By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
On a recent episode of The Editors podcast, Dominic Pino observed that there
is no obvious reason why violent antisemitism should be associated with the
radical, Marxian left. It is so associated because, after the Second World War,
the Soviet Union promoted antisemitism and, later, anti-Zionism.
Maintaining a Jewish identity, much less seeking to
preserve the existence of a sovereign homeland for the Jewish people, came to
be regarded in Soviet propaganda as a form of “bourgeois nationalism.” Once it
had sloughed off its origins as a left-wing state oriented around an
archipelago of communitarian kibbutzim, Israel came to be seen in Moscow as an
instrument wielded by (and somehow also controlling) the imperialist West.
Israel’s sins against international communism became even more unignorable after
it defeated a collection of Middle Eastern Soviet client states in 1967 and
1973.
The KGB took this mandate and ran with it. In an
exploration of the literature surrounding Soviet “Zionology” and Moscow’s
efforts to portray the Jewish experience as a conspiracy akin to Nazism, Izabella Tabarovsky described the methods by which Soviet
intelligence assets operationalized antisemitism:
KGB residencies across the world
were instructed to increase collection of intelligence on ‘the plans, forms and
methods of Zionist subversion’ and work to ‘weaken and divide the Zionist
movement.’ Obsessed with the supposedly omnipotent Zionist lobby, the KGB
sought to discredit it by forging racist letters in the name of Meir Kahane’s
Jewish Defense League and sending them to Black American leaders and heads of
Arab missions in New York. Believing that ‘virtually no major negative
incidents’ happened in the socialist bloc without Zionist involvement, the KGB
blamed Poland’s Solidarity movement on the few Jews within its ranks. At the
UN, it helped engineer the passage of the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution. When
the British chief rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits came to the USSR, the agency got
eleven ‘highly trained’ KGB agents to talk to him under the guise of ordinary
Soviet Jews to convince him that only a small minority among them wanted to
emigrate.
The Soviet Union is gone, but its vestiges remain.
Fortunately, vestigial Marxian anti-Zionism lacks the prudence, foresight, and
cleverness that typified many of the USSR’s schemes. So we’re left with a
collection of ghoulish dopes whose attachment to Leninism blinds them to best
practices. That’s right: I’m talking about the Democratic Socialists of
America:
Excellent statement that we are proud to add our name to. Free Elias
Rodriguez and all political prisoners. https://t.co/z1yW0xm5xZ pic.twitter.com/6MIBhaCFKX
— DSA Liberation Caucus ⛓️💥 ☭ (@dsaliberation) May 27, 2025
Hats off to AG
Hamilton for flagging that one. It is a pristine example of the devolution
of Marxian thought in the absence of a center that directs and coordinates
ideological agitation campaigns like Moscow’s effort to anathematize the Jewish
state. In much the same way that Michael Keaton’s character in the film Multiplicity
gets dumber with every new iteration, just as the Xerox of a Xerox loses its
sharpness, today’s useful idiots are much less useful and far bigger idiots.
The national DSA may distinguish itself from this splinter group
and its unashamed advocacy for a “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus in the DSA,”
but those distinctions are hard to identify when it comes to anti-Zionism. The Democratic Socialists of America is a hate group, and
its members do not seem to see the terrorization of American Jews as a
departure from their mission statement. It is openly hostile toward the Jewish
state. It celebrated Hamas’s bloody massacre while its fighters were
still active and at large in southern Israel. Its rally-goers brandish
unambiguous slogans: “I do not condemn Hamas,” read one sign. “There is only
one solution: Intifada. Revolution,” the marchers chanted. Twenty days after
the slaughter, DSA activists organized a demonstration they called “Flood
Brooklyn for Gaza,” which seemed to take direct inspiration from the name Hamas
gave to the 10/7 massacre: “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
The national DSA may not explicitly endorse this
organization’s imprudent celebration of the premeditated murder of random
people outside an Israeli diplomatic event in Washington, D.C., but its actions
suggest otherwise. If nothing else, this episode is a reminder that Zionism and
anti-communism are linked, both historically and philosophically.
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