The Soviet Origins Of Left-Wing Anti-Zionism

On college campuses today, such twisted anti-Zionist conspiracy theories are manifested in the incessant targeting of Jewish students. In 2019, the SJP chapter at Emory University posted eviction notices on Jewish students’ doors. The notices included statistics on Palestinian homes demolished by Israel, and the group was given permission by the campus residence department to post them. 

As in the Soviet campaign, Jews were targeted, not just “Zionists,” which would have been bad enough. Indeed, in February of this year, SJP at the University of Chicago attacked the very idea of Jewish national identity, claiming that it was invented by the Zionist movement. Dovid Efune, editor-in-chief of The Algemeiner, has said of campus antisemitism: “The biggest predictor is the presence of a Students for Justice in Palestine group.”

Another tactic used by Soviet propaganda was to twist the reality of the Holocaust. In 1961, for example, the Soviets openly questioned the validity of the Eichmann trial and claimed that Israel was following in Nazi Germany’s footsteps. As the trial neared, the Soviet press began attacking Eichmann’s defense counsel, called Israel a traitor to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust by working with “Hitler’s heirs” in West Germany and even alleged that Israel and West Germany were conspiring to prevent other Nazis from being brought to justice.

Ironically, Soviet anti-Zionism itself drew extensively from Nazi rhetoric and imagery. Many prominent contributors of propaganda material, such as Trofim Kichko, Yuri Ivanov, Lev Korneev and others unabashedly recycled ideas directly from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf. They even blamed the Jews for the extermination of both Jews and non-Jews during World War II. Today, anti-Zionist groups keep that legacy alive by routinely comparing Zionism to the Nazis. For example, Shahd Abusalama, a professor at Sheffield University in the United Kingdom, found it acceptable for a first-year student to compare an Israeli operation in Gaza to the Holocaust.

One of the Soviet propaganda machine’s greatest victories was the United Nations’ 1975 adoption of the “Zionism is Racism” resolution. Its revocation in 1991 had little effect on the U.N.’s stance on Israel. Statistics from 2020 are particularly illustrative: Israel was targeted by 17 U.N. resolutions, while all other countries combined, including regimes like Iran and North Korea, received six. On campus, Israel is frequently attacked in the same language. For example, at a Cornell SJP poetry reading, one participant designated Israel a “racist, exclusivist, supremacist state.”