Anti-Zionism’s Soviet Roots

By Zach Kessel

Thursday, November 30, 2023

 

Antisemitism is on an alarming rise as Israel continues to respond to the Hamas massacres of October 7. But the particular strain of antisemitism that we see today, in which Israel and Jews are cast as oppressors subjugating their Palestinian victims, arose long before the Hamas attack and has roots in a time and place that many no longer consider: the Soviet Union. In fact, the very notion of distinct Palestinian nationhood emerged from a Soviet project devised under the banner of national liberation.

 

Vladimir Lenin professed opposition to antisemitism and denounced the czarist pogroms, but his enterprise necessitated the assimilation of minorities and the tamping down of religious practice. The idea that Jews should have their own state, then, was a nonstarter. In his writings, Lenin describes the Zionist project as an expression of American imperialism that aims to advance the interests of owners and exploit laborers. Those ideas eventually came to form official Soviet policy toward Israel.

 

For a brief period after the Second World War, Stalin took a different tack and supported Israel. This was a matter of strategy. “It was done because of two reasons,” Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a professor of history and Jewish studies at Northwestern University, tells National Review:

 

First, Stalin knew that Israel had several communist bodies and was convinced that Israel would become a socialist state. The first three prime ministers of the country were representing the party Mapai, which was based on Zionist Marxism, so Stalin was confident that Israel would become a Marxist country and enclave for the Soviet Union of socialism in the Middle East. Second, Stalin wanted to give a slap on the face to Winston Churchill because the Middle East under the British mandates was kind of a failure for British imperialism. Stalin wanted to add insult to that injury. 

 

But Soviet support for Israel would not last long. Neither would a brief pause in Soviet propaganda that accused Zionists of being capitalist vassals who wished to exploit the third world and destroy the USSR. The return to form came in response to a geopolitical reality: The Soviet Union developed ties with Arab countries, the United States grew closer to Israel, and it became clear that the Jewish state would not take the Soviet side in the Cold War.

 

Near the end of his life, Stalin tried to discredit Zionism by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, of which the “doctors’ plot” is the best-known example. In 1953, he publicly accused a group of Jewish medical professionals of participating in a conspiracy to murder Soviet officials. This scheme, it was said, was part of a broader Zionist and Western plan to undermine the USSR — and by extension the global project of Marxist “liberation.” A Pravda report about this alleged treachery accused a “Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization” — the philanthropic American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee — of having sought to “achieve domination over other nations” at the behest of the United Kingdom and the United States through creating “in the USSR their own subversive ‘fifth column.’”

 

This smear of Israel played well with the Arab states that had rejected the United Nations’ plan for the partition in 1948 of the former British Mandate. Soviet influence among those states continued to grow as the USSR used its power on the U.N. Security Council to condemn British, French, and Israeli actions in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Not long after, the Soviet Union formed strong alliances with ruling socialist parties in Syria and the purportedly nonaligned Egypt. Brian Horowitz, a professor of Jewish studies at Tulane, says that Marxist-influenced Arab anti-Zionism was due to “a confluence of movements”:

 

The Arabs wanted to gain power over the West, to assert independence, and to be able to get a better deal on either foreign aid or when selling oil. They were glad to have an ideology that gave them legitimacy — one of resisting imperialism — in opposition to Israel. The Soviet Union, capitalizing on the idea of being anti-capitalist and anti-imperial, was able to appeal to the Third World in its own pursuit of power. 

 

After the Six-Day War — in which the USSR was Egypt’s primary weapons supplier — the Soviet Union began to export its version of anti-Zionism with new vigor. The field of “Zionology” — essentially antisemitism under a patina of pseudo-academic language — was the primary incubator of this propaganda. In 1972, the Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a directive “on further measures to fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism.” Soon after, the Soviet Academy of Sciences began to study anti-Zionism in the classic Marxist style of presenting ideological projects as scholarly. A common thread in the Zionologists’ output was the idea that Zionism is inherently evil; the Great Soviet Encyclopedia listed its pillars as “militant chauvinism, racism, anticommunism, and anti-Sovietism,” and accused “international Zionism” of “serving as the front squad of colonialism and neo-colonialism.”

 

It is worth drawing a distinction between this kind of antisemitism and the varieties that had come before. The medieval Christian hatred of Jews as “Christ-killers” did not have much purchase in Communist Russia, with its state-enforced atheism. But there is a contrast as well between the USSR and Nazi Germany. Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, wrote in a 2019 Tablet essay that Soviet leaders adapted old antisemitic tropes “to the Marxist framework by substituting the idea of a global anti-Soviet Zionist conspiracy for a specifically Jewish one. Jewish power became Zionist power. The rich and conniving Jewish bankers controlling money, politicians, and the media became the rich and conniving Zionists. The Jew as the Antichrist became the Jew as the anti-Soviet.”

 

This characterization of Zionism fit nicely into a broader anti-Western project to portray the U.S.-led order as oppressive and colonialist, a notion that would in turn help birth the idea of a distinct Palestinian national identity. Petrovsky-Shtern explains: “There was no concept of a Palestinian qua national identity before 1967, and all of that, I believe, is the product of Soviet propaganda after 1967. In the political discourse from the late 19th century to that time, the word ‘Palestinian’ is used to describe one group: Jews in the land of Israel. If you talked about ‘Palestinians,’ you were talking about Jewish kibbutzniks.”

 

Petrovsky-Shtern also says that the Soviet Union promoted the idea of Palestinian nationality by establishing nominal educational academies. For instance, it “created the Patrice Lumumba University, where representatives of future African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern elites were trained . . . along the lines of Soviet ideology — anti-American, anti-capitalist, and of course anti-bourgeois.” This was all done “under the banner of national liberation.” Directed toward Israel, the ideology denied the Jewish state’s very right to exist.

 

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority since 2005, completed his graduate studies at the Patrice Lumumba University in 1982. His dissertation, later published as the book The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism, was directed by Yevgeny Primakov, a master of Soviet political warfare. Its thesis is that Zionists collaborated with Nazis to perpetrate the Holocaust — which, according to Abbas, killed far fewer than 6 million European Jews — in order to win public support for a Jewish state. This supposed history, Abbas wrote, explains “the origins” of Israel’s “aggressive and racist policy vis-à-vis Palestinians and the Arabs in other countries.” Invoking Nazi Germany, Abbas described Zionists as “the storm troopers of world imperialist reaction” and claimed that the “aggressive essence of international Zionism and, first and foremost, its crucial component — Israel’s ruling Zionist regime — appear today in its most crude, expansionist, and racist form.”

 

It was not only Abbas who was influenced by Soviet attempts to link Zionism and Nazism. Tabarovsky writes that “foreign-directed Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda gradually built in for its audiences associations between Israel and such familiar Nazi German–specific terms as genocide, concentration camps, deportations, and Lebensraum.”

 

Soviet likenings of Zionism to Nazism reached a climax in 1975, with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379 — the “Zionism is racism” resolution that the USSR marshaled through. (It would be rescinded in 1991 under pressure from the U.S.) The resolution linked Zionism with “colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, . . . apartheid, and racial discrimination.” Petrovsky-Shtern tells NR that this was once again a strategic play by the Soviets, who were “interested in killing two birds with one stone.” First, they wanted to discourage emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. Second, they wished to curry more favor with Arab states and further degrade Western influence in the third world: If the West’s outpost in the Middle East was racist and oppressive, then the West itself must be illegitimate.

 

Through publications such as Sputnik, a monthly available in English, the USSR also spread its propaganda directly to Westerners who were sympathetic to narratives of anti-imperialism. Petrovsky-Shtern says the USSR’s casting of itself as a champion of the downtrodden was tailor-made for left-wing American ears: “The message of the peace-loving Soviet Union is sent to the West, and people swallow it hook, line, and sinker because it is contagious. These leftists heard the Soviet Union say that it supported the humiliated and oppressed, which was wonderful for them, because that was their ideological position.”

 

Today, the idea that Zionism equals Nazism is common in Western academia and culture. The narrative of decolonization, national liberation, and Israel as imperialist aggressor is well represented in course curricula. Bard College offers a class on Israeli “apartheid.” Princeton offers a class called “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South.” Included among the readings is a book that claims Israelis harvest Palestinian organs. Myriad ethnic-studies departments — and not only those having to do with Arabs — have issued statements supporting Hamas’s October 7 attack and rejecting the characterization of Hamas as a terrorist organization. And left-wing activist groups such as Black Lives Matter claim the Palestinian cause is similar to their own.

 

It may be that none of these groups or individuals has read Mahmoud Abbas’s dissertation at the Patrice Lumumba University. But they demonstrate that the antisemitic propaganda of the Soviet Union has outlived the Soviet state, to baleful effect.