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When the Soviets began allowing Jews to emigrate to Israel in 1969, it was mainly due to political pressure. However, I have read that another reason was that the Soviets secretly hoped to swamp Israel's economy.

Suppose that sometime in 1972, the Soviets saw that the limited amounts of immigrants they were letting out wasn't working, and the idea to let them all go at once was floated in the Politburo. The Politburo considers it, keeping in mind that a mass immigration of Soviet Jews is politically undersirable and would be a propaganda coup against the Russians. In the end, they come to the following conclusions:

* Such an influx is guaranteed to destroy Israel economically, because there are more Jews in the Soviet Union than Israel itself.

* Israel is the only thing preventing the Soviets from dominating the region. Remove Israel, America's precious asset that allows it to leapfrog Soviet influence in Egypt and Syria, and the Americans can be driven out.

* We don't even really like the Jews living here anyway, and the pressure is so intense, they'll all leave eventually in limited numbers. Letting them leave in these numbers allows Israel to absorb them more easily, and only strengthens it.

In other words, the benefits outweigh the costs.

So in 1972, the Soviets suddenly announce that any Jew who wants to will be given an immigration visa. Also, the immigrants will no longer leave by train to Austria and be picked up by the Jewish Agency, they will be flown directly from Moscow to Tel Aviv (this would prevent any of them from applying for a US refugee visa in Austria rather than going to Israel, as a small number were starting to do in the early 1970s).

In 1973, the Soviet Union's Jewish population was 2,644,000. Israel's was 2,632,000. You get the idea of what kind of influx we are talking about here.

So what happens next? How does the Yom Kippur War and subsequent Israeli history go.
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