"I Am Not Antisemitic, Just Anti-Zionist."
The Soviet Union, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Anti-Zionist Propaganda Campaign that Created Today's Far-Left.
“Zionism emerged as an appendage of imperialist ideology.”
“…one of the demagogic methods of defending Zionism against all attacks on Zionism as a whole is to qualify them as "anti-Semitic acts”…We reject these base methods...”
“Israeli militarism and…neo-Nazism are fed from the same source.”
The above quotes could easily have been written by Columbia Professor Joseph Massad, who came under Congressional scrutiny when he referred to the October 7th attacks as “awesome”, but instead, these quotes are from decades earlier. In 1970, Soviet KGB and Central Committee employee Yuri Ivanov published these words and more in his best-selling book, Caution: Zionism! Ivanov frequently circles back to motifs from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and, in other works, Ivanov can be found citing from notorious antisemites like Henry Ford. Caution: Zionism! was one of the most influential books of the Soviet Union’s centralized anti-Zionist campaign, and a foundational source of “Zionology scholarship” in Soviet universities.
Statements like, “Zionism is Nazism” or “Israel is an apartheid state,” popularized by modern university students and social media, originated with Soviet Union’s propaganda efforts that ramped up after the loss of the USSR’s client states in the Six Day War. These propaganda efforts were spread domestically, internationally, and institutionally via Soviet foreign press and publishing, Soviet-sponsored resolutions at the United Nations, Soviet university departments, and more.
In the present day, this Soviet propaganda campaign still manifests in academia, the press, Middle Eastern political movements, and shapes our national dialogue. Any progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict will need to overcome this antisemitism disguised as mere “anti-Zionism” that has shaped our perception of current events and halted our ability to move forward.
Why Did the Soviet Union Promote Anti-Zionism?
Russia’s History of Middle Eastern Aspirations and Shifting Alliances
Russian aspirations towards the Middle East did not start with the creation of the Soviet Union. Rather, Russia’s interest and interference in the Middle East had been ongoing for hundreds of years. This aspiration started first with a desire to control the Turkish Straits - the Bosphorous and Dardanelles - and later to have access to Middle Eastern oil. For hundreds of years, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire fought over their borderlands for access to the Turkish Straits, as the Straits connect the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and would help with both military ventures and trade into Africa, India, and other places around the world. As such, control of the Turkish Straits was a central component of Russia’s involvement in Ottoman Wars, World War I, World War II, the postwar order, and the Cold War.
In the immediate postwar era, the USSR sought to ally with the non-Arab Middle East in order to achieve their geopolitical aspirations. Tel Aviv University historian Yaacov Ro’i documents the trajectory of Soviet Middle Eastern policy from its initial non-Arab strategy to its alignment with Arab and pan-Arab nationalisms in his book, From Encroachment to Involvement: a Documentary Study of Soviet Policy in the Middle East, 1945 - 1973. The USSR had initially backed Israel’s creation, seeing multiple opportunities in backing Israel: Israel was a socialist country and thus the USSR assumed Israel would be an ally, and the USSR believed that supporting Israel would undermine British and American influence in the Middle East. The USSR also put a military presence in northern Iran and otherwise tried to gain control of the Persian Gulf, tried to force Turkey to relinquish control of the Straits, seemed to meddle in the Greek Civil War, and supported Azerbaijani separatists as part of their aim of controlling Iranian oil, among other endeavors . Overall, the USSR specifically aimed at the non-Arab nations since, in the immediate postwar period, the Arab nations were still relatively pro-British and anti-USSR. After all, it was the British who supported the Arab revolts against the Ottoman Empire and set up many of the ruling kingdoms.
When the USSR first started reaching out to the Arab world, the Arab nations were apprehensive and unresponsive. The USSR could not provide economic and military aid to the Middle Eastern countries in the way that Western powers could. However, the Arab world was also growing wary of the West for not supporting their desire for war with Israel, particularly after the 1949 Armistice agreements on borders between Israel and Jordan. Arab states’ uncertainty about the USSR began to change in 1953 after Stalin died, and the new leadership in Russia became more insistent on partnering with the Arab world, while simultaneously, Egypt became more cautious of the United States for initiating defense pacts in the Middle East at the Soviet borders. As such, the USSR and Egypt made agreements regarding military and economic aid, and the United States retracted Egyptian aid as a result, thus allowing the USSR - now under premier Nikita Khrushchev - to ramp up their support and alliance with Egypt.
By 1958, Egypt, now under President Gamal Nasser, and Syria - wary about internal opposition groups like the growing Ba’ath party - formed a union known as the United Arab Republic (UAR). During this time, the USSR’s relationship to Egypt was up in the air. Russia had also allied with Iraq, who the UAR was at odds with, and Egypt and Syria began to prosecute communists internally, while improving their relationship with the United States and referring to the USSR as “imperialists.” Yet when Iraq began turning on its internal Communist Party members and the Iraqi Kurdish civil war broke out, the USSR and Egypt renewed their relationship. Meanwhile, Syria left the United Arab Republic - the UAR now simply consisting of Egypt - and the UAR then declared itself a Marxist Leninist socialist polity. By the early 1960s, a civil war broke out in Yemen, and the USSR and Egypt sent about 70,000 troops to help the socialist rebels against Yemen’s monarch - an expenditure of force and money that later hurt their access to resources in the Six Day War, but that cemented the Egyptian-Soviet alliance. After this series of events, the USSR and the Arab states, particularly as headed by Egypt, grew more entwined.
The Lead-Up to the Six Day War and a Turning Point in Russia’s Attitude Towards Israel
By 1964, the Soviet Union and the Arab states of the Middle Eastern were largely allied with one another. At the First Arab League Summit of 1964, the USSR along with 14 other Arab nations - including Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria - made a common cause of casting Israel as a symbol of Western imperialism, and agreed on fighting Israel as a common goal. The summit then continued on to discuss the right time to attack Israel. Nasser proposed that rather than starting with military encroachment, they could begin with other steps towards ramping up hostilities. The machinations that Nasser proposed at the First Arab League Summit directly lead to the Six Day War, such as the Headwater Division Plan - a plan to violate a 1955 treaty over Israel’s water supply that instead diverted a significant source of that supply to the Jordan River. At this same summit, the Arab nations, but particularly President Nasser of Egypt - helped to form an organization called the Palestinian Liberation Organization - or the PLO - not with the intention of creating a separate Palestinian state, but with the intention of creating a sole Palestinian state in place of Israel. Thus, the creation of the Palestinian cause in the 1960s became part and parcel of the USSR’s causes.
In the years preceding the Six Day War, several more monumental changes occurred in the Middle East and with the USSR. A coup in Syria ushered in a new “Neo Ba’ath” regime that tried to institutionalize the CPSU - the Communist Part of the Soviet Union - as the organizing principle of their regime. Rewarding this newfound political alignment, Egypt and Syria renewed their relationship with one another and created a defense pact in November of 1966. The Syrian-Egyptian defense pact after both countries had institutionalized Soviet communism into their own governments became yet another a prime force behind the Six Day War.
Significantly, in May of 1967, the USSR provided misinformation to Egypt, telling them incorrectly that Israeli troops were concentrating at the Syrian border. Whether this was purposeful or a mistake is still a matter of debate amongst today’s historians, with some historians insisting that instigating war was the USSR’s intent behind providing false information, and other historians attributing human error to this false information. Regardless, Egypt began mobilizing at their shared border with Israel under a false belief about Israel mobilizing to enter Syria, leading Israel to strike preemptively as it appeared that Egypt was preparing to attack Israel. Thus started the Six Day War. Prior to the Six Day War, Egypt militarily occupied Gaza, refusing to annex Gaza and keeping the Arab population of Gaza from traveling into Egypt or obtaining Egyptian citizenship due to the belief that this population would be used to instead take over Israel. Similarly, prior to the Six Day War, Jordan had militarily occupied the West Bank with a similar tactic and agenda. After the Six Day War, Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank, and other territories that had been used by the hostile neighboring nations as strategic areas from which to launch attacks. The land capture of 1967 would later become a focal point of the USSR’s international propaganda against Israel, labeling the Six Day Was as a “war of aggression,” conveniently ignoring their own role in causing the war or the reasons behind Egypt and Jordan’s military occupation of the territories.
When Israel won the Six Day War, the USSR felt that their reputation in the Middle East and abroad was deeply tarnished. After all, Israel was but one small state, yet the client states of the Soviet Union, supposed world superpower, lost. Thus, the USSR changed tactics. No longer did the USSR focus primarily on providing direct military aid and intelligence to their Arab allies in their joint cause of upending Israel. Now, the USSR added a new theater to this war: propaganda. The USSR’s new weapon of choice was to de-legitimize Israel in the eyes of the world.
Jews Fleeing from the Soviet Union: Another Motivation for the USSR to invent, “I am not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist.”
Arab alliances and the Six Day War is not the sole reason that the USSR began to so heavily propagandize against Israel. The Jewish population of the Soviet Union was emigrating en masse to Israel due to the antisemitism of the Communist regime. There are several major events that precipitated such concerns, but they were hardly alone in the atmosphere of terror and instability under which many Soviet Jews lived. One such even was the “Doctor Plot.” During this episode in Soviet history, a rumor began that a group of largely Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union were plotting to murder high level Soviet politicians. As a result, the doctors were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, and tortured for confessions. Around the same time, the notorious “Slansky Trials” occurred, in which Jewish Communist party officials in the Soviet bloc were accused of being “Trotskyists” and having secretly been at “Zionist meetings” with American President Truman in a plot to overthrow the USSR. Jews across the Soviet bloc were let go of their positions, eleven of the accused Jewish communist party members were executed, three sentenced to life in prisons. With this on top of mass Jewish poverty and antisemitism at all levels of Soviet society, Jews of the Soviet bloc were rightly fearful of their futures and began mass emigrating to Israel. As such, and under ongoing threat throughout the existence of the Soviet bloc, the USSR was inspired to demonize Israel, both to propagandize to the Jews at home, and to try to salvage their reputation abroad by starting the now oft-repeated phrase, “we are not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist.”
How did the Soviet Union Spread Anti-Zionism? The Russian Domestic and International Propaganda Apparatus
The Soviet Union had an extensive propaganda apparatus, with a centralized agenda and a strict approach as to how “news” should operate. Professor of political science at University of Haifa, Baruch A. Hazan, documents this extensive propaganda network in his book, Soviet Propaganda: A Case Study of the Middle East Conflict. Starting in the 1920s, the Soviet Union created the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop). By 1966, this was reorganized into the Department of Propaganda. The USSR’s Politburo would create the policy aims, which then the Department of Propaganda would disseminate. There were multiple agencies that created the propaganda for dissemination.
The propaganda apparatus of the Soviet Union operated according to principles of journalism that Vladimir Lenin had espoused. As Lenin said, “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer.” Lenin likewise insisted that there is no such thing as “objectivity,” and so the aim of a journalist is to help explain to the audience the events in question from a perspective of partiinost - a phrase akin to party-mindedness. The agencies and instruments that created propaganda included: TASS (the Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union), the Novosti publishing house (also called A.P.N.), the Foreign Press, Radio Moscow, a university called the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University to train foreign students in Marxist-Leninist and Soviet ideology and analysis (also where Mahmoud Abbas, current president of the Palestinian Authority, did his Ph.D.), and more.
TASS was an official agency of the Soviet government. It started in 1917 and by 1973, had offices in 115 countries. TASS’ former director, Nikolay Palgunov, reiterating Leninist perspectives on journalism, said that it is not enough for the news to report merely facts; no “simple photograph.” Instead, it must,
“disseminate information based on Marxist-Leninist theory…news must pursue a definite purpose…news is agitation by facts…”
In addition to journalism, TASS employees were often Soviet foreign intelligence agents as well. But as TASS was too obviously officially a part of the Soviet government, the Soviet Union created many other arms of their propaganda apparatus to give the illusion of impartial journalists operating abroad.
Novosti was one of the most extensive propaganda arms of the Soviet Union. They formed in 1961, officially without government ties, but in reality, the editorial board was largely staffed by those who completed KGB training programs and the publishing house was still under the complete control of the Department of Propaganda. Novosti published information about the USSR to foreign mass media and disseminated brochures, magazines, and other forms of media to the general international public. By the 1970s, according to Hazan, Novosti had activities in 110 countries, representatives in 82 countries, and relationships with 140 major international and national news agencies. Novosti was able to disseminate false or heavily propagandized stories to local media networks around the world, after which larger mainstream media channels would pick up such stories from their local colleagues and amplify them. In that way, the USSR achieved one of their biggest disinformation successes: in the 1980s, Novosti’s mechanisms got CBS television anchor Dan Rather to broadcast to millions of viewers the KGB-fabricated story that American scientists invented AIDS in order to kill African-Americans and gay people.
The Novosti stories were often false, but they operated by the premise - that we still see in use by propagandists like Hamas today - that truth and falsehood did not matter. Instead, they reasoned that by the time the “actual facts” were presented and a story retracted or rectified, it would still be believed and repeated by many, if not most, members of the public. Still today, people believe the claims of the Soviet “Operation Denver,” the disinformation campaign about the U.S. lab origin of AIDs.
The Foreign Press was another organization closely associated with Novosti. They created books, magazines, and newspapers for a foreign audience. Such magazines included Soviet Life, a monthly magazine in the US, Al-Magallya and ash-Shark, in Egypt, Soviet Weekly in England, Soviet News in Iran, and The Land of the Soviets in Syria. They also published not just national magazines, but magazines directed at whole language groups, like Anba Moscú in Arabic and Aube Noubvelle in French for Africa. They also published subject matter magazines in multiple languages, such as Soviet Military Review in English, French, Arabic, and Spanish. After the USSR’s humiliation of the Six Day War, they ramped up their anti-Zionist publications, publishing 75 books on Zionism in foreign languages between 1967-1973 alone, sometimes released in 3 or 5 languages simultaneously.
Radio Moscow was another major source of USSR foreign propaganda. By 1970, Soviet radio was in 70 foreign languages. Radio Moscow employed a large number of foreign speakers to best relate to the countries’ in which they were broadcasting - for example, in 1962, Moscow Radio’s Danish section claimed that half of those who worked there were Danes. Arab countries in specific also had a channel called “Radio University” that aired between 1958-1963, which would teach basic concepts of Marxism to an Arab audience.
Other forms of propaganda included various cultural agreements, such as the “Friendship Circles.” “Friendship Circles’” goal was to negotiate cultural initiatives abroad, such as museum exhibitions, scholarships, and to provide libraries, reading rooms, film showings, and otherwise to engage with intellectuals, a curious public, and politicians alike. By 1972, there were 60 Friendship circles abroad (Hazan, 103). Every four years, there would be an All-Union Conference that would meet to vote on the executives of the Union of Soviet Societies - the heads of the Friendship Circles. President of the Societies would have been been members of the CPSU Central Committee. At Friendship Circle ceremonies, various nations would praise the USSR in their joint-effort to “resist” Israel, such as Jordan’s Ambassador to the UN who thanked Moscow for its military assistance against Israel at a Friendship Circle ceremony.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, the USSR propagandized to foreign audiences through Soviet universities. International students generally studied at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, which was founded in 1960 with the goal of “helping African, Asian, and Latin American countries train highly qualified specialists.” This was also the university at which Mahmoud Abbas did his Ph.D. Students were supposed to graduate recommending Soviet policies back to their native countries. For example, in 1974, a conference of Lebanese students was held in Moscow at which they advocated for “the Soviet-Arab Friendship as a contributing factor to progress in the Middle East.” When the USSR wanted to better increase their propaganda efforts towards one country in particular, they would open more admissions slots at Patrice Lumumba for students entering from that country. As an example, when the USSR was concerned about the increasingly positive relations between Egypt and the U.S. after 1974, they explicitly announced that they would be taking more students from Arab counties.
The Content of USSR Anti-Israel Propaganda: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the work of Nazi Émigrés to the Middle East and the Soviet Union
Jews in the Russian Empire: a short and violent history of imperialism, ethnic cleansing, child slavery and rape.
None of the Russian hatred towards Jews started with the Soviet Union. In fact, Jews were generally not allowed into the Russian Empire, being considered “Christ killers,” until the late 18th century, when Catherine the Great allied with Austria and Prussia and came to rule a number of areas of Poland. After the final partition of Poland in 1795, the number of Jewish residents in the Russian Empire exploded. However, Jews were not allowed to live in the interior of the country. Treated with deep suspicion, between the years of 1791-1915, the new Jewish residents of Russia were forced to live in exterior regions called “the Pale of Settlement.” The Pale, largely in eastern and southeastern Russia, extended through most of modern-day Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, and more. Historically, much of the Pale had been part of other reigning empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, Crimean Khanate, Polish Commonwealth, and others.
The Jews living in the Pale were subject to sporadic bouts of violent acts of ethnic cleansing, known as the Pogroms. During pogroms, Russians would massacre whole Jewish villages, destroy Jewish business, and rape Jewish women. Jewish boys as young as 12 years old could be conscripted into the czarist army as child soldiers and kept for 25 years. Furthermore, Jews were often forcibly relocated from one region to another depending on czarist interest. By the late 19th and early 20th century, 40% of the Jewish inhabitants of the Pale were so poor as to be living on foreign charity. Russians did not consider Jews to be Russian, and regarded them with suspicion.
The Foundational Work of Russian Anti-Zionism: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Thus, when the infamous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was introduced to Russia by a czarist foreign agent, Russia was ripe for believing and acting upon the Protocols. The Protocols was first published in 1903 by Pavel Krushevan, a czarist publicist who lived in Paris, and based his fabricated “Protocols” on a text initially meant to be critical of Napoleon. In his forgery, Krushevan claims that he is exposing secrets that were supposedly spoken of at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, 1897.
As explained by historian William Korey in his book, Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism, the Protocols has essentially five major themes.These themes include (1) International Jewry, or Zionism, through the concept of the “chosen people,” aspires towards world domination; (2) this aspiration will be achieved through manipulating “the goyim cattle;” (3) the major form of world domination will come through control of the world banking system; (4) additionally, the Zionists own the press; (5) Zionists will infiltrate and manipulate “Masonic Lodges.”
The Protocols inspired a number of movements prior to the post-Six Day War Anti-Zionist campaign. First, under czarist rule in 1905, a proto-fascist group called the “Union of the Russian People” emerged, angered at Russia’s loss during the Russo-Japanese War. Some historians believe that this group and the movement it inspired directly influenced the creation of German National Socialism. At its core was, in Korey’s words, “vicious antisemitism.” Referred to as the “Black Hundreds,” it morphed in the 1920s and 1930s, using street violence, paramilitary formations, marches, distribution literature meant to incite anger - largely based on the Protocols, and even special dress codes like Yellow Shirts. This movement also overlapped with religious movements that saw Jews as the enemies of Christ, and thus they came to share a common cause of blood libel, onto which the “anti-Zionist” movement would easily attach itself.
As the Soviet Union grew, they molded this historical form Protocols-based antisemitism to conform to their own geopolitical aims. Politicians - when not outright advancing the claims that lead to more antisemitism, would also excuse antisemitism when questioned about it. For example, while visiting with a French parliamentary delegation, Soviet President and strident Syria and Egyptian ally Nikita Khruschev said of anti-Jewish discrimination,
“this is a complicated problem because of the position of the Jews and their relations with other peoples…Should the Jews want to occupy the foremost positions now, it would naturally be taken amiss by the indigenous inhabitants….it is understandable that this should create jealousy and hostility towards Jews.”
Later, such hostility vastly increased when, in 1959, Khrushchev launched a campaign against religion in general.
In August 1967, Russian antisemitism and Russia’s geopolitical interests finally coalesced into what Korey calls the “official demonology” of anti-Zionism. Shortly after Russia’s loss of the Six Day War, Yuri Ivanov - the KGB and Central Committee “specialist” on Israel (only transferred to cover Israel after his repeated issues with drunkeness while covering Africa) published an article called “What is Zionism” in a major and well-circulated paper. Zionism, Ivanov claimed, is a worldwide network of “Zionist organizations” that is “behind the scenes of the international theater.”
Additionally, the USSR did not win support in the United Nations for their first attempt to put pressure on Israel using a transnational organization. The UN at the time, contrary to Russia’s pressure, would not compel Israel to return strategic territories such Gaza and the West Bank that Israel had captured from Egypt and Jordan during the Six Day War. With this loss at the UN, the USSR began ramping up their search for a scapegoat, settling on amplifying the “Zionism controls international politics and media” trope across foreign and domestic press, as extolled by the Protocols and Yuri Ivanov.
In October 1967, a mass-circulated newspaper of the Young Communist League, Komsomolosky Pravda, described to readers that the Zionist enemy consisted of,
“an invisible but huge, mighty empire of financiers and industrialists”
a group of people for whom, “nationality is exploitation and whose God is the dollar.” The author in this edition of Pravda rattled off an astounding array of figures.
“The numbers of Zionists in America totaled twenty to twenty-five million (though there were but six million Jews in the U.S. at the time), 70% of American lawyers were Zionists; sixty-nine percent of physicists were Zionists “including those engaged in secret work on the preparation of weapons,” and forty-three percent of industrialists.”
But most strong, according to this article and as written about in the Protocols, were the Zionists in the media.
The Nazi Relationship to Russian Propaganda
Where did the above figures cited in a major Russian newspaper come from? It should be of no surprise to learn that this extraordinary series of numbers regarding powerful “Zionists” was published in 1957 at a publishing house in Cairo owned and operated by a Nazi emigre named Johannes von Leers, who adopted for himself the Arabic name of Omar Amin, and who had been an employee of Joseph Goebbels, the head of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Von Leers, among with many other former Nazi zealots, had relocated to the Middle East and continued their campaign to demonize and wipe out Jews amongst countries they recognized as hostile to Judaism, regions that had indeed even allied with Hitler under the pact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammed Amin al-Husayni, to attempt to bring the “Final Solution” into the Middle East. Historian at University of Maryland College Park, Jeffrey Herf, details more greatly throughout his body of work the relationship between Nazi Germany and violent antisemitism in the pan-Arab and pan-Islamist movements in the Middle East.
But former Nazis did not simply relocate to the Middle East. Others, such as the Nazi soldiers captured at the Battle of Stalingrad, chose to defect to the Soviet Union. The USSR had a particular affinity and acceptance of those who had been employed in Nazi propaganda, and hired them after they pledged to ally themselves to the USSR for employment in Russian propaganda. While Russian proto-fascists from the Black Hundreds may have inspired the creation of Nazism, now Nazism was having a direct affect on the nature and spread of Soviet antisemitic - nay, anti-Zionist - propaganda.
After 1967, many “anti-Zionist” publications with Protocols underpinnings - books, periodicals, “scholarly” works, children’s literature, cartoons, television, films, and so on - proliferated domestically and abroad. One popular book was called In the Name of the Father and the Son, by Ivan Shevtsov, which echoed much of the propaganda of the Nazi Era Der Sturmer. “Zionism,” a character in the novel, was accused of “secretly infiltrating all the life cells of the countries of the entire world…even…the international Communist workers movement.” As such, Shevtsov would refer to “Judas Trotsky (Bronshtein)” as a “typical agent of Zionism,” being sure to put Trotsky’s original last name in parentheses to remind readers of Trotsky’s Jewish origins. This book, like many others, would clearly draw from the Protocols in their description of the relationship between “Zionism” and “American imperialism.”
“You think that international Zionism is in the service of American imperialism,” wrote Shevtsov, “[but] For my part, I am convinced that this is the other way around. American imperialism constitutes the economic and military base of Zionism.”
Shetsov’s popular work was but one of many with motifs drawn directly from the Protocols.
Others Protocols-heavy works include the publications of Vladimir Begun such as his 1977 work Invasion Without Arms. In this, his thesis was that ”Jewish bankers” aspired to take “into their hands the most powerful propaganda apparatus- the mass media.”
“The ideological sources of Zionist gangsterism,” Begun would continue, “originated in the Torah…”
Additionally in 1979, an influential Soviet propagandist by the name of Valery Yemelyanov published another infamous book: De-zionization, this one published in Syria in the Al-Ba’ath newspaper, at the request of then-Syrian president Hazef al-Assad, father of the current dictatorial Syrian president and Putin-ally, Bashar al-Assad. Yemelyanov’s book was also issued by the PLO and distributed by them through their and Soviet propaganda circles at home, in the Middle East, and abroad in cities like Paris. This book presents a version of the Protocols “Masonic” conspiracy, one we hear less about in the contemporary West, but that is nevertheless still incorporated into ideologies and literature in the Middle East. In addition to the connections with Assad and the spread of Zionist Masonic conspiracy theories, Yemelyanov was also insistent that all Soviet Jews were “Zionist agents.”
As part of Yemelyanov’s political mission - he urged the CPSU Central Committee to incorporate a mandatory course of the “scientific anti-Zionism and anti-Masonry” in all major Russian institutions - schools, universities, the army, as well as the creation of such a “scientific” institute as an official government agency. His goals, similar to goals of many other conspiratorial Soviet antisemites, was realized in 1983 when the USSR created the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, (the AZCSP). To legitimize this committee, the Soviet government found “anti-Zionist Jews” to take part in the Committee, thus assuring that they could once again claim, “we are not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist.”
Internationalizing Anti-Zionism at the United Nations
The Soviet Union also used transnational bodies such as the United Nations to spread libel about Zionism. Their first attempt was in 1965, prior to the Six Day War, yet still a politically advantageous tactic in consolidating their relationship with the Arab states. When the UN Commission on Human Rights debated drafting an International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which specifically would condemn “racial segregation and apartheid,” The US attempted to add “antisemitism” to this draft, but the USSR proposed a separate article condemning antisemitism. Then, shockingly, when the USSR produced a draft for this second article, it read that states should
“condemn antisemitism, Zionism, Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and all other forms of the policy and ideology of colonialism, national and racial hatred…”
Thus, the first time that somebody tried to publicly equate Nazism with Zionism was a Soviet campaign at the United Nations to hijack an otherwise neutral and aspirational statement in order to make a political bid with Arab allies in the Cold War.
Worse, the person who proposed equating Nazism with Zionism was Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik, a man known for his off-color “jokes” about Jews, and a man whose justification for equating Nazism with Zionism came from the Protocols usage of the term “chosen people.” As directly said by Malik,
“Mr. Tekoah [Israeli ambassador to the UN] was indignant at our parallel between Zionism and Fascism. But why not? It is all very simple: both are racist ideologies. The Fascists advocated the superiority of the Aryan race as the highest among all the races and peoples in the world…their (the “Zionists”) racist theory is the same. The Fascist advocated hatred toward all peoples and the Zionist does the same. The chosen people: is that not racism? What is the difference between Zionism and Fascism, if the essence of the ideology is racism, hatred toward other peoples? The chosen people. The people elected by God.”
This draft was rejected and widely viewed as absurd at the time.
This same Soviet Ambassador, Ambassador Malik, was known for his unabashed antisemitism. Having visited the Soviet Jewish autonomous zone of Birobidzhan, Malik commented on the tremendous poverty of the Jewish population therein. He informed others of his perspective on why there was so much Jewish poverty: “since the place had been reserved for Jews, there were no Russians to cheat.”
Unfortunately after 1967, the Soviet Union was more successful at the UN. In 1975, several months before the USSR’s next bid to internationally codify the “demonology of Zionism” into a resolution known as the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, Soviet publications ramped up agitation against Zionism both at home and abroad. The infamous antisemite Yuri Ivanov published one such compelling media analysis in support of the USSR’s 1975 UN resolution. In it, Ivanov quoted directly from Henry Ford to support his assertions. Henry Ford was a notorious antisemite who bought his local newspaper in order to create a column to espouse his Jew hatred, distributed all such issues for free at his car dealerships, published a book called The International Jew, reprinted and distributed copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and won an award from Hitler for his support. And it is this Henry Ford, from a March 8, 1925 editorial that Ford wrote for the New York Times, whom Ivanov quoted to express support of the Soviet Union’s 1975 resolution against Israel. Ivanov reprinted Ford saying,
“50 Jewish financiers who are richer than I am” and “who create war for their own profits” needed to be subject to public control (in this case, Ivanov is referring to the UN), as only then will “wars be eliminated.”
Thus in 1975, the USSR introduced another resolution to the UN to officially equate Zionism with Racism. After lobbying hard for UN support at their Cold War allies in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of South America, the Resolution this time passed, though it was widely regarded as disgraceful and antisemitic by the Western members of the United Nations. This resolution stayed in effect until the early 1990s, at the fall of the Soviet Union, when the new Russian government itself finally admitted to the antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the influences of the Protocols. At this point though, the damage had been done.
Soviet Academic Zionology: The “Scientific” Scholarship of “Anti-Zionism.”
The Soviet Union did not stop at institutionalizing anti-Zionism via transnational organizations and international press; instead, they also sought to give anti-Zionism academic legitimacy. To this end, they created a field of study known as “Zionology,” the supposed scientific study of Zionism. Of course, the supposed scholarship to support such study was negligible, highly distorted, and simply based on the voluminous canon of anti-Zionist propaganda already produced under the direction of Politburo and the Department of Propaganda. Zionology was eventually mandated by the Central Committee of the Soviet Union. In 1972, the USSR issued a directive to mandate such studies as part of “further measures to fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism.” As a result, the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences established a permanent department for the scientific study of Zionism at the Academy’s Institute of Oriental Studies and incorporated such departmental study with the Patrice Lumumba school.
Some of the “scholarly” anti-Zionist works introduced new themes to downplay claims that their work was anti-semitic, promoting the concept that there are good Jews who are simply being “manipulated” by “Zionist propaganda.” One such article was published in the prestigious Soviet Journal of the Historical Profession, entitled: “Social Democracy, Zionism, and the Middle East Question,” by propagandist L. Dadiani, featuring other writings from the famous antisemite Trofim Kichko. Dadiani proposed that while some Jewish people and socialist allies still argued that Zionism was a labor and socialist movement, in reality, such claims were meant to “brainwash Jewish youth in various countries.”
The theme of good Jews being “manipulated” carried on into many other works, such as in the academic article “The Victims of Zionist Deception” by V. Vladimirsky, who espoused sympathy for the Soviet Jews who were “lured” to Israel by “lying propaganda” and the “subversive activity of world Zionism.” Sadly, the claim that good Jews are being “deceived to support Israel” is still an ongoing claim in today’s politics. For example, on the popular social media site Reddit, a large feminist subreddit with nearly a million members pinned this post that claims, “Jewish grief and collective generational trauma (being victims of genocide and racism themselves) is being exploited and weaponized to justify more violence.”
In 1977, the Soviet Academy of Sciences published what became the definitive work of Zionology, entitled, International Zionism: History and Politics, composed of articles written by “scholars” from a variety of institutions, and trumpeted across international TASS media with glowing commentary. Once again, this work echoed the Protocols, reiterating that international Jewry aspired to world domination via the banking system and media. It did not much bother to differentiate between “Jew” and “Zionist,” as often propagandists would try to do, and singled out the Rothschilds and a variety of Jewish-owned enterprises as promoters of Zionism. Unsurprisingly, this work had barely any scholarly citations, though did have several references. Three of the citations in this definitive academic work on Zionism included (1) The USA: Property and Power, by I.I. Beglov, (2) the mass-produced and popular work Caution: Zionism!, by Yuri Ivanov, and (3) a supplemental text with a few additional citations by Vladimir Bolshakov, an author who the New York Times would report on as being a promoter of Zionist anti-Communist conspiracy theories in the main Russian newspaper, Pravda.
The Bolshakov supplement cited from Middle Eastern “scientific research centers” that claimed to study “international Zionism.” One such center was the Palestine Research Center, which was established by the PLO in Beirut in 1965 and thrived with USSR funding. The other was the “Scientific Center of Palestinian Research” as part of the University of Baghdad. Papers cited in this supplement included those read at the International Conference on the Problems of Israel and Zionism, such as “The Near East in the Plans of Imperialism and Zionism,” written Yevgeny Yeseyev.
Yeseyev was an Arabist whose career began at the Soviet Embassy in Cairo in the 1950s. After his work in Cairo, he returned to the USSR in the 1960s and his work often plagiarized the work that came out the Cairo-based publishing house written about above, the publishing house run by Von Leers, the former employee of Nazi chief of propaganda Goebbels. Yeseyev continued his career by delivering lectures on the “dangers of International Zionism” at Soviet-sponsored conferences in Egypt and Baghdad, and in the 1970s, worked at the PLO-run Palestine Studies Center. He was also a prolific commentator and ardent supporter of the the 1975 Soviet-backed UN resolution to equate Zionism with racism.
Such authors and works as listed above were representative of the caliber of Soviet Zionology.
Mahmoud Abbas, Successor to Yasser Arafat and Current Head of the Palestinian Authority, Does his PhD in Soviet Zionology
Mahmoud Abbas based his Ph.D. on the anti-Zionist “scholarship” that was produced by the USSR, the Nazi-run publishing house in Cairo, and the PLO’s “Palestine Research Center” when he did his Ph.D. in the Soviet Union at the Patrice Lumumba University and the Institute of Oriental Studies. Izabella Tabarovsky - prolific journalist, former Research Fellow and current Senior Advisor at the Wilson Center - elaborates on what exactly was the basis for Abbas’ dissertation claims.
Abbas’ dissertation is entitled “The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945.” Considering just how frequently USSR propagandists would publish on this theme, it is clear that goal of his Ph.D. program was not original scholarship, but rather, the mass production of more sources of propaganda. From Abbas’ abstract, he states, “With the deepening of the crisis of capitalism in our time, the crisis of the ideology of Zionism and the inadequacy of its ideological concepts become increasingly obvious.” And in keeping with the “we are anti-Zionists, not antisemites” theme, Abbas explains that “the vast majority of Jews around the world…reject Zionist dogmas.” Instead, Abbas claims, “the natural and objective process of Jewish assimilation” would continue around the world.
The Zionologist “scholars” who Abbas cites in his dissertation include none other than the Henry-Ford citing Yuri Ivanov and his classic, Caution! Zionism. Another piece of Zionologist literature that Abbas cites from includes the anthology, The Ideology and Practice of International Zionism, which has three editors: (1) the above-mentioned Yevgeny Yevesyev, a descendent of the Goebbel’s school of propaganda and worker at the joint PLO-Soviet controlled Palestine Studies Center, (2) Yelena Modrzhinskaya, who was an intelligence officer under Stalin in London whose works included books such as the Poison of Zionism, replete with images of Jewish stars intermixed with dollar bills, and (3) Mark Mitin, who was born Jewish and served as the token “useful Jew” to deflect claims of anti-semitism.
The Palestine Studies Center is important to Abbas’ work as his dissertation is filled with citations to literature published from this center, which is perhaps no surprise as he was the successor to the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat. In 1978, another work published by the PSC included Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany. Its author was Paris Yahya (Glubb), the son of a British army officer who commanded Transjordan’s Arab Legion between 1939-1956, and later associated himself with the PLO and the PFLP, while reporting for American, British, and Arab media. He had no background in Jewish history, did not know the history of the Holocaust nor World War II, and yet his largely fabricated and distorted piece on the supposed relationships between Zionists and Nazis became another part of Abbas’ work. Thus, the background to Abbas’ dissertation, a background endorsed and often funded by the USSR, was largely produced by two recognized terrorist organizations with no pretense at knowledge of Hebrew, Yiddish, or Jewish history.
In 2020, 40 years after Abbas’ dissertation the Institute of Oriental Studies itself published an article where they state from the early 1970s, “the Soviet party leadership set itself the goal of “fighting the Zionist ideology,” and such studies were “largely guided and controlled by state structures.” The IOS goes on to admit to be being instructed to approach Zionism as “an extreme expression of reactionary bourgeois-nationalist ideology,” and present Israel as an “aggressor.” Yet, their scholars had never visited Israel and there were no Hebrew or Yiddish language specialists among them. Decades too late, with the fabrications and slanders of decades of Soviet-directed “academia,” these tropes are now a part of mainstream culture on the left, with today’s college professors often repeating the ideological fabrications of a Cold War strategy.
The Effects of Soviet Anti-Zionism Today
Unfortunately, the Soviet’s wide-scale campaign to entrench anti-Zionist propaganda within the Middle East, transnational organizations, media, and academia has longstanding ramifications still today.
The Novosti Strategy: Publish False Information; Retract it Only When People Will Unwaveringly Still Believe It
Terror organizations across the Middle East like Hamas and Fatah, and the general strategy of the Russian-Iranian-Chinese axis of press and social media, now follow the Novosti propaganda guidelines. Today, these countries and organizations have followed the strategy of distributing copious amounts of false information, and only publish a “retraction” once these ideas are firmly entrenched in public perception. Hamas, under their “Ministry of Health”, will frequently fabricate numbers - numbers that have been shown to not occur naturally, numbers that do not differentiate between civilians and combatants, or “friendly fire,” and numbers that are later even shown by allied institutions like the UN to be incorrect. But by that point, months later, it does not matter - even politicians and academics still repeat the fake and dis-proven numbers. Similar Hamas propaganda occurs regarding even claims of catastrophes and causation - the al-Shifa hospital bombing hoax is one such example, or claims of a “famine” that even the UN is later forced to retract, stating in their most recent report that “…the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.” Even the Hamas run Gaza Ministry of Health admits that their original account of casualties was incorrect, reducing their numbers by 10,000. Nevertheless, not only do people still take the claims made by Hamas and social media accounts at face value, but it simply does not matter when truth is revealed - the Soviet propaganda technique of releasing false information and only correcting it later is working, persisting in empty slogans such as “genocide” that were created based on the above-mentioned falsehoods and more.
State-Endorsed Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation: This Time, with Social Media
And of course, with roughly 100 years of expertise in spreading foreign propaganda as part of official government strategy, Russia continues to do so, this time aided by the ease of social media manipulation. In 2016, American liberals were ready to - correctly - identify that Russia was using social media to agitate Americans towards radical political positions during the Trump campaign in order to destabilize the country and cause disunity. This discovery became a major cornerstone of cultural dialogue and concern. Unfortunately, those same liberals today are unwilling to admit that they too have been captured by Russian social media operations, even as reports have increasingly emerged on the prevalence of “pro-Palestine” bots hosted by Russia and China. The New York Times reports that State Department and cyber security officials claim that this social media disinformation campaign is the “largest they have seen,” yet it gets far less attention in mainstream media than did Russian disinformation during the Trump campaign and is largely untouched across liberal social media or in real life social or academic dialogue. Unfortunately, liberal voters who are repeating Russian and Chinese disinformation and who were the first to recognize foreign disinformation as a factor in the 2016 elections are unwilling to recognize it when they are the audience that has been captured by it.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Zionology, and Official Hamas Political Documents and Media
The founding charter of Hamas and the types of TV programming that airs in Gaza and other areas of the Middle East show that the influence of the Protocols and specific Soviet interpretations of the Protocols are still strong. The Hamas charter, such as in Articles 17 and 32, speak of the “Zionist” ploy to use “masonic lodges,” blames “Zionists” for all world turmoil going back to the French Revolution, and cites by name the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as a source in which to read more such information. Of course, the Hamas charter does not just stop at the masonic conspiracy theories that Westerners now find laughable, but include accusations that still have captured the far-left Western imagination, such as a supposed connection between Zionists and Nazism, as evidenced by the number of anti-Israel Western rioters holding posters with slogans like “Zionism = Nazism.”
Soviet Propaganda Aimed at Children; Now there is Hamas Propaganda Aimed at Children.
The Soviet tactic of distributing ideological anti-Zionist literature to children at home and abroad is unfortunately ongoing in regions that have inherited the legacy of Soviet propaganda techniques. For example, the children’s television show “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” that airs on Hamas’ Al Aqsa TV in Gaza shows children discussing how the only path forward is Jihad, and children discuss the virtues of spilling Jewish blood. Another infamous children’s show airing on Al Aqsa TV shows Farfour the Mouse, a play on Mickey Mouse, discussing with children how one must “annihilate the Jews” and martyr oneself. Hamas is not the only organization to air such children’s show, the issue is unfortunately endemic across the Middle East, such as recounted by Duke University professor and chaplain Imam Abdullah Antepli, a man devoted to fighting antisemitism and promoting Jewish and Muslim coexistence, who recounts his own experiences with antisemitic children’s literature growing up in Turkey in an interview with Bari Weiss, which can be listened to on her podcast.
Soviet Anti-Zionism and Academic Blood Libel
But the most looming and dangerous legacy of institutionalized Soviet Anti-Zionism is the effects today on academia, as the youth who graduate repeating such distortions enter into high-status, narrative-shaping professions. The Soviet policy of equating Zionism with all evils of the world, one that stems from other historical versions of blood libel, has become the academic norm. Israeli historian Nati Cantorovich relates that, in the Soviet Union,
“Zionism played a role of a bugaboo. In Africa, it was about South African apartheid and Zionism. In Latin America it was about American imperialism and Zionism. In Asia, it was Japanese Revanchism and Zionism.”
Today is no different, except that many Western academics have dropped some of the less-compelling-to-modern-audiences associations, such as discussing Masonic Lodges or Japanese Revanchism. Cantorovich’s analysis is similar to that of the late venerable Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of England. As Rabbi Sacks said in his video, “The Mutation of Antisemitism,” antisemitism has historically functioned by defining Jews as the opposite of whatever is the highest virtue of the day. Thus,
“In the Middle Ages, it was religion. In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science: the so called scientific study of race. Today it is human rights.”
In the Middle Ages, Jews were viewed as “Christ killers,” and thus it would be wrong to not despise and isolate Jews. In the Enlightenment and Napoleonic eras leading up to the Holocaust, hatred of Jews was allowed because Jewish blood was “scientifically” impure, harming the countries in which Jews resided after the political decisions to grant Jews citizenship and allow them to live and work next to their Christian neighbors, and thus it was another moral imperative to expel or kill the Jews. And today, Jews are hated because they are “Zionists,” and “Zionist” is defined as the antithesis of our greatest value of the day: human rights.
Anti-Zionist Antisemitism Today: How Can We Interrupt this Ongoing Legacy of Soviet Propaganda?
Nobody in the history of hatred has considered themselves the “bad guy.” Hatred has nearly always emerged from zealous, righteous convictions - from fanatical certainty in one’s moral correctness. The Crusades were not motivated by a mob consciously thinking, “I just do not like Muslims and Jews,” it was motivated by a desire to reclaim land for God, the most noble of aims. The Salem Witch Trials were not motivated by men thinking, “I really do not like young women with a voice, who can I execute?” It was, again, motivated by righteous convictions. Those opposed to legalizing gay marriage, or those stripping women of their full range of reproductive health care options, do not think of themselves as the bad guys - they see themselves as defending traditional Western values, saving civilization, and saving babies. And those who proudly call themselves “anti-Zionist,” using “Zionist” as a slur, they too are convinced they are on the right side of history, that they are utterly morally correct, and as such, they can take whatever sort of action - “by any means necessary” - they see fit to implement their holy Crusade.
How can we stop this? This is worthy of a separate article, or Ph.D. dissertation or two. But in short, I think much of this needs to be addressed in today’s academia. The graduate admissions, networking, and faculty hiring pipelines have been hijacked by a social network of ideological uniformity and zealotry that needs structural intervention to diffuse. Courses on the history of hatred - not in terms of today’s identity-based analysis of hate, but more comprehensively, including the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of hate as stemming from righteousness, groupthink, and moral certainty, should be required as part of universities’ core curriculum, bringing us back to the post-World War II analyses that gripped the thinkers of the day.
And finally, I believe that we need to broaden the ways in which we teach about pre- and post-Napoleonic Jewish history, Middle Eastern Jewish history, antisemitism, and 20th century history. Unfortunately, much of today’s educational curricula regarding Judaism ignores the Soviet Union altogether, and universalizes the history of the Holocaust to be about a general lesson on intolerance instead of as a unique outcrop from a particular trajectory of Jewish history. Furthermore, education on Palestinian politics can be tempered by including in academic curricula the numerous thoughtful, brilliant Palestinian writers and researchers who are critical of the reign of extremism and who instead are open for dialogue - the leaders we should be uplifting as the voices that can bring peace, such as the writings of the Gazan native Ahmed Faoud Alkhatib, or the son of one of the founders of Hamas who later defected and works for peace with Israel, Mosab Hasan Yousef. While I do not agree with all that either says, that is another crucial lesson we must teach our youth: it is okay to disagree with people, and that does not make either side morally irredeemable. Reasonable and empathetic dialogue is of utmost importance to achieving peace. Righteous zealotry will only lead to more violence.
Until then, I hope that articles like this, and the many other authors who write on similar topics, are at least able to shed light on why approaching Middle Eastern conflicts through the lens of “anti-Zionism” is inherently antisemitic and stems from a dangerous and violent history.
It’s a masterpiece. Congratulations! I’m so impressed with the depth and soundness of your research. I was born and raised in Kiev and I heard my parents and their friends quietly, urgently discussing some of these issues. I remember seeing the ugly cartoons in the news. My family was lucky enough to immigrate in the late 70’s, a few years after my dad submitted our papers. (My dad’s knee jerk reaction to my coming home with a black eye - best friend’s response to finding out I was Jewish.)
I was horrified to find my ‘friends’ flooding social media with updated versions of Soviet propaganda in May, 2021. You’ve filled in so many holes in my knowledge and understanding! Thank you!
Kudos to you and my heartfelt congratulations on your pregnancy ❤️
Great analysis! It’s horrifying to me how the left in America are now copying the soviet playbook. I always say that while my soviet childhood sucked, but at least I see propaganda a mile off.