The nefarious Soviet legacy on the Middle East and Western culture

How Soviet propaganda gifted us anti-Zionism, terrorist worship, Jeremy Corbyn, post-truth and the indoctrination of Western youth

FOREWORD BY THE EDITOR (Daniel Clarke-Serret)

This article by Izabella Tabarovsky (originally published in Tablet magazine) is an absolute game changer. If you struggle to understand the madness we’re currently living through - from libellous claims of genocide in Gaza to the Guardian lauding Hassan Nasrallah as Gandhi in disguise to the politics of anti-Jewish hate that took over Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to the brain dead neo-Marxist ideologies that have hijacked our universities - then Izabella’s piece is essential reading. Just think about it. Isn’t it astonishing that Third World African countries - whose independence struggles were heartily supported by Israel - suddenly turned against her with a uniformity of hostile language? Isn’t it a little more than coincidence that Israel turned overnight (amongst influencial voices) from the courageous little guy bullied by its hostile neighbours into a “white, colonising, European power”?

Well let Izabella now reveal the secret of the magician’s illusion. To understand the current intellectual climate we need to face up to a truth hidden in plain sight: Although the physical Soviet Union fell into oblivion in the late 20th Century, its nefarious legacy lives on. A concerted anti-Zionist campaign that began in November 1967 in New Delhi (under the auspices of a Soviet front organization) - and continued through years of Soviet funding to anti-Zionist and anti-Western causes - survived the economic collapse of the Muscovite bear. Though the rubles may have stopped flowing to useful idiots in 1990, the intellectual indoctrination implanted into the likes of George Galloway remained as fresh as ever. The West, content with having defeated the communist bloc through military and economic warfare, inexplicably abandoned the battle on the plain of ideas. It left the field open to its worst enemies; enemies that rose to power in our social democratic parties, higher education institutions, media organisations, “humanitarian” NGOs and at the top of the United Nations.

By reprinting this article, I rebegin the fight that was so shamefully abandoned by short termists who declared the “End of History”. Today we say clearly that the rotting corpse of the Soviet misery machine needs to be buried once and for all. And nations from all four corners of the world must unite to declare truth over dismal Soviet ideology. The road is yet long, but we will prevail.

[Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism. She is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities and a Research Fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP. Follow her on Twitter @IzaTabaro.]

Zombie Anti-Zionism by Izabella Tabarovsky

The left’s addiction to warmed-over Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda from half a century ago proves that its criticism of Israel has nothing to do with facts on the ground in Gaza

[Postcard, circa 1920s, BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE]

In November 1967, the Indian chapter of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front organization, held the International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples in New Delhi. Gathering in the capital of India were some 150 delegates representing 55 countries and 70 international organizations from across the Third World, the socialist bloc, and the West. India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Algeria’s Houari Boumedienne—the biggest political stars of the Non-Aligned Movement—sent their greetings, as did heads of Sudan, Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Kuwait, and Mongolia. Chairing the proceedings was Krishna Menon, a firebrand leftist Indian intellectual and former Indian defense minister the KGB had actively cultivated in the hopes that he would rise to be the head of state.

Some 1,200 delegates and visitors attended the opening plenary, at which Herbert Aptheker, a senior member of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and influential scholar of Marxism, argued for framing the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms of “imperialism and colonialism versus national liberation and social progress,” as well as through the lens of racial oppression. Contrary to Israeli rulers’ claims, he declared, the greatest threat facing Israel came not from Arabs but from Israel’s own extremist right-wing government, which had turned Israel into the “handmaiden of imperialism and colonialist expansionism.” He equated Israel with Nazi Germany by referring to the recent Six-Day War as a blitzkrieg, a quintessentially Soviet propaganda term meant to evoke Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Today, said Aptheker, it was Jews who were “acting out the roles of occupiers and tormentors” of the oppressed. He called on the audience to work tirelessly to unmask “the horror of the June war and its aftermath.” So closely did Aptheker’s speech follow the anti-Israel logic and idiom of Soviet propaganda that it may well have been written for him in Moscow.

The two documents the conference unanimously adopted—the “Appeal to the Conscience of the World” (reportedly signed by 100 members of the Indian parliament) and a “Declaration”—conveyed similar messages with even more bombast. Evoking classic antisemitic tropes, they accused Israel of having cynically violated all “standards of human decency,” and declared that it had made “a mockery of all human moral values.” They dubbed Palestinian terrorism—aka “resistance”—as “righteous and justified.” In an attempt to make the Middle Eastern conflict more relatable, they equated it with the central cause animating the Western left at the time: the war in Vietnam. They called for all the people on the planet to resist “imperialist-Zionist propaganda” and expressed appreciation for the “progressive and peace-loving” Soviet Union and other socialist states and Non-Aligned countries that “supported the Arab cause.”

The message echoed throughout the global leftist universe. The CPUSA, which was almost wholly subsidized by the Soviet Union, published Aptheker’s speech and both statements in full in its theoretical journal Political Affairs. The African Communist, the Soviet-financed quarterly organ of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which was deeply intertwined with the African National Congress (ANC), ran a piece titled “Zionism and the Future of Israel,” closely reflecting the language of the New Delhi conference, complete with the word blitzkrieg. Its author, who claimed to be a South African living in Tel Aviv, accused Zionist “fanatical zealots” of exploiting the biblical concept of Jewish chosenness to fan the flames of Jewish supremacy (“chauvinism” in the language of the day), while equating Israel with apartheid South Africa.

What’s so interesting about this half-century-old Soviet propaganda is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7. Today’s left, too, speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state; equates it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; disparages Jews for having turned into oppressors; and proclaims Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist their colonial oppression by any means necessary.

A quick excursion into the Soviet-sponsored Third World, aka the left-wing universe of yesteryear, helps put many things into perspective—from the disastrous “anti-racism” U.N. conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 that launched a massive new global wave of anti-Israel demonization to the current grotesque spectacle of progressives using “anti-colonialism” to justify the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians in a land where Jews have lived for more than 3,000 years of their collective history as memorialized in the works of Greek and Roman historians; monumental inscriptions by neighboring kingdoms; such globally recognized works as the New Testament, the Koran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls; and by world-famous monuments like the Arch of Titus in Rome.

That what we are watching is less an upsurge of a new and terrifying phenomenon than the zombielike repetition of the state-sponsored propaganda of a dead empire that was hardly known for truth-telling explains why the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist prattle of today’s college students feels like déjà vu to those of us who grew up in the USSR. We’ve heard it all before: anti-imperialism mixed with anti-Zionist sloganeering; anti-racism interwoven with the demonization of the Jews; incantations about “world peace” and “friendship of the peoples” intertwined with the fomenting and financing of wars in faraway lands. One example in particular stands out as an illustration of profound Soviet cynicism with regard to the Third World: While calling for the boycott of the apartheid regime in every international forum, Moscow didn’t for one second stop trading diamonds with South African companies De Beers and Anglo American. As perestroika got underway and Soviet foreign policy priorities began to shift, some in Moscow started reaching out to the South African regime to convince it not to surrender power to Nelson Mandela.

Those who try to explain the contemporary left’s anti-Israel derangement by pointing to the latest academic fashions, such as critical race theory and intersectionality, or to specific news events of the day often miss the point that the precise language used by the anti-Israel left today to condemn the Jewish State has been a conventional part of left-wing discourse for decades—and that it originated in the USSR. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, wrote Stephen Norwood, the American far left “repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s campaign to eradicate the Jewish state.” Similar trends were on view in the United Kingdom. “By the early 1970s, it was generally accepted across the [British] far left that Zionism was a racist ideology and that Israel was comparable to apartheid South Africa,” wrote Dave Rich in Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present.

The extraordinary fidelity with which progressives reproduce the ancient tropes and warped logic of Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, complete with specific fictions and terms of abuse, raises questions. How is it that such a multitude of groups across the globe—from all manner of Communists and Trotskyists to Non-Aligned political figures, non-Communist New Left, Pan Africanists, and Cuban revolutionaries—adopted this language so completely and simultaneously? The answer is that they followed Moscow, which targeted them all with a colossal anti-Zionist campaign, pushing out masses of printed matter, communicating these ideas in multilingual radio broadcasts, and using media and diplomatic channels to influence opinions within countries.

The zombie-like repetition of state-sponsored propaganda from a dead empire explains why the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist prattle of today’s college students feels like déjà vu.

But the most important channel of transmission for the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign was, undoubtedly, the Third World—more specifically, an ecosystem that formed at the intersection of the postcolonial Non-Aligned Movement; the Western left, which looked toward exotic distant lands and their guerillas as the future of the revolution and a cure for their own alienation; and the USSR, which at the same time, in the 1960s, began to view this part of the world as central to defeating the “main adversary,” the United States, in the Cold War.

Moscow did not control this ecosystem entirely. But it had no shortage of tools with which to shape it, the most important of those being the multitudes of international youth festivals, solidarity forums, women’s assemblies, and nuclear disarmament congresses that Moscow sponsored in support of its foreign policy goals. “It is simply impossible to list all the conferences, campaigns, and other events, organized by various international bodies with the assistance of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries,” wrote Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson in The Hidden Thread. Essop Pahad, a prominent ANC activist and member of the South African Communist Party, recalled, “You could have a conference in Ethiopia, and somebody would come from Laos and Indonesia and Malaysia and Cambodia and Vietnam. … Where would all these people have found the money? The Soviets and the other socialist countries paid for all of this,” including “for the airplanes that were hired.”

It was at Soviet-sponsored conferences that the Western left got to rub shoulders with its Third World revolutionary heroes. It was here that Moscow worked to inculcate its brand of conspiracist anti-Zionism by tying it to every progressive cause of the time, turning Palestinian terrorists into a global cause célèbres on par with anti-apartheid campaigners, French leftists, and the stars of the U.S. antiwar movement. It was here, at these all-expenses-paid gatherings, that shared narratives and opinions formed and global peer-to-peer networks were established to carry those narratives and opinions. In this ecosystem, being anti-Zionist and anti-Israel became as much a marker of belonging as standing against imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, and apartheid.

A remarkable number of figures who have shaped anti-Israel discourse in recent years came of age politically within the Soviet-sponsored anti-colonialist ecosystem. Angela Davis is only one such figure. A long-term member of CPUSA and a prominent member of the Black Power movement, who owes much of her political and cultural stardom to Soviet investment in her image and career (in 1971 Moscow devoted an estimated 5 percent of its propaganda efforts to Davis), she first met Yasser Arafat at a 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin and credits the “powerful force” of “communist internationalism”—“in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean”—with globalizing the Palestinian cause. Davis remains an icon on today’s anti-Israel left, and in a recent post-Oct. 7 talk, she spoke of the “murderous power of Zionism.”

Another iconic figure of the Black Power movement, Stokely Carmichael, whose virulent anti-Zionist quotes are frequently recalled by admirers today, including last fall at Harvard, was also profoundly influenced by this global ecosystem. He first entered it at a conference in Cuba in 1967. He developed a close personal relationship with Fidel Castro, embarked on a Third World pilgrimage to Vietnam and Africa, and lived for many years in Guinea and Ghana, developing close relationships with their Marxist dictators, Ahmed Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah. (Both played important roles in the Non-Aligned Movement.)

Another influential American who is a product of that ecosystem—meaning, that he literally grew up in it—is President Biden’s former Iran envoy Robert Malley, who is currently under an FBI investigation for potentially mishandling classified information by sharing it with Iran. Malley’s father, Simon, an Egyptian Jew and a communist, served Nasser, built close relationships with Arafat and Castro, and “dedicated his life to the “anti-imperialist and anti-American causes of Third World national liberal movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” writes Hussein Aboubakr Mansour. Malley the father saw Israel as “an evil vestige of colonialism,” and as an editor of the Paris-based magazine Africasia (later renamed Afrique Asie), he took radical positions that were not only “virulently” anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli, but also overtly pro-Soviet. (His support of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—a position that was deeply unpopular in the Non-Aligned world and typically indicative of a deeper Soviet link—is particularly notable in this regard.) Malley senior boasted several Arab and African citizenships, including an honorary Palestinian one, and took his son on “revolutionary tourism trips” across the postcolonial world. As a boy, Robert played with his father’s friend Arafat. As a student at Yale, he wrote articles condemning Israel.

On the opposite side of the Atlantic, some of the most zealous Corbynistas, too, are products of the Soviet ecosystem. They include George Galloway, who first visited Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) camps in Lebanon in the 1970s, has made a career out of his unhinged hatred of Israel, and dubbed the day the USSR fell as the worst day of his life; Ken Livingstone, who took money from Libya’s Non-Aligned dictator Muammar Gaddafi to publish a weekly newspaper that ran several pro-PLO articles per issue and demonized Israel as a racist, genocidal, apartheid reincarnation of Nazi Germany; and Jeremy Corbyn’s former advisers, the “Stalinist” Seumas Milne, who spent his gap year in Lebanon and published a pro-Soviet and pro-PLO newspaper, Straight Left, and Andrew Murray, a 40-year veteran of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who for a time worked for the Soviet foreign propaganda agency Novosti. Corbyn emerged on the British political scene as a young Labour activist in the 1980s, when the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist currents within the party had already been nurtured for a decade, and joined an organization that “rejected Israel’s existence and campaigned to ‘eradicate Zionism’ from the Labour Party,” wrote Dave Rich in The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism.

Some of the Latin American leaders who rushed to condemn Israel and equate it with Nazi Germany in the wake of Oct. 7 are also products of that era. Brazil’s Lula Da Silva rose through the ranks of communist-aligned trade-union politics, and Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro was for several years a member of a left-wing guerrilla group responsible for assassinating 13 politicians.

As for the ANC, the plaintiff behind the bogus International Court of Justice suit accusing Israel of genocide, it occupied pride of place in that ecosystem, both as an object of admiration for its fight against apartheid and as a group that enjoyed the closest relationship with Moscow among all other national-liberation movements the latter sponsored. The ANC turned postapartheid South Africa into a country of “government-sponsored anti-Zionism,” with Muslim student groups using “Soviet-style terminology” and Communist slogans to attack Jewish students. When ANC’s Jewish veteran Ronnie Kasrils justified Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom on the grounds that Israel was an oppressor, he was being entirely consistent with his role in the Moscow-led radical left—as opposed to Western liberal—anti-apartheid struggle.

China’s incorporation of anti-Israel propaganda into its post-Oct. 7 anti-Western agitprop—and its role mediating a unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah just recently—has surprised many observers, but that, too, is consistent with its rich Cold War history of supporting Palestinians and condemning Israel and Zionism as part of its attacks on the West and the United States, which were even more radical than those of the USSR. And we must not, of course, forget Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote his pamphlet-sized dissertation equating Zionism with Nazism at a Soviet think tank run by KGB’s master-Arabist Yevgeny Primakov and charged with developing “scholarly” foundations for anti-Zionist propaganda.

The belief that “the Cold War could be won in the Third World” began to take hold in Moscow in the late 1950s. In 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev spent a month with the Soviet U.N. delegation in New York, where he witnessed 17 new states join the organization, 16 of them from Africa. “Hearing Western imperialism publicly denounced by Third World leaders in the heartland of American capitalism” left an indelible impression on the general secretary, wrote Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin in The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World. Khrushchev flew home convinced that the way to bring imperialism (and the United States) “to its knees” was indeed by supporting the “sacred anti-imperialist struggle of colonies and newly independent states.” He gave Soviet propaganda professionals appropriate instructions. In 1961, the KGB adopted a strategy to use “national liberation movements and the forces of anti-imperialism” in an aggressive new effort against the “‘Main Adversary’”—the United States—“in the Third World.”

Khrushchev’s new strategy demanded a new international posture. Moscow duly refurbished its image, discarding commitment to ideological orthodoxy and presenting itself as both a staunch advocate for peace, progress, and development and a principled opponent of imperialism, colonialism, and racism—all issues that were top of mind among newly independent nations. Soviet periodicals, translated into even more languages, were now reaching practically every country on the planet. (Some 400 were available in Latin America alone.) Stories about Soviet advancements in education, public health, housing, agriculture, fashion, science, and technology supplanted dreary texts about Marxism-Leninism. Colorful photo spreads of women, children, gymnasts, ballerinas, and happy members of Asian ethnic minorities painted the USSR as a forward-looking country filled with optimistic, smiling people enjoying all the benefits of socialist industrial modernity. Third World politicians and technical specialists flocked to take Potemkin village tours of the Soviet “inner periphery” (Central Asia and the Caucasus) to learn how the great, progressive Russian people helped their backward non-white brothers leapfrog into modernity. (Few seemed to recognize these as examples of Soviet racism and imperialism.)

What Moscow was now selling to these countries was not proletarian revolution but economic aid, offered in a brotherly spirit and supposedly with no strings attached. “We do not interfere in the internal affairs of the countries that are getting our aid,” proclaimed a Soviet official in Cairo in 1957. The real meaning of this proposition would reveal itself a few years later, when the KGB turned the Third World into the staging ground and vehicle for active measures, penetrating in particular the Non-Aligned Movement’s most influential state actors, such as India, Egypt, Ghana, and Cuba. Newly loosened ideological strictures and theoretical adjustments enabled Moscow to engage with every kind of Third World nationalist, leftist, Islamist, and genocidaire. So successful did this new approach to foreign policy appear that by the late 1970s, the USSR was confident “the world was going our way.”

Moscow also worked to divine what made the non-Communist New Left tick. One insight arrived in October 1967, when 50,000 American students—mostly members of the New Left—who gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to protest the war in Vietnam took the opportunity to pay tribute to Che Guevara, just recently executed by U.S.-trained Bolivian forces. The spectacle must have riveted Moscow, which had viewed Guevara as a fantasist and “brave but incompetent guerilla”; it shed few tears for him. When a poll revealed that more American students “identified with Che than with any other figure, alive or dead,” the KGB knew it got a gift. In the coming years, it would incorporate Che’s myth into its “active-measures campaign against American imperialism.” The New Left’s cringeworthy hero-worship of Third World militants and despots would offer numerous such gifts.

The anti-imperialist crowd Moscow had at its disposal, then, was motley, and at the many conferences, seminars, and festivals Moscow sponsored, it made sure to offer a little bit for everyone. Non-Aligned grandstanders got bright media spotlights and a bully pulpit from which to harangue American imperialism. New Leftists got to rub shoulders with their revolutionary heroes in thrillingly authentic, noncapitalist settings. Orthodox communists could partake in hard-core theoretical discussions. Spending days in exotic locations bonding with peers normalized radical perspectives, turning the most extreme views into conventional wisdom. Recognizing the complicated feelings the USSR aroused among many in this group, Moscow kept its involvement in the background, using front organizations to organize and run the shows.

By the time anti-Zionism rose to the top of its ideological priorities in June 1967, Moscow had a ready-made ecosystem with receptive members primed to condemn anything Western, American, and imperialistic, as well as a proven method to socialize the anti-Israel new ideas among them.

Moscow wasn’t the first party to introduce anti-Israel demonization into Third World revolutionary discourse: Arab states started doing it the moment Israel was established. Nor did the Soviets suddenly become anti-Zionist in 1967; ideological Zionophobia had been part of the Soviet outlook from the Bolsheviks’ early days. But the crushing defeat of the Soviet Union’s Arab allies in the Six-Day War created a massive crisis of confidence in Moscow. As Soviet Jews began to demand the right to emigrate, and Jews around the globe joined in a campaign on their behalf, Moscow turned Zionism into a bogeyman that threatened its interests everywhere at once. In the fevered imagination of KGB’s head, Yuri Andropov, Zionism was a global anti-Soviet and anti-socialist force, and the only way to defeat it was by attacking it globally.

We can get a vivid picture of Moscow’s approach to solving its Zionist problem from an article titled “Anatomy of Israeli Aggression,” which appeared in the World Marxist Review—the English edition of the Prague-based Soviet theoretical journal Problems of Peace and Socialism. Published in 40 languages and distributed in 145 countries, the journal reached an estimated half a million of the most committed leftists around the globe. The author of the article, Yevgeny Yevseyev, was one of the key ideologues of the new brand of Soviet anti-Zionism—the so-called Zionologists.

The piece reported on the “Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples,” which took place in Cairo in January 1969. Organized jointly by the World Peace Council and the Cairo-headquartered Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), it enjoyed Nasser’s personal patronage. As 14 months earlier in New Delhi, stars of the Third World and Non-Aligned Movement were here, including India’s Krishna Menon; the world’s first female prime minister, Ceylon’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike; and Isabelle Blume, an ex-head of Belgium’s Communist Party and the recipient of Stalin’s International Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples, who counted Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Indira Gandhi, and Salvador Allende among her friends. PLO and Fatah were there as well.

Yevseyev hailed the Cairo conference as “a powerful demonstration of the anti-imperialist forces in support of the Arab people’s struggle.” Delegates from 74 countries and 15 international organizations, including France, Italy, Sweden, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, came together, he wrote, to discuss Zionism as an “active but skillfully concealed force” that was engaged in a “worldwide struggle against the national liberation movement, communism, and other democratic forces.” Having postulated this fundamentally conspiratorial notion, Yevseyev sought to debunk the view of Israel as a “small and weak state” surrounded by hostile neighbors: In reality, he wrote, Israel was a warmongering, “aggressive force” and “source of tension” in the Middle East.

Yevseyev praised the conference for exposing Zionism “as a transmission belt of world imperialism,” a “modern form of fascism,” and a reactionary expression of late-stage capitalism—which naturally made Israel Hitler’s fascist heir apparent: “Practical application of the Zionist doctrine in the Middle East,” he explained, inevitably involved “genocide, racism, perfidy, duplicity, aggression, annexation”—in other words, “all the attributes of fascism that go back to the Hitler days.” The word genocide appeared in the piece twice, helping solidify the link between Israel and Nazi Germany and laying the groundwork for its indiscriminate use in future anti-Israel propaganda.

Yevseyev dedicated a portion of his article to painting Zionism as the enemy of the African peoples. (Undermining the American puppet Israel’s budding relationships with newly independent African states was a Soviet priority in the region.) “Zionist agents disguised as specialists” were seeking to infiltrate African countries’ press, trade unions, and educational institutions, wrote Yevseyev, using one of KGB’s favorite tropes. Playing on the young nations’ central fears, he announced that the real objective of “Israel’s Zionist policy” in Africa was “to stamp out even the first tender shoots of independence” among them. Zionist propaganda, meanwhile, sought “to set one people against another and thereby prevent genuine and lasting peace in the area.”

Yevseyev then proceeded to lay out a program of action that the conference adopted. First on the agenda was establishing a commission “to investigate Israeli atrocities” and peg Israel as a platform for launching imperialist aggression against the “struggle for freedom and progress.” Next was mobilizing “world public opinion” against Israel by countering “the widespread imperialist and Zionist propaganda” with “truthful and detailed information” about the conflict. It was also important to build global support for Palestinians, particularly in Europe, where said truthful information was still lacking. In-country committees were to raise funds and organize film showings, exhibitions, and radio and TV programs to keep their publics informed about the “activities of the resistance organizations,” while visits of “prominent Arab political and public personalities and representatives of the Palestinian resistance movement to as many countries as possible” were to be arranged. Meanwhile, it was crucial to explain to the world that the pro-Palestinian movement was directed not against Jews but against Zionism, which represented a “constant menace” to “universal peace and security.”

Just how accurately Yevseyev’s piece described the conference proceedings is less important than Moscow’s peddling of that narrative around the globe, signaling that condemning Zionism in this way was now imperative for all progressive people. It would take a separate project to identify how closely the conference’s recommendations were followed. But in at least one country whose delegates attended the event—the United Kingdom—things would soon develop in ways that would please men like Yuri Andropov. 

It’s worth dwelling for a moment on how these Soviet propaganda tradeshows were organized. From the World Peace Council to the International Union of Students to the World Federation of Trade Unions to Women’s International Democratic Federation, the purported sponsors were public organizations with cumulative memberships of hundreds of millions, financed by Communist countries—primarily the USSR and the socialist bloc. Overtly designed to unify people across the globe around specific issues or interests, their true purpose was to mobilize them around Soviet foreign policy priorities, which earned them the moniker of Communist fronts. The World Federation of Trade Unions alone, for example, wrote Baruch Hazan, counted 140 million “highly disciplined” members and published several “magazines, bulletins and pamphlets, which were distributed in 70-125 countries.”

During times of international crises, writes Hazan, all the major fronts immediately declared their unreserved support for the Soviet position on the issue. For example, when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, all the fronts “denounced Israel within a period of a few days, often in exactly the same words,” and demanded that “all public organizations in all countries launch a wide campaign in protest against the barbarous actions of the Israeli military.” Given their reach and overtly neutral status, the fronts provided crucial infrastructure for Soviet international ideological offensives. Whatever the issue—Vietnam War, Angela Davis, the campaign to discredit Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—the fronts cooperated with one another and could count on “enthusiastic, friendly publicity in the entire Communist-oriented press throughout the world.”

When it came to coopting the Third World’s political agenda, Moscow’s primary tool was the Asian-African People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), which was born in 1957 as an offshoot of the World Peace Council. The group’s main publication, the Afro-Asian Bulletin, consistently portrayed Israel as “a creation and tool of imperialism artificially implanted in Palestine to divide African, Arab and Asian peoples, subvert their quest for independence and penetrate their economies for Western capitalism,” wrote Dave Rich.

In January 1969, right before the Word Peace Council-AAPSO gathering in Cairo, the two groups jointly ran the International Conference in Support of the Peoples of the Portuguese Colonies and Southern Africa in Khartoum, Sudan. According to African Communist’s coverage, it brought together 200 delegates from more than 50 countries, including India, Egypt, Cuba, Vietnam, and the entire socialist bloc. Nasser, Indira Ghandi, and Kwame Nkrumah sent greetings. Leaders of all key Moscow-sponsored African liberation movements—the ANC, Mozambique’s FRELIMO, Namibia’s SWAPO and Angolan MPLA—were there. So were the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and, of course, the PLO and Fatah. 

Although the conference focused on colonialism and apartheid in Africa, the declaration it adopted included a condemnation of the “imperialist-backed Zionist aggression” against “the fraternal Arab peoples.” Speakers at the conference talked “of a global anti-imperialist struggle that included Palestine,” and the ANC delegate accused Israel of providing direct support to the apartheid regime. Conference documents “repeatedly referenced” America’s war in Vietnam, “enhancing the Soviet Union’s status as the favored superpower in these circles” and associating it with the Palestinian struggle against “reactionary Zionism” and “Zionist aggressors.”

Among the delegates at both the Khartoum and Cairo conferences was a 21-year-old British anti-apartheid activist, Peter Hellyer. A member of Young Liberals, the student wing of the British Liberal Party, he “was enthralled by the presence of leaders from all the Southern African liberation movements.” After the two events, Hellyer proceeded on a trip to Lebanon and Jordan, organized by the Arab League. He went home convinced of the South Africa-Israel linkage and that the West’s “unthinking support for Israel” needed to be reassessed. He would go on to become one of the most influential activists on the 1970s British pro-Palestinian scene, helping to turn Young Liberals into the first organization on the British left “to call for Zionists to be excluded from mainstream political structures,” wrote Rich.

Another globe-trotting Brit in attendance at Khartoum was Scottish Labour MP Andrew Faulds. Like Hellyer, Faulds came into the pro-Palestinian movement via anti-apartheid activism. Importantly, Faulds was firmly in the British mainstream, working for the Palestinian cause as part of the Labour Committee for the Middle East, which he cofounded with another centrist (and definitively anti-communist) Labour politician Christopher Mayhew. Faulds and Hellyer were delighted in attacking the BBC, which they viewed as having fallen victim to Zionist propaganda. A breakthrough came in 1976, when the BBC broadcast a program produced and hosted by Hellyer and Faulds, among other activists, titled The Right of Return, which one British newspaper described as “the most extremist anti-Israel program ever shown on Western television.” Fatah’s Secretary General Farouk Kaddoumi proclaimed it “the best film he had ever seen on the Palestinian issue.”

They notched another success by drawing powerful British trade unions into the pro-Palestinian campaign. By the mid-1970s, high-level British labor delegations were traveling to Egypt and Lebanon (George Galloway’s anti-Israel political activism started with such a trip). They also drew anti-Zionist Jews into their activities. It was this early 1970s mix of radicals and centrists, including Hellyer and Faulds, that British scholar James Vaughan credits with introducing the country to an enormously “influential” and “controversial” “new language of anti-Zionism,” complete with racial themes, allegations that Israel was an apartheid state akin to South Africa, and equations between Israel and Nazi Germany. This language would prove to be their legacy, but they, of course, did not invent it: They simply brought it back with them from Soviet-sponsored Third World, left-wing gatherings.

Within a few years, the global anti-Zionist campaign put into motion by the Arab defeat in 1967 seemed to be unstoppable. A continuous flow of international events increasingly entrenched the idea of Zionism as the enemy of all progressive causes across the Third World, leftist universe.

Here are a few public events that took place in 1973 alone. That year, Soviet Zionologists—all of them associated with Soviet intelligence and state security apparatus, including Yevseyev and Mahmoud Abbas’ future dissertation adviser Vladimir Kiselyov—participated in at least three “scientific” events on Zionism organized in the Middle East: two in Baghdad and one in Cairo. (In Cairo, Yevseyev delivered a talk in Arabic titled “Middle East in Zionist and Imperialist Plans.”) The same year, Gaddafi organized an all-expenses-paid International Conference of European and Arab Youth in Tripoli, Libya. Among 200 delegates from 55 countries were some 20 young Brits, including members of the National Union of Students, who made contacts with London-based PLO- and Fatah-affiliated groups.

The most consequential public anti-Zionist Third World-ist event of 1973, though, was undoubtedly the massive, glitzy fourth Non-Aligned Summit, which met in Algiers in September. There, Israel and Zionism were condemned in anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and anti-Western terms in front of 54 heads of state and delegates from 75 countries representing a combined population of 2 billion. (It was at this summit that Castro publicly cut ties with Israel.) Among the guests was U.N. General Secretary Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi who had participated in the annihilation of the 2,000-year-old Jewish community of Salonica and would preside, two years later, over the adoption of the U.N. “Zionism is racism” resolution. The summit “marked the beginning” of the Non-Aligned Movement “as a voting bloc” within the United Nations, observed one former U.S. official. In its wake, U.S. diplomats “lobbying among Third World delegations” for the first time found themselves “rebuffed with the explanation” that they could not go against positions they had committed to in Algiers.

That fall, too, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution condemning “the unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism and Israeli imperialism.” Soon, more than 30 Black African states had broken off relations with Israel, despite Israel’s extensive track record of aid to the Third World.

And that was hardly all. At the July 1975 U.N. World Conference on the International Women’s Year in Mexico City, a declaration “on the equality of women and their contribution to development and peace” called for the elimination of Zionism along with colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, and racial discrimination. The following month, foreign ministers of Non-Aligned countries met in Lima, Peru, to denounce the United States “and other imperialist powers” for their support to Israel’s “Zionist regime” and condemned their “deliberate intention” to use Israel as a “base of colonialism and imperialism within the Third World” and as a weapon against national-liberation movements—a policy that helped “consolidate racist regimes, threaten peace and security in the developing countries and plunder their natural resources.”

By the time the “Zionism is racism” resolution, introduced by Soviet-dominated Somalia, came up for vote at the United Nations in November 1975, two-thirds of the planet—the Third World and the socialist bloc—had turned against Israel in less than a decade.

What’s so interesting about this half-century old Soviet propaganda is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7. 

It’s reasonable to wonder what moved all these countries, with their disparate agendas and loyalties, to assume such a unified stance on Israel—a country that held zero significance for most. Some undoubtedly did it out of ideological conviction, others out of Third World solidarity with the Arab states. But for many, purely political calculation came into play as well. The anti-Israel position proved to be a cost-free bargaining chip that could be traded for something valuable, such as Arab economic aid or Soviet support.

By the end of the decade, reflexive anti-Zionism had become a litmus test of belonging and unity in the struggle on the global left. Meetings between Soviet and Third World officials in Moscow invariably concluded with pledges to fight “imperialism, Zionism and world reaction.” At the Non-Aligned Summit in Havana in 1979, the incoming chair Fidel Castro mentioned Zionism five times, postulating it as one of the main obstacles to the aspirations of postcolonial countries and as a comprehensive enemy of peace. It became a term of abuse, too: During the Iran-Iraq war, which broke out in 1980, the two countries accused each other of being puppets of “international Zionism” (a politically acceptable derivative of the “international Jewry” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, itself widely popularized by Soviet propaganda).

The fall of the USSR at the end of the 1980s brought the Third World, left-wing ecosystem to a halt. Without Soviet money, ideological brainpower, and organizational muscle, none of that could function. Lots of leftist publications went bankrupt, and lots of leftist careers ended or changed course from 1989 to 1991. There seems to have been little soul-searching in those quarters, however. On the contrary, many disapproved of the political changes in the USSR and waxed nostalgic about the past. And why wouldn’t they? They all benefited personally and professionally from the money stolen from ordinary Soviet citizens and hardly even thought about it.

ANC’s example is illustrative. In addition to comprehensive military training, the USSR provided members of the ANC with scholarships to Soviet universities, treated its leaders at exclusive hospitals reserved for Kremlin honchos, and sent their children to the elite Artek summer camp in the Crimea. Ronnie Kasrils, the former leader of the ANC military wing who extolled Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom, admitted that it had never occurred to them that they were treated as “privileged visitors” and that ordinary people might live differently. Years later, ANC’s veterans still fondly recalled their Soviet experience. In their minds, the USSR had “belonged to them as much” as it had “to the Soviets themselves.”

Activists and intellectuals who came of age in the Soviet ecosystem parlayed their internationalist experience into successful academic, journalistic, and political careers, passing on their “anti-imperialism of idiots” to the next generation of students and followers. There was never an imperative for any of them to rethink their ideas—and it isn’t even clear that they could have, given their conditioning.

Somehow, liberal America has slept through all of it. Having won the Cold War, it didn’t even bother to disarm and discredit the ideas it opposed, the way it had after it defeated Nazi Germany. Too many American intellectuals had been leftists or had leftist parents or had been fellow travelers with leftist causes to want to look too closely at the moral and physical rot of the empire that America defeated—a victory that moreover belonged to the arch-enemy of the American left, Ronald Reagan. Why give Reagan and his fellow anti-communists and troglodyte McCarthy-ites credit for having been right?

That the left has held onto the Soviet language of anti-Zionist struggle, down to retaining the same stilted epithets, despite the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union is a testament to the disenchantment of Western liberals with what they should have remembered as a heroic and deeply meaningful struggle that rescued close to a billion people around the world from totalitarian slavery. It also testifies to the enduring utility of anti-Zionism as a political tool. Throughout the Cold War, this ideology helped unite political actors with agendas so different as to be virtually irreconcilable; it continues to do the same today. Anti-Zionism allows the Western left to ally itself with jihadists, who stand against everything the progressive left has ever claimed to represent. That these crude, immoral politics and ideology, shaped by illiberal, anti-Western, anti-democratic regimes with the blood of millions on their hands, are being presented to young Americans as the main paradigm to make sense of the world is a scandalous historical irony.

America, of course, is not the Soviet Union, and there is much American Jews can do to fight this moldy propaganda, which now emanates from power centers within their own society. As any third-rate horror movie will tell you, fighting zombies is thankless work. But doing nothing is an even worse option.

The article was originally published in Tablet Magazine at this link: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/zombie-anti-zionism

#IZABELLA TABAROVSKY #ANTI-ZIONISM #PROPAGANDA #COLD WAR #NON-ALIGNED MOVEMENT #THIRD-WORLDISM #PLO