry, which lost 200,000 people during the Nazi occupation. After the Communist seizure of power in February 1948, Czechoslovak Jews began to leave the country, but emigration was banned in 1950. By the beginning of the Slansky trial, 18,000 Jews were living in the country. After the trial, Jewish lawyers, doctors, engineers, and scientists were arrested all over the country. The Jews feared a new Terezin (Theresienstadt), that is, the creation of a “model ghetto” in which the Nazis placed 140,000 Jews. Eighty-eight thousand Czechoslovak Jews were transferred to Auschwitz and exterminated.
Israel reacted officially to the Slansky trial even before it was over: On November 24, 1952, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharet told the Knesset to protest against the pogrom-antisemitic nature of the trial as a gross denigration of Zionism. On December 19, 1952, the Israeli government strongly rejected the charges against the Jewish people and Zionism, describing them as a new edition of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
The Slansky trial was a copy of the Moscow trials of the 1930s: monstrous, preposterous charges, torture, self-incrimination, brutal reprisals and posthumous rehabilitation of the victims. Unlike the Moscow trials, in which the convicted “enemies of the people” belonged to different nationalities, the Slansky trial was openly anti-Semitic. The charges were a blood libel against the Jewish people. Slansky’s trial tried the state of Israel for what it is. It condemned a group of high-ranking and loyal Czechoslovak Jews who had aided the Jewish state by supplying arms to the state factories. But these supplies could not have been their personal initiative, but were authorized by the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party on orders from Moscow. Israel turned out to be an independent and democratically oriented state, not a satellite of the USSR like Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak Communists, at the behest and direction of the Kremlin, avenged Israeli Jews for their independence and democracy by massacring their fellow Jews.
In 1952, the anti-justice of socialist Czechoslovakia, acting on command and script from Moscow, condemned innocent servants of its system for crimes it invented. Eleven of those convicted were hanged, their bodies burned, and their ashes scattered. The family of one of the executed, Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, Dr. Rudolf Margolius of Law, erected a plaque in the family burial plot at the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague in memory of the 39-year-old victim of the antisemitic massacre. The plaque is next to the grave of Franz Kafka, who described the trial and execution of an innocent man in his book “The Trial.” Kafka, a doctor of law, depicted the arbitrariness of the totalitarian system and the powerlessness of the victim. Next to the place of repose of the great composer of the fantastic “Trial” stands a plaque reminding of the terrible real antisemitic trial in his city.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.