Barry Gilheany discusses Soviet anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

The current crisis in the Labour Party concerning anti-Semitism has much to do (but not exclusively) to do polarising positions of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the related issue as to what extent antizionism is a variant of; an intrinsic part of or completely distinct from anti-Semitism. Much of the ballast behind the demonization of Zionism particularly its most explosive constituents, that there is an affinity between Zionism and Nazism and that there was a history of strategic collaboration between both was provided by the propaganda of former Soviet Union and its satellite states in the Cold War era. I now provide a brief history of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign and how it relates to the anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic controversies of today as they impact on the crisis on the Left, particularly in the British Labour Party, on anti-Semitism.

In 1985, the KGB-supervised Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, known by its Russian acronym as AKSO, issued a brochure, Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism. The brochure was translated into English and distributed abroad by Novosti Press Agency, a news service and an important weapon of Soviet foreign propaganda (Tabarovsky: 2019).

This brochure portrayed a harrowing vista of Zionism. Senior members of the AKSO, most of whom were prominent Soviet Jews (a deliberate choice by the KGB in order to stymie accusations of anti-Semitism), claimed that they had cast iron proof of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. They described Zionists of facilitators of Nazi expansionism, accused them of falsely inflating the import of anti-Semitism and Jewish victimhood in the Second World War and claimed that the Haavara 1930s transfer agreement that enabled the emigration of 60,000 German Jews to Palestine had made it "easier" for the Nazis to unleash World War II. They alleged that Zionists had colluded in the genocide of “Slavs, Jews and some other peoples of Europe”. They rejected in advance any attempts by the “Zionist press” to describe the committee’s claims as anti-Semitic and disassociated Zionists from Jews (Tabarovsky: p.1).

The cynical distortion of history that this scurrilous publication promoted was an integral part of a massive Soviet anti-Zionist campaign that assumed a particular momentum in 1967 - the year of the Six Day War. This campaign used the significant Soviet broadcasting and publishing capacity abroad as well as front organisations and allied communist and other far left organisations in the West and Third World countries to disseminate its messages to foreign audiences. In the course of the campaign hundreds of antizionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles were published in the USSR and were translated into numerous foreign languages in addition to the demonization of Zionism in many films, lectures, broadcasts and cartoons; many of the anti-Semitic tropes used were borrowed secretly from Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion despite Soviet protestations of antifascism and many of the authors were directly linked to Communist Party leaders and the KGB (Tabarovsky: p.2).

Since Soviet generated anti-Zionism was a significant factor in the morphing of perceptions of Zionism of many on the Left from an emancipatory movement for the Jewish people to one associated with racism, colonialism, militarism, Nazism and apartheid and contributed to the infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which held Zionism to be a form of racism and since its memes figure prominently in the anti-Semitic discourse of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, it is important to examine the origins of the far-left’s anti-Zionist discourse, especially its intersection points with anti-Semitism.

The idea of Zionism as a hostile ideology developed in the early 1950s in the post-World War II USSR as Israel’s alignment with the ‘imperialist camp’ rather than the Soviet Union became clear. Allegations of Zionist conspiracy was to be a salient feature of Stalinist purge trials. The Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia in 1952 in particular featured the idea of ‘international Zionism’ as a worldwide conspiracy aiming to destroy socialism. (Tabarovsky: p.2) The spectre of the ‘Cosmopolitan Jew’ also loomed large in the ‘Jewish doctors’ trial just before Stalin’s death.

A key moment in the early stage of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign was the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 which with its exclusive focus on the extermination of European Jewry in the Shoah/Holocaust challenged Soviet concepts of Slavic victimhood in World War II. The Soviet response was to attack Israel’s diplomatic relationship with West Germany which the Soviets depicted as a ‘fascist’ heir to Nazi Germany. Drawing upon the enormous sacrifices of the Soviet people during World War II for whom fascism and Nazism were the greatest evils imaginable, the Soviet propagandist sought to portray Zionism as an ‘obvious’ and natural bedfellow with the evils of Nazism and fascism and to evoke a visceral reaction based not on facts but pure emotion. In the 1960s also, Soviet propagandists also began to develop the idea that Zionism was an outgrowth of Judaism which it saw, with its concept of Jews as a chosen people, as an inherently racist religion and linked to American imperialism and Israeli colonialism (Tabarovsky: p.3)

Acceleration Point: The Six Day War and Soviet Antizionist Campaign

The defeat of the USSR’s Arab allies in the Arab-Israel “Six Day War” was pivotal in Soviet anti-Zionist campaigning, The ideological triumph of the ‘anti-imperialist’ camp and the awakening of national feeling among Soviet Jews generated by Israel’s victory represented for Soviet ideologues the revival of the old international Zionist enemy and its Jewish fifth column in the Soviet fatherland. This Zionist triumph therefore necessitated a new propaganda tool for domestic and foreign consumption.

Now writers such as the KGB operative Yuri Ivanov and Trofim Kichko drew on age-old tropes of Jewish conspiracy and influence to present in an article titled ‘What is Zionism’ to present Zionism as a centrally-controlled international system whose tentacles reached into all aspects of global politics, finance and the media, had infinite resources and sought to establish monopolistic domination over the entire world. Kichko in in his 1968 book Zionism and Judaism attributed the ‘crimes’ of Israeli ‘aggressors’ to Judaism posing the question ‘Weren’t the actions of the Israeli extremists during their latest aggression against the Arab countries in keeping with the Torah?’

The animus against Judaism reflected the Soviet struggles against religion with Judaism persecuted with particular harshness through the prohibition of the study of Hebrew and of the training of the next generation of clergy in the 1970s and 1980s. Such religious persecution rendered Soviet claims that it was not anti-Semitic but merely anti-Zionist untrue.

More of the same staple was to follow. One of the USSR’s foundational anti-Zionist texts was Ivanov’s 1969 book Caution Zionism! It described Zionists as representative of colonialist powers, hostile to the working people of Palestine; portrayed Judaism as the world’s most inhumane religion which through its ‘chosen people’ idea of Jews spawned the world’s most brutal nationalism. Reflecting early Bolshevik assimilationist beliefs on the Jewish question, Ivanov sought to discredit the idea of a single Jewish nation as a ‘false and reactionary’ Zionist invention which promoted a ghetto mentality amongst Jews and therefore provoked anti-Semitism (Tabarovsky: pp3-4).

The Nazi-Zionist Analogy

In the eyes of many, the drawing of analogies or comparisons between the ideologies of Nazism and Zionism and between the actions and policies of the State of Israel and Nazi Germany are the most preposterous and gratuitously offensive features of anti-Zionist discourse. 1983 saw the publication of two books of this genre which attracted international publicity thanks to the campaign by US Jewish organisations to facilitate the emigration of Soviet Jews. Both were authored by Lev Korneev; a notorious anti-Semite with a doctoral degree. On the Course of Aggression and Fascism detailed Zionism’s alleged ‘criminal alliance with the Fascists’ and blamed the Zionists for the extermination of non-Zionist Jews during the Shoah/Holocaust. The Class Essence of Zionism declared Jews a ‘fifth column in any country.’ (Tabarovsky: p.4)

Each book publication spawned an infinity of reviews and ‘analytical pieces’ aimed at different audiences, including the military, party apparatchiks, trade unions and youth. In what could be a comment on the current convulsions in the Labour Party, the Washington Post ‘s report on this output in 1979 observed: ‘Soviet bureaucrats vehemently reject suggestions that “anti-Zionism” means “anti-Semitism.” But to many Soviet Jews, it is distinction without a difference. ‘(Tabarovsky: p.4)

In addition, the Soviets produced several documentaries in support of this campaign including one, The Concealed and the Apparent: Goals and Actions of the Zionists, deemed to be so inflammatory in its manipulation of historical footage and deeply anti-Semitic imagery and Nazi-Zionist parallels that it was only shown to selected audiences. (Tabarovsky: p.4)

The early 1980s saw the creation of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public whose remit was to produce brochures and deliver press conferences on the evils of Zionism and Israel. A 1985 TASS broadcast commenting on one of the committee’s English-language brochures announced:

Zionist leaders are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews annihilated by the Nazis. It is precisely the Zionists who assisted the Nazi butchers by helping them to make up the lists of doomed inmates of ghettoes, escorting the latter to the places of extermination and convinced them to resign to the butchers. (Tabarovsky: p.4)

The Antizionist Campaign Goes Global

The main driver behind the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign in the later years of the Cold War was the prevention of Jewish emigration from the USSR to Israel and the related Western condemnations of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. The Soviets did appear to believe that a vast Zionist conspiracy did exist aimed at undermining the USSR and socialism itself. Indeed, by the mid-1970s the KGB felt that the Zionist threat was so dangerous that it justified setting up a special department focusing specifically on Zionism (Tabarovsky: p.4).

The Soviets fought Zionism abroad through information warfare conducted via its powerful state-owned media apparatus whose goal was to ‘spread the truth about the USSR in all the continents. Perhaps the most important constituent of the Soviet media colossus (including Radio Moscow which broadcasted more than 1,000 hours per week in over 80 languages and the multi-lingual circulation of tens of millions of copies of newspapers and magazines) as the Novosti Press Agency, the USSR’s main foreign broadcasting arm and chief distributor of foreign propaganda, which worked in over 110 countries.

The Soviets organised their foreign antizionist messaging to suit their particular foreign policy concerns for that country or audience. For example, in Africa it was about South African apartheid and Zionism. In Latin America it was about American imperialism and Zionism.

In the Middle East the head of the Anti-Zionist Committee, General David Dragunsky, cultivated close relationships with the Arab world and especially Syria with the Soviet-Syrian Friendship Treaty of 1980 specifically named Zionism a common enemy.

Arab-language anti-Zionist literature was an important part of Soviet propaganda aimed at the Middle East. It served as source material for Mahmoud Abbas’s 1982 PhD dissertation which he undertook at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University and defended at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies – an important institution within the Academy of Sciences which regularly spewed out ‘scholarly’ works demonising Zionism and Israel. The dissertation was published as an Arabic book in 2011 under the title The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism. The book replicates several mainstays of Soviet antizionism including alleged Zionist collusion with the Nazis during the Shoah/Holocaust, casting doubt on the number of victims of it and the historical falsification that Adolf Eichmann was abducted by Mossad and later executed to prevent him from disclosing the “secret” of Zionist involvement in the Shoah/Holocaust. (Tabarovsky: p.6).

In July 1990, less than a year before the collapse of the USSR, an editorial in Pravda admitted the wrongs of the anti-Zionist campaign of the previous quarter century. It said that:


Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Black Hundred and of fascist origin.



It acknowledged that ‘Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism and on Jews in general’. But the damage had been done. A 1990 Soviet poll showed that a significant percentage of Soviet citizens thought that Zionism was ‘the policy of establishing the world supremacy of Jews’ and an ‘ideology used to justify Israeli aggression in the Middle East’. With the political freedoms brought about through Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of perestroika came the emergence of the fanatical anti-Semitic Pamyat (Memory) and Otechshestvo (Homeland) which fused Nazi and fascist ideas and Russian ethnic nationalism and led by some of the same ideologues who had waged the Soviet antizionist campaign. After the demise of the USSR, two million Jews left Russia in the following decade (Tabarovsky: p.6).

The history of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign is a case study in how, discursively and in praxis, antizionism and antisemitism can become deeply enmeshed. In accordance with their ideological bearings they never engaged in explicit Jew hate, indignantly asserting (like many accused of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party) that they were merely antizionist. But their strategic deployment of anti-Zionism enabled antisemitism to flourish. That antisemitism can be a consequence of antizionist discourse and practice is proved by the example of Poland “Cleanse the Party of Zionists” campaign in 1968 which quickly descended into an anti-Semitic witch hunt, leading to expulsions and the forced emigration of 15,000 Jews (Tabarovsky: p.7).

Conclusion

The Soviet anti-Zionist campaign of 1967-1988 was one of agitprop and disinformation. It pickled together and weaponised narratives from twisted, out-of-context, alternative facts and bogus historiography. It used age-old propaganda techniques such as deception, guilt by association to drive home key messages. It shamelessly manipulated people’s memories and emotions such as those of the massive sufferings of the Soviet people during the “Great Patriotic War” and used both Soviet Jews and Muslims as propaganda pawns.

By substituting anti-Zionism for anti-Semitism, it appealed to many well-intentioned and progressive individuals (not useful idiots) in the West who would have been otherwise repelled by overt anti-Semitic overtones. Looking at the content of bitter debates over the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the Labour Party; Ken Livingstone’s view that Hitler supported Zionism in the 1930s and Jewish emigration to Palestine “before he went mad and killed six million Jews”; that Zionists collaborated in the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944 to ensure that some Jews be allowed to go to Palestine; that Israel was a settler-colonial enterprise founded on the same racist ideology as Nazism and Apartheid-era South Africa; that it is an outpost of American imperialism ; that Zionists through the tentacles of Israeli embassies and advocacy/ campaign organisations and favoured spokespersons which comprise the ubiquitous Israeli Lobby control the world’s banks, media outlets and political decision-makers, one can trace a not so distant lineage to the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign (Tabarovsky: p.7).

Just as the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign had nothing really to do with justice for the Palestinians and proper peace and reconciliation with the Israelis but was about bolstering one of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrannies so their copycats in the Labour Party, many of whom have migrated from the Marxist-Leninist left, in treating Israel-Palestine as an empty vessel into which to project their own ideological and identity phantasies (as certain far right figures such as Katie Hopkins and lobbies such as Christian Dispensationalists project their pathologies onto Israel). Labour anti-Zionists may vehemently abjure any anti-Semitic prejudice or motivation but as has already been shown by those who have mined the seams of Corbynista and (purportedly) pro-Palestinian social media ecology these two “antis” have formed more than the occasional marriage of convenience. The post-Soviet careers of the manufacturers of the Soviet antizionist campaign provide a possible clue as to the ultimate political destiny of Labour’s antizionist campaign, if they have not already formed (informally at least) their red-brown alliance.

References

Izabella Tabarovsky, 2019,  Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism Fathom Journal, May.

⏩  Barry Gilheany has joined the Jewish Labour Movement as an affiliate member and encourages fellow labour movement colleagues concerned about Labour’s anti-Semitism problem to do the same.

Soviet Anti-Zionism And Labour Anti-Semitism: A Chronicle Foretold And Retold?

Barry Gilheany discusses Soviet anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

The current crisis in the Labour Party concerning anti-Semitism has much to do (but not exclusively) to do polarising positions of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the related issue as to what extent antizionism is a variant of; an intrinsic part of or completely distinct from anti-Semitism. Much of the ballast behind the demonization of Zionism particularly its most explosive constituents, that there is an affinity between Zionism and Nazism and that there was a history of strategic collaboration between both was provided by the propaganda of former Soviet Union and its satellite states in the Cold War era. I now provide a brief history of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign and how it relates to the anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic controversies of today as they impact on the crisis on the Left, particularly in the British Labour Party, on anti-Semitism.

In 1985, the KGB-supervised Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, known by its Russian acronym as AKSO, issued a brochure, Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism. The brochure was translated into English and distributed abroad by Novosti Press Agency, a news service and an important weapon of Soviet foreign propaganda (Tabarovsky: 2019).

This brochure portrayed a harrowing vista of Zionism. Senior members of the AKSO, most of whom were prominent Soviet Jews (a deliberate choice by the KGB in order to stymie accusations of anti-Semitism), claimed that they had cast iron proof of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. They described Zionists of facilitators of Nazi expansionism, accused them of falsely inflating the import of anti-Semitism and Jewish victimhood in the Second World War and claimed that the Haavara 1930s transfer agreement that enabled the emigration of 60,000 German Jews to Palestine had made it "easier" for the Nazis to unleash World War II. They alleged that Zionists had colluded in the genocide of “Slavs, Jews and some other peoples of Europe”. They rejected in advance any attempts by the “Zionist press” to describe the committee’s claims as anti-Semitic and disassociated Zionists from Jews (Tabarovsky: p.1).

The cynical distortion of history that this scurrilous publication promoted was an integral part of a massive Soviet anti-Zionist campaign that assumed a particular momentum in 1967 - the year of the Six Day War. This campaign used the significant Soviet broadcasting and publishing capacity abroad as well as front organisations and allied communist and other far left organisations in the West and Third World countries to disseminate its messages to foreign audiences. In the course of the campaign hundreds of antizionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles were published in the USSR and were translated into numerous foreign languages in addition to the demonization of Zionism in many films, lectures, broadcasts and cartoons; many of the anti-Semitic tropes used were borrowed secretly from Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion despite Soviet protestations of antifascism and many of the authors were directly linked to Communist Party leaders and the KGB (Tabarovsky: p.2).

Since Soviet generated anti-Zionism was a significant factor in the morphing of perceptions of Zionism of many on the Left from an emancipatory movement for the Jewish people to one associated with racism, colonialism, militarism, Nazism and apartheid and contributed to the infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which held Zionism to be a form of racism and since its memes figure prominently in the anti-Semitic discourse of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, it is important to examine the origins of the far-left’s anti-Zionist discourse, especially its intersection points with anti-Semitism.

The idea of Zionism as a hostile ideology developed in the early 1950s in the post-World War II USSR as Israel’s alignment with the ‘imperialist camp’ rather than the Soviet Union became clear. Allegations of Zionist conspiracy was to be a salient feature of Stalinist purge trials. The Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia in 1952 in particular featured the idea of ‘international Zionism’ as a worldwide conspiracy aiming to destroy socialism. (Tabarovsky: p.2) The spectre of the ‘Cosmopolitan Jew’ also loomed large in the ‘Jewish doctors’ trial just before Stalin’s death.

A key moment in the early stage of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign was the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 which with its exclusive focus on the extermination of European Jewry in the Shoah/Holocaust challenged Soviet concepts of Slavic victimhood in World War II. The Soviet response was to attack Israel’s diplomatic relationship with West Germany which the Soviets depicted as a ‘fascist’ heir to Nazi Germany. Drawing upon the enormous sacrifices of the Soviet people during World War II for whom fascism and Nazism were the greatest evils imaginable, the Soviet propagandist sought to portray Zionism as an ‘obvious’ and natural bedfellow with the evils of Nazism and fascism and to evoke a visceral reaction based not on facts but pure emotion. In the 1960s also, Soviet propagandists also began to develop the idea that Zionism was an outgrowth of Judaism which it saw, with its concept of Jews as a chosen people, as an inherently racist religion and linked to American imperialism and Israeli colonialism (Tabarovsky: p.3)

Acceleration Point: The Six Day War and Soviet Antizionist Campaign

The defeat of the USSR’s Arab allies in the Arab-Israel “Six Day War” was pivotal in Soviet anti-Zionist campaigning, The ideological triumph of the ‘anti-imperialist’ camp and the awakening of national feeling among Soviet Jews generated by Israel’s victory represented for Soviet ideologues the revival of the old international Zionist enemy and its Jewish fifth column in the Soviet fatherland. This Zionist triumph therefore necessitated a new propaganda tool for domestic and foreign consumption.

Now writers such as the KGB operative Yuri Ivanov and Trofim Kichko drew on age-old tropes of Jewish conspiracy and influence to present in an article titled ‘What is Zionism’ to present Zionism as a centrally-controlled international system whose tentacles reached into all aspects of global politics, finance and the media, had infinite resources and sought to establish monopolistic domination over the entire world. Kichko in in his 1968 book Zionism and Judaism attributed the ‘crimes’ of Israeli ‘aggressors’ to Judaism posing the question ‘Weren’t the actions of the Israeli extremists during their latest aggression against the Arab countries in keeping with the Torah?’

The animus against Judaism reflected the Soviet struggles against religion with Judaism persecuted with particular harshness through the prohibition of the study of Hebrew and of the training of the next generation of clergy in the 1970s and 1980s. Such religious persecution rendered Soviet claims that it was not anti-Semitic but merely anti-Zionist untrue.

More of the same staple was to follow. One of the USSR’s foundational anti-Zionist texts was Ivanov’s 1969 book Caution Zionism! It described Zionists as representative of colonialist powers, hostile to the working people of Palestine; portrayed Judaism as the world’s most inhumane religion which through its ‘chosen people’ idea of Jews spawned the world’s most brutal nationalism. Reflecting early Bolshevik assimilationist beliefs on the Jewish question, Ivanov sought to discredit the idea of a single Jewish nation as a ‘false and reactionary’ Zionist invention which promoted a ghetto mentality amongst Jews and therefore provoked anti-Semitism (Tabarovsky: pp3-4).

The Nazi-Zionist Analogy

In the eyes of many, the drawing of analogies or comparisons between the ideologies of Nazism and Zionism and between the actions and policies of the State of Israel and Nazi Germany are the most preposterous and gratuitously offensive features of anti-Zionist discourse. 1983 saw the publication of two books of this genre which attracted international publicity thanks to the campaign by US Jewish organisations to facilitate the emigration of Soviet Jews. Both were authored by Lev Korneev; a notorious anti-Semite with a doctoral degree. On the Course of Aggression and Fascism detailed Zionism’s alleged ‘criminal alliance with the Fascists’ and blamed the Zionists for the extermination of non-Zionist Jews during the Shoah/Holocaust. The Class Essence of Zionism declared Jews a ‘fifth column in any country.’ (Tabarovsky: p.4)

Each book publication spawned an infinity of reviews and ‘analytical pieces’ aimed at different audiences, including the military, party apparatchiks, trade unions and youth. In what could be a comment on the current convulsions in the Labour Party, the Washington Post ‘s report on this output in 1979 observed: ‘Soviet bureaucrats vehemently reject suggestions that “anti-Zionism” means “anti-Semitism.” But to many Soviet Jews, it is distinction without a difference. ‘(Tabarovsky: p.4)

In addition, the Soviets produced several documentaries in support of this campaign including one, The Concealed and the Apparent: Goals and Actions of the Zionists, deemed to be so inflammatory in its manipulation of historical footage and deeply anti-Semitic imagery and Nazi-Zionist parallels that it was only shown to selected audiences. (Tabarovsky: p.4)

The early 1980s saw the creation of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public whose remit was to produce brochures and deliver press conferences on the evils of Zionism and Israel. A 1985 TASS broadcast commenting on one of the committee’s English-language brochures announced:

Zionist leaders are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews annihilated by the Nazis. It is precisely the Zionists who assisted the Nazi butchers by helping them to make up the lists of doomed inmates of ghettoes, escorting the latter to the places of extermination and convinced them to resign to the butchers. (Tabarovsky: p.4)

The Antizionist Campaign Goes Global

The main driver behind the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign in the later years of the Cold War was the prevention of Jewish emigration from the USSR to Israel and the related Western condemnations of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. The Soviets did appear to believe that a vast Zionist conspiracy did exist aimed at undermining the USSR and socialism itself. Indeed, by the mid-1970s the KGB felt that the Zionist threat was so dangerous that it justified setting up a special department focusing specifically on Zionism (Tabarovsky: p.4).

The Soviets fought Zionism abroad through information warfare conducted via its powerful state-owned media apparatus whose goal was to ‘spread the truth about the USSR in all the continents. Perhaps the most important constituent of the Soviet media colossus (including Radio Moscow which broadcasted more than 1,000 hours per week in over 80 languages and the multi-lingual circulation of tens of millions of copies of newspapers and magazines) as the Novosti Press Agency, the USSR’s main foreign broadcasting arm and chief distributor of foreign propaganda, which worked in over 110 countries.

The Soviets organised their foreign antizionist messaging to suit their particular foreign policy concerns for that country or audience. For example, in Africa it was about South African apartheid and Zionism. In Latin America it was about American imperialism and Zionism.

In the Middle East the head of the Anti-Zionist Committee, General David Dragunsky, cultivated close relationships with the Arab world and especially Syria with the Soviet-Syrian Friendship Treaty of 1980 specifically named Zionism a common enemy.

Arab-language anti-Zionist literature was an important part of Soviet propaganda aimed at the Middle East. It served as source material for Mahmoud Abbas’s 1982 PhD dissertation which he undertook at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University and defended at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies – an important institution within the Academy of Sciences which regularly spewed out ‘scholarly’ works demonising Zionism and Israel. The dissertation was published as an Arabic book in 2011 under the title The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism. The book replicates several mainstays of Soviet antizionism including alleged Zionist collusion with the Nazis during the Shoah/Holocaust, casting doubt on the number of victims of it and the historical falsification that Adolf Eichmann was abducted by Mossad and later executed to prevent him from disclosing the “secret” of Zionist involvement in the Shoah/Holocaust. (Tabarovsky: p.6).

In July 1990, less than a year before the collapse of the USSR, an editorial in Pravda admitted the wrongs of the anti-Zionist campaign of the previous quarter century. It said that:


Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Black Hundred and of fascist origin.



It acknowledged that ‘Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism and on Jews in general’. But the damage had been done. A 1990 Soviet poll showed that a significant percentage of Soviet citizens thought that Zionism was ‘the policy of establishing the world supremacy of Jews’ and an ‘ideology used to justify Israeli aggression in the Middle East’. With the political freedoms brought about through Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of perestroika came the emergence of the fanatical anti-Semitic Pamyat (Memory) and Otechshestvo (Homeland) which fused Nazi and fascist ideas and Russian ethnic nationalism and led by some of the same ideologues who had waged the Soviet antizionist campaign. After the demise of the USSR, two million Jews left Russia in the following decade (Tabarovsky: p.6).

The history of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign is a case study in how, discursively and in praxis, antizionism and antisemitism can become deeply enmeshed. In accordance with their ideological bearings they never engaged in explicit Jew hate, indignantly asserting (like many accused of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party) that they were merely antizionist. But their strategic deployment of anti-Zionism enabled antisemitism to flourish. That antisemitism can be a consequence of antizionist discourse and practice is proved by the example of Poland “Cleanse the Party of Zionists” campaign in 1968 which quickly descended into an anti-Semitic witch hunt, leading to expulsions and the forced emigration of 15,000 Jews (Tabarovsky: p.7).

Conclusion

The Soviet anti-Zionist campaign of 1967-1988 was one of agitprop and disinformation. It pickled together and weaponised narratives from twisted, out-of-context, alternative facts and bogus historiography. It used age-old propaganda techniques such as deception, guilt by association to drive home key messages. It shamelessly manipulated people’s memories and emotions such as those of the massive sufferings of the Soviet people during the “Great Patriotic War” and used both Soviet Jews and Muslims as propaganda pawns.

By substituting anti-Zionism for anti-Semitism, it appealed to many well-intentioned and progressive individuals (not useful idiots) in the West who would have been otherwise repelled by overt anti-Semitic overtones. Looking at the content of bitter debates over the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the Labour Party; Ken Livingstone’s view that Hitler supported Zionism in the 1930s and Jewish emigration to Palestine “before he went mad and killed six million Jews”; that Zionists collaborated in the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944 to ensure that some Jews be allowed to go to Palestine; that Israel was a settler-colonial enterprise founded on the same racist ideology as Nazism and Apartheid-era South Africa; that it is an outpost of American imperialism ; that Zionists through the tentacles of Israeli embassies and advocacy/ campaign organisations and favoured spokespersons which comprise the ubiquitous Israeli Lobby control the world’s banks, media outlets and political decision-makers, one can trace a not so distant lineage to the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign (Tabarovsky: p.7).

Just as the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign had nothing really to do with justice for the Palestinians and proper peace and reconciliation with the Israelis but was about bolstering one of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrannies so their copycats in the Labour Party, many of whom have migrated from the Marxist-Leninist left, in treating Israel-Palestine as an empty vessel into which to project their own ideological and identity phantasies (as certain far right figures such as Katie Hopkins and lobbies such as Christian Dispensationalists project their pathologies onto Israel). Labour anti-Zionists may vehemently abjure any anti-Semitic prejudice or motivation but as has already been shown by those who have mined the seams of Corbynista and (purportedly) pro-Palestinian social media ecology these two “antis” have formed more than the occasional marriage of convenience. The post-Soviet careers of the manufacturers of the Soviet antizionist campaign provide a possible clue as to the ultimate political destiny of Labour’s antizionist campaign, if they have not already formed (informally at least) their red-brown alliance.

References

Izabella Tabarovsky, 2019,  Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism Fathom Journal, May.

⏩  Barry Gilheany has joined the Jewish Labour Movement as an affiliate member and encourages fellow labour movement colleagues concerned about Labour’s anti-Semitism problem to do the same.

8 comments:

  1. Scandalous zionist text, obviously filled with the most ridiculous, gross and sinful lies and denials.

    The reality :

    "Anti-Zionism is a rejection of racism and imperialism, not just criticism of Israel", Eyad Kishawi, Max Ajl and Liliana Cordova-Kaczerginski, January 29, 2019
    https://mondoweiss.net/2019/01/rejection-imperialism-criticism/

    "Pro-Zionism and antisemitism are inseparable, and always have been

    Joseph Massad

    9 May 2019 18:36 UTC | Last update: 1 month 3 weeks ago

    Pro-Zionism is the only respectable form of antisemitism today - one that is welcomed by the Israeli government and pro-Zionist white nationalists everywhere

    In recent years, amid the increasing success of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, pro-Israel voices have expressed much concern about the “antisemitic” motives of all movements opposing Israeli settler-colonialism, state racism and military occupation.

    The pro-Israel accusers want to correct the record, asserting that antisemitism is not a right-wing ideology anymore, but rather one that is endemic on the left.

    This is not a new strategy, but an old Israeli state-sponsored scheme to attack Palestinians and defame critics of Israel in the US and European left who began to level criticisms against Israel after 1967.

    Suppressing Palestinians

    In the two decades between the establishment of the Israeli settler colony and its 1967 invasions of Syria, Jordan and Egypt, the white US and European left was enchanted with the country, defending it at every turn against the claims of the expelled and suppressed indigenous Palestinians whose lands and livelihoods it had usurped.

    However, after the 1967 invasions, the rise of US civil rights and liberation movements, and student uprisings in France and elsewhere, the situation began to change. A minority of the white left in the US and Western Europe began to voice criticisms of Israel for the first time, alarming the Israeli leadership and pro-Zionist circles in the US and Western Europe.

    While more recently, the Israeli government has devoted huge financial resources to challenge such criticism - including $72m to combat BDS - its response in 1972 was less drastic, if not less effective. At an annual conference in Israel sponsored by the American Jewish Congress, former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban laid out the new strategy: “Let there be no mistake: The New Left is the author and the progenitor of the new antisemitism … the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new antisemitism.”

    If gentile critics were castigated as anti-Semites, Eban described two US Jewish critics (Noam Chomsky and I F Stone) as suffering from a complex of “guilt about Jewish survival”. Their values and ideology - meaning anti-colonialism and anti-racism - “are in conflict and collision with our own world of Jewish values”.

    Eban's identification of Israeli colonial and racist policies with Jewish tradition was part and parcel of Zionism’s implicating all Jews in Israel’s actions and ideals.

    An old alliance

    The strategy of equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is, in fact, a strategy to conceal and distract from the very real, old antisemitism that was always an ally of the Zionist movement - an alliance that goes back to the 1890s and continues to this very day.

    The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, explained in his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State that the Zionist project shares with anti-Semites a desire to empty Europe of its Jews in order to send them to a colonial territory outside Europe.

    He famously declared that “the governments of all countries scourged by antisemitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want” and that “not only poor Jews” would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them”.

    He added in his diaries: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies.”

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  2. When a surge of antisemitism arose in Britain at the beginning of the 20th century in relation to admitting Jewish refugees fleeing Russian pogroms, it was Herzl who counselled British antisemitic officials that supporting Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine would spare them from admitting Jewish refugees into Britain.

    Herzl’s British ally at the time was former colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who believed that “Jewish” money would aid British imperialism if Britain supported the Zionist project.

    When former British prime minister Arthur Balfour shepherded the Aliens Act of 1905 through the House of Commons to ban Eastern European Jewish immigration, his concern was to save the country from the "undoubted evils" of Jewish immigration.

    Like Chamberlain, Balfour had in mind another colonial destination for Jewish immigrants. The point is not that Balfour was first an anti-Semite and then became pro-Jewish when he issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917, but rather that his pro-Zionist views were mobilised by his antisemitism.

    Churchill’s conflation

    Winston Churchill is also declared by Zionists as yet another hero for the “Jewish people”. Churchill’s antisemitism was also legendary. He identified communism as a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, and supported Zionism, which offered a settler-colonial solution to “the Jewish problem” that undercut communism.

    One could ostensibly argue that, aside from Herzl’s own ideological pronouncements and opportunism, perhaps the early Zionists were weak and desperate, and had to ally themselves regrettably with the devil in order to realise their project, making them most forgiving of the antisemitism of their allies.

    But this would be a difficult thing to argue, not only because the Israeli leadership today and its pro-Zionist allies in Europe and the US continue to celebrate figures such as Chamberlain, Balfour and Churchill, but also - and more importantly - because Israel’s leaders, like the pre-state Zionist leadership, have continued to ally the country with anti-Semites and white colonial settlers consistently since its establishment in 1948.

    More than that, the country’s leaders, like pre-state Zionists, continue to ignore antisemitism when it comes from pro-Zionist forces, or at least from forces that are not anti-Zionist. Israeli silence, for example, on McCarthyist antisemitism in the 1950s US, which targeted Jews as communists and communists as Jews, in a way not unlike Churchill’s conflation, is but one example.

    The Zionist movement chose to name its settler-colonial state “Israel”, the name the Torah accorded to Jacob, wherein the children of Israel become the “Jewish people”. This choice was not arbitrary. In naming its state this way, the Zionist movement conflated its settler-colonial project with all Jews, even when the majority of world Jewry did not support the movement and continues to refuse to live in Israel today.

    Continuing Herzl’s legacy

    If Zionism becomes another word for Judaism and Jews, and if Israel is the Jewish people - and not only “their” alleged state - all pro-Zionists would be, perforce, not antisemitic. Indeed, if classic antisemitism is racism against diaspora Jews, then the Zionist movement has nothing to worry about, as its declared aim was, and is, to end the Jewish diaspora.

    This is why anti-Semites, if pro-Zionist, are considered by Israel and its supporters as pro-Jewish. As for those who oppose Zionism and are critical of the state of Israel, and who also oppose classic antisemitism that targets diaspora Jews, they are maligned as veritable “anti-Semites”.

    What has been worryingly absent in the recent official US, European and British endorsements of the Israeli government’s equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is any mention of the endemic antisemitism of pro-Israel circles before and after 1967.

    Eban’s concern about the “new antisemitism”, expectedly, was never expressed when dealing with pro-Israel and pro-Zionist anti-Semites.

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  3. Israel also supported Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who launched antisemitic campaigns against Paraguayan Jews who opposed him, but at the same time supported Israel, which provided him with weapons.

    In addition, Israel allied itself with the Argentinian coup leaders in the late 1970s and 1980s and provided them with military aid, as they targeted Jewish dissidents whom they disappeared, tortured and killed.

    A ‘verbal onslaught’

    This was also the position of the Israeli government towards US evangelicals. Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority, a right-wing fundamentalist Christian organisation that would be the most powerful supporter of Israel on the Christian right, identified the antichrist as a Jew. Yet, when he died in 2007, Israeli leaders and heads of pro-Israel mainstream US Jewish organisations praised Falwell’s support of Israel, “despite” some “differences” they’d had with him.

    If Eban was concerned about all gentile critics and a couple of Jewish intellectuals critical of Israel in 1972, by 2007, the pro-Zionist concern would be expanded to include the much larger number of US Jewish critics of Israel.

    David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, published an essay in which he stated: “Perhaps the most surprising - and distressing - feature of this new trend is the very public participation of some Jews in the verbal onslaught against Zionism and the Jewish state.” He added that those who oppose Israel’s right to exist, “whether Jew or gentile, must be confronted”.

    In the more recent past, not only have Israel’s leaders been uncritical of right-wing, white supremacist European and US movements with which Israel is allied, but they have also continued to ignore their antisemitism, which - as expected - is forgiven because of their support for Israel and Zionism.

    The story has repeated itself recently in Israel’s support for Ukrainian antisemites, Hungarian and Polish antisemites, and even German and Austrian antisemites. This has been important for the recent Israeli push to criminalise anti-Israeli criticism in the EU and US.

    Arming neo-Nazi militias

    This began with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s adoption of a working definition of antisemitism in 2016, which included “manifestations … targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”. When the EU adopted a measure last December defining antisemitism as including anti-Zionist positions and positions critical of Israel, it was the right-wing Austrian government, which includes members of a neo-Nazi party, that pushed for its adoption.

    In Hungary, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went so far as to rebuke the Israeli ambassador in Budapest for a statement expressing mild concern over Orban’s anti-Jewish racism. On Netanyahu’s orders, the Israeli foreign ministry retracted the statement.

    In the Ukraine, Israel is arming neo-Nazi militias, especially the Azov Battalion. Azov leader Andriy Biletsky declared in 2014 that “the historic mission of our nation … is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led untermenschen.”

    In Germany, the party Alternative for Germany (AFD) is a far-right organisation that won almost 100 seats in Germany’s general election last September and whose critics say it promotes neo-Nazi ideas, alarmed the country’s Jewish community. Alternative for Germany also supports Israel; deputy leader Beatrix von Storch, granddaughter of Hitler’s last finance minister, told The Jerusalem Report that “Israel could be a role model for Germany” as a country that “makes efforts to preserve its unique culture and traditions”.

    This echoes the line of US neo-Nazi demagogue Richard Spencer, who referred to his mission as a “sort of white Zionism”. Israel, he added, is “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state, and it’s one that I turn to for guidance”. Israel and its leaders have not responded to his declarations.

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  4. Synagogue attacks

    When US President Donald Trump told US Jews at a White House Hanukkah party in December 2018 that his vice president had great affection for “your country”, Israel did not object - nor did it object to Trump telling a group of US Jews a few weeks ago that Netanyahu is “your prime minister.”

    The support for Israel among white supremacist US groups goes hand-in-hand with their antisemitic propaganda, whether in Charlottesville, or last October in Pittsburgh when a white supremacist massacred 11 Jewish worshippers in a synagogue, or last month in San Diego, with yet another attack on a synagogue killing one person and injuring several.

    Pro-Zionist right-wing antisemitism continues to threaten Jewish lives in the US and Europe. While progressive US and European Jews, Christians, Muslims, and people of all faiths have joined anti-Zionist movements, and movements that oppose Israeli racist and settler-colonial policies, and are committed to combatting anti-Semitism, pro-Israeli Jews and gentiles are part of pro-Zionist movements whose anti-Semitism threatens the physical existence of US and European Jews.

    It is high time that pro-Zionist US and European Jewish organisations issue special reports on pro-Zionist antisemitism, as they continue to do when they target anti-Zionists. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not one and the same, as Eban, the Israeli government and their supporters would like us to believe; in fact, anti-Semitism, pro-Zionism, racism and pro-colonialism are inseparable companions.

    Celebrating war crimes

    Indeed, pro-Zionism is the only respectable form of antisemitism today - one that is welcomed by the Israeli government and pro-Zionists everywhere as a boon to the state of Israel.

    When pro-Zionists celebrate Israeli invasions and war crimes as a Jewish achievement, Israel and its supporters cheer them on - but when anti-Zionists attack Israeli crimes and invasions as the crimes of the Israeli government, and decidedly not the crimes of the Jewish people, it is Israel and its pro-Zionist supporters who call them antisemites.

    Israel defines itself as the “Jewish state” and insists that stealing the homeland of the Palestinian people, colonising their lands, expelling them and bombing them are all carried out in the name of the “Jewish people”. It claims that what it does is mandated by its “Jewish” ethics and, after all this, advances the claim that those who condemn Israel are condemning Jews.

    Ironically, it is the majority of Israel’s critics, in contrast to the majority of its supporters, who reject Israeli claims that Israel represents all Jews, and who insist that Israeli racist laws and colonial policies represent the Israeli government and not the Jewish people.

    When Palestinians resist Israeli colonialism and racism, they are not resisting the “Jewish” character of Israel, but its racist and colonial nature, institutions, laws and practices.

    The pro-Zionist conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not only a false equation to fight critics of Israel; it is first and foremost the justification for pro-Zionist and pro-Israeli antisemitism. Those concerned with the lives and safety of diaspora Jews and the Palestinian people should respond to this propaganda campaign by declaring with confidence that pro-Zionism is antisemitism, and that no distinction should be made between the two."
    https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/pro-zionism-and-antisemitism-are-inseparable-and-always-have-been

    "Israel's worldwide role in repression", International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
    http://www.ijan.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IWoRR.pdf
    http://www.ijan.org/projects-campaigns/israels-worldwide-role-in-repression/israels-worldwide-role-in-repression-pamphlet/

    "Israel: Imperialism's Attack Dog in the Middle East"
    http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1988-11/AWTW-1988-11-IsraelAttackDog.pdf

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  5. "None other than SS chief, Reinhard Heydrich wrote this in 1935 (thanks to Shraga Elam for forwarding this historical gem):

    “‘National Socialism has no intention of attacking the Jewish people in any way. On the contrary, the recognition of Jewry as a racial community based on blood, and not as a religious one, leads the German government to guarantee the racial separateness of this community without any limitations. The government finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas. On this basis, Germany undertakes measures that will surely play a significant role in the future in the handling of the Jewish problem around the world.’

    Göring’s January 24, 1939, note to the Interior Ministry gave Heydrich the authority to determine which parts of the world were the most suitable destinations for Jewish emigrants. The SS had consistently favored Jewish emigration to Palestine and would continue to do so with its enhanced authority in emigration policy.”

    This passage is from Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1985. For further historical evidence on this issue, see Shraga’s terrific culling of sources here.

    Let’s introduce another inconvenient piece of historical evidence that rebuts Beaumont’s claims. Writing in 1932, the Palestine Post (predecessor of the Jerusalem Post) published this piece from the Jewish Forward via the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in which thugs clad in Nazi uniforms assaulted Jews in the Berlin Underground shouting: “Jews to Palestine!” If the Nazis rejected the legitimacy of Palestine, they could’ve shouted simply: “Jews Out!” or “Jews to America.” But they associated German Jewish emigration with the Jewish homeland, Palestine."
    https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2016/05/01/guardians-peter-beaumont-piles-on-ken-livingstone-mangles-nazi-era-and-zionist-history/

    "Eichmann didn’t just visit Palestine in 1937 to meet with the Zionist leadership. He didn’t just serve as the lead Nazi in implementing the Haavara Agreement. He actually endorsed Zionism and did so with fulsome praise. This New York Times review of In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin quotes the memory of a Terezin survivor who met Eichmann:

    Anny Stern was one of the lucky ones. In 1939, after months of hassle with the Nazi bureaucracy, the occupying German Army at her heels, she fled Czechoslovakia with her young son and emigrated to Palestine. At the time of Anny’s departure, Nazi policy encouraged emigration. ‘‘Are you a Zionist?” Adolph Eichmann, Hitler’s specialist on Jewish affairs, asked her. ”Jawohl,” she replied. ”Good,” he said, ”I am a Zionist, too. I want every Jew to leave for Palestine.”

    As if to prove this anecdote is not an aberration, there is an even more explosive story told of Eichmann’s self-identification with Zionism,. It was published in Life Magazine in 1960 under the title, I Transported Them to the Butcher: Eichmann’s Story:

    ‘In the years that followed (after 1937) I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable.’"
    https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2016/05/27/adolf-eichmann-if-i-were-a-jew-id-be-a-fanatical-zionist/

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    1. At last a voice of reason on The Pensive Quill concerning matters 'Jewish'. It never ceases to amaze me how logic, reason, common sense, fairness and above all else honesty, go out the window when certain people comment on this subject here. But what would you expect when defending the indefensible; certainly not logic, reason, common sense, fairness and honesty.
      I hope you continue to post here. Your posts are very clear and fair minded.
      ps - I'm a Nazi, fascist and anti-semite and all round evil person (dont you know).

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  6. From the River to the Sea

    Thanks for your comment.

    I notice that you do not address a single aspect of my article which was about the use of antizionism in the USSR and its satellite states.

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    1. Barry - what I think From The River to the Sea does do is pose a powerful challenge to the type of narrative you put forward.

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