ABSTRACT
The Soviet media were intensifying their anti-Israel propaganda, increasingly stressing precisely those sensitive points which the Israeli programs to the USSR took pains to avoid. The anti-Israel position adopted by the USSR at this period was a logical outcome, given internal dynamism of totalitarian politics as a whole and Soviet politics in particular, of the motifs in Soviet domestic politics and developments within the Communist bloc. From mid-1948, the ideological tensions and trends, whose development, influence and implications within the USSR have been briefly discussed, began to appear in the People's Democracies. The change in the East European attitude toward Israel was rather the logical outcome of this anti-Zionist offensive than of any increased interest in the Arab world of which the earliest signs appeared in the summer of 1949. A flourishing black market and the comfortable villas of the "Zionist leaders" built on plots purchased with public money.
