Israel Before Israel

TEHRAN (Iran News) The name of this region is Birobidzhan, and it is located in southeastern Russia as the first Jewish republic. Most people around the world are unaware of its existence, which, according to the author, is because the Zionist regime has sought to conceal this reality and has, in various ways, prevented media presence and coverage there.

This republic was the first Jewish country in the world. Before migration to Palestine, and prior to the rise of Zionism and the ideology of settling Jews in Palestine, Jews migrated to this republic. Jews were able to establish the first Jewish republic without seizing land from indigenous populations—a country whose entire population was Jewish.

What Israel and its Western supporters fear, the author argues, is the growth and promotion of the idea of Jews returning to this republic as their first homeland, and the possibility that the world might be persuaded of the feasibility of the safe return of Jews currently living in Palestine to the Republic of Birobidzhan, where they could live in peace and tranquility.

In that republic, Jewish culture prevails, and everyone speaks Yiddish, the European Jewish language. According to the author, Jews can live there without the presence of what he describes as anti-Jewish ideologies that are currently promoted by global Zionism.

Dr. Saleh Ali Al-Suhayqi authored a book—translated by Ali Rashidi—in which he traces the 2,000-year history of Jewish life. In the book, he writes that the area of the Jewish Autonomous Republic of Birobidzhan within the Russian Federation is approximately 41,277 square kilometers, roughly the size of a European country such as Switzerland, with a very low population density of 14 people per square mile. By contrast, population density in the Zionist regime is currently 945 people per square mile.

According to the author, this republic has the capacity to accommodate all Jews worldwide, including those who have occupied Palestinian land. Should this occur, he argues, it would be possible to put an end to the catastrophe of Palestinian Arab displacement across the world and facilitate their return to Palestine.

The author maintains that this idea contradicts the objectives of global Zionism and Western countries that benefit from the presence of the State of Israel in the Arab world and West Asia. He claims that Israel’s existence and survival in the region are tied to Western interests, arguing that Israel supports those interests by engaging in proxy wars against parties that threaten Western objectives—chief among them, in his view, Arab actors.

What Arabs, according to the author, do not know is that this Jewish republic was established in 1928 with the support and encouragement of American Jews, including a delegation that reportedly included Albert Einstein, the Jewish physicist, and Goldberg, the well-known American writer.

In this way, the author asserts, global Zionism deceived the world. At the start of World War II, Zionist leaders claimed they urgently needed Palestinian land as a national homeland because Jews were scattered and lacked a national refuge. This claim was then used, he argues, as a pretext to displace Palestinians and seize their land.

During the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this republic—like Chechnya—had the legal capacity to declare independence from the Russian Federation. However, the author claims that Zionism prevented such a declaration due to the sensitivity surrounding the emergence of a Jewish republic outside Palestine and the risk that awareness of this state among Jews worldwide would increase, potentially redirecting Jewish migration there instead of to Palestine. He adds that it is striking that Western governments, which encouraged Arabs and Muslims to wage jihad for Chechnya’s independence from Russia, could have done the same to support Birobidzhan’s independence and establish it as a Jewish state instead of Palestine.

The author notes that, despite this reality, Arabs rarely speak about it, and Arab citizens remain largely unaware of the issue—even though, in the 1980s, a delegation from Kuwait’s Al-Arabi magazine conducted a comprehensive visit to the republic to examine conditions there.

He argues that this fact could be promoted today: that there exists a land to which Jews living in Palestine could return, enabling Palestinians to return to their own homeland.

“Why does this media censorship exist?” the author asks. “Why have Arabs and Muslims remained silent about this truth?”