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Washington Experts Evaluate Moscow’s Move Against Israel

February 13, 1953
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Neither President Eisenhower nor the State Department had any comment today on Moscow’s diplomatic break with Israel, but diplomatic experts here predicted that all the Soviet satellite countries would follow the Kremlin’s lead and would sever relations with the Jewish State.

It is assumed that Bulgaria will be the only Communist country to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel even after the other Iron Curtain countries withdraw their representatives from Tel Aviv. The assumption is based on the belief that Moscow will want one of its satellites to remain in Israel as custodian for the huge property interests of the Soviet Government in the Jewish State, property which belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church when the country was under British Mandate.

Highly placed foreign experts here all agreed today that the actual reason for Moscow’s break with Israel was not the bombing of the Soviet Legation in Tel Aviv, but the opportunity that presented itself to bring the Soviet campaign against the Jews and Israel to a dramatic climax. These experts are all of the opinion that the anti-Jewish campaign in the Soviet Union and in the satellite countries will now be intensified.

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