AH Challenge: Cold War flip- Israel as a Soviet ally/client, Arab states pro-West

Not sure how you get this to work but how do we get a Cold War where the Israelis are supported or even allied to the USSR and the Arab states like Egypt and Syria supported by the West?
Best way I can think of is Suez going slightly differently and Britain and France end up attacking Israel to keep them out of Egypt leading to the same sort of break with Europe that happened to Egypt IOTL. Israel would still need arms to protect them from the Arab states and the US wasn't touching the region in the early/mid '50s so the USSR is the only source of arms. A pro-Soviet Israel probably makes the Syrians pro-Western and Jordon was pro-Western IOTL.
 
Really? I knew the Egyptians et al had periods of being pro-Western on either end of the Cold War but when was Israel ever pro-Soviet?
 
Ok I see what you mean. If my Alt-Suez keeps that going or strengthens it the Cold War in the Mideast is going to look very different.
 

Nikephoros

Banned
Ok I see what you mean. If my Alt-Suez keeps that going or strengthens it the Cold War in the Mideast is going to look very different.

Nassar was in power by then, but he didn't really become a friend to the Soviets until after the Suez crisis.
 
It wouldn't be that hard, all you would have to do is make America more Anti-Semetic than it is in OTL. I'm not sure how that would be achived though. Maybe have more incidents like the one with Leo Frank take place.

Leo Frank was a Jew who was accused falsely of killing a woman, and then lynched for it. if more cases like this happen, America might become more Anti-Semetic and less trsuting of Jews.
 
I doubt you could get the Soviet Union to support Israel, they might be argued as the second most Anti-Semitic society of the 20th century. After all, in the 70's they allowed the Jews who could afford to to get the heck out.

Though, I suppose, if you were to make some pre-war changes to Russian culture, and decrease the general Anti-Semitism in society, you might have the USSR sponsoring Israeli statehood within the security council at the expense of British and American interests. America still develops and becomes oil-addicted per our TL and buys oil at higher or relative prices, supporting a lot of Arab regimes in the area. That might flip the two.
 
Well, first you get a wildly popular but anti-Semitic businessman to run for President.

Oh, wait....

Seriously, though, one could manage to do something with the "right" president in office. All that it would take would be a policy of benign neglect, where an administration sees the oil offered by the Arab states as being more important than a stringent defense of Israel's borders.
 
Early OTL Israeli leadership were primarily communists and socialists, anyway, and far more were Russian than American or British. A Stalin who's willing to help early Israel will very quickly find a stalwart ally who remembers that the USSR was the second country to acknowledge Israel's existence.
 
Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral] Marshall about it. He'd no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed. When the country went backward — and Republican in the election of 1946, this incident loomed large on the DP [Displaced Person] program. The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes. Look at the Congress[ional] attitude on DP — and they all come from DPs.

Personal diary of Harry S. Truman 6:00 P. M. Monday (21 July 1947)
 

MacCaulay

Banned
It wouldn't be that hard, all you would have to do is make America more Anti-Semetic than it is in OTL. I'm not sure how that would be achived though. Maybe have more incidents like the one with Leo Frank take place.

You don't need anything like that.

Note to half the thread: Ameri-centric thinking doesn't need to go anywhere near this.

The Soviets were happy to be friends with Israel for the first few years of it's existence. Heck, people often forget that before '56 when it's sugar daddy became France, it got most of it's weaponry from Czechoslovakia, aka: the USSR. PBS' The 50 Years War has an interview with Menachem Begin where he basically spells it out and says straight away that the Czechs were their sole open arms supplier in the War of Independence. The US wouldn't sell them anything.

I've got a friend who owns a Mauser that takes a 7.62mm round because the Israeli government paid the Czechs to modify hundreds of them. They're the only kind that's more common that the Turkish Mausers. If anything, it's more likely that the Israelis would become something like Yugoslavia: playing both sides of the street.
 
Wasn't most of the Czech stuff acquired before the Communist coup? I thought late '40s Czechoslovakia sold to anyone and everyone with no regard for Cold War politics?
I agree the US is irrelevant since we didn't really deal with Israel until after the Six Day War a good decade or more after PODs I'm thinking of.
Also to the issues of Russian anti-Semitism the Soviets could easily have hid it internally or blamed it on the Czars/Stalin if they felt it would get them a solid Mideast client. Hell the atheist superpower backed Islamist groups IOTL.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
So in other words, it's mildly surprising that history turned out the way that it did, and that this isn't a DBWI.

It's mostly because of 1956, and the confrontation over the Suez Canal. That put the Israelis on the British and French side, and thus the Soviets gravitated to the Arab side. But even then there's still a precedent for Western support of an Arab state: in '67 during the Six Day War, Israeli Centurions faced off against Jordanian models of the same type. A few years later during an Israeli crossborder raid, the same IDF tanks faced Jordanian M-60s while in the sky Royal Jordanian Air Force pilots flew British-built Hawker Hunters.

You'd have to take out the Suez Crisis. And if you did that, I could totally see a Yugoslavia-type Israel surrounded by Arab states that continue to get Western arms just like Iraq did until the mid-60s and Jordan does to this day.
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
There's a new thread on this? This site needs an AH FAQ so that people can be spared the correct but somewhat repetitive 'this happened OTL' response.
 
Top