The Language of Soviet Propaganda
Progressive anti-Zionism and the poisonous legacy of Cold War hatred.
The claim that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians is among the longest-running lies told about Israel. “Genocide Israeli style”; “Zionist-engineered genocide”; “the ‘final solution’ of the Palestinian question”—these may look like snippets from some recent campus proclamation, but they are not. They appeared in a Soviet pamphlet titled “Zionists Count on Terror.” Published in 1984 by Novosti, a Soviet foreign propaganda arm masquerading as a news agency, this pocket-sized brochure was meant to promote the Soviet view of Israel and Zionism to English-language audiences.
English-speaking readers around the world were meant to understand that Zionists were genocidal and racist settler-colonialists who deployed Nazi methods in the service of global imperialism, while suppressing the anti-colonial national-liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. In the pamphlet’s 76 pages, variations on the words genocide, terror, and racist appear some 300 times. Novosti made clear that Zionists were perfidious double-dealers by associating them with the CIA, MI6, and of course, the Mossad in 100 instances. Readers were told to dismiss Jewish claims of antisemitism as Zionist tricks meant to deflect attention from Israel’s crimes.
These calumnies will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the rhetoric that exploded in progressive quarters in the wake of October 7—the day Hamas raped, tortured, slaughtered, and pillaged its way through Israel’s southern kibbutzim. Isn’t this 40-year-old Soviet propaganda pamphlet speaking the language of today’s progressives? It is. Or to be more precise: today’s progressives are speaking the language of Soviet propaganda. The most extraordinary feature of the anti-Israel rhetoric flooding the West today is the extent to which it reproduces the motifs, tropes, slogans, and explanatory logic of late-Soviet communist ideology.
In a recent New Yorker essay by Masha Gessen titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” the author calls on Germany to get over constrictive Holocaust “memory culture” and renounce the taboo on equating Israel with Nazi Germany. Gessen argues that Gaza is the equivalent of a Nazi Jewish ghetto, and asserts that what we are witnessing in the Gaza Strip is the Israeli equivalent of the ghetto’s liquidation—i.e., a genocide.
Judging from subsequent remarks, Gessen was under the impression that no one else had used this comparison before. But this rhetorical device, known as Holocaust inversion, has been around for decades, and it was pioneered by the Soviets for mass propaganda use in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. “We learned the lesson of World War II,” reads the caption under one cartoon depicting an Israeli soldier with Hitler’s smiling face in a thought bubble next to him. “Familiar assortment,” reads another under a drawing of a Nazi skeleton passing an IDF soldier a suitcase stuffed with blood-stained torture implements and a blueprint of Auschwitz. Concentration-camp-like structures engulfed in flames provide the background to these cartoons, evoking precisely the kind of ghetto-liquidation imagery that Gessen would revive in the high-brow pages of the New Yorkerhalf-a-century later.
Historical analogies are fine, so long as they inform the present. But the Gaza-as-Jewish-ghetto equation collapses under inspection. Jews who perished in the Holocaust would have wished they had a fraction of the armaments the IDF is uncovering in Gaza. Jews did not shoot rockets at Germany. Nor did they rape, sexually torture, and mutilate German women or kidnap German infants. And no one intended for their ghettos to become flourishing enclaves akin to Singapore, as many hoped Gaza would when Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005. (Hamas destroyed those hopes by stealing billions in foreign aid and investing them in its terrorist infrastructure.) Nor did the ghettos have international agencies singularly dedicated to their well-being. Jews were enclosed in the ghettos for a single purpose—to be slaughtered. And that is precisely what happened to them while the world stood silent.
Those using this false Holocaust comparison, then, are not doing so to elucidate the present but to stoke outrage and provoke the kind of anti-Israel responses we are now seeing unfold across the world. Gessen even admits to the poor analogy. The Nazis had no need to lock Jews in ghettos, while the Israelis faced real and present dangers from Hamas. “These are essential differences,” Gessen acknowledges.
So, why make the analogy? Presumably, for its shock value: it’s precisely because it’s so jarring that it needs to be made, explained Gessen in a follow-up interview. The shock value of the analogy, however, needs to be measured against the effect it’s had on Jews over the years. “Equating Israel with the Nazis is an important component of incitement and racial aggravation against Jews in the UK today,” wrote British scholar Lesley Klaff in 2014. Deborah Lipstadt, historian of the Holocaust and State Department’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, referred to the comparison as “a worm of soft-core [Holocaust] denial”: it elevated “by a factor of zillion any wrongdoings Israel might have done,” and diminished by the same factor “what the Germans did.”
Holocaust inversion is just one example of ways in which poisonous Soviet anti-Zionist rhetoric continues to reverberate through the contemporary progressive Left. Today’s far-Left is driven by a mongrel ideology that cross-pollinates Marxism, intersectionality, postcolonialism, and critical theory, and that draws upon a battle-tested set of rhetorical tools built and honed by Soviet masters of ideological subversion during the last 25 years of the Cold War.
Marxism-Leninism always opposed Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination in Jewish ancestral lands, but the war of 1967 was the moment when this doctrine acquired new conspiracist dimensions and went global. The victory of tiny Israel over Soviet-sponsored armies in the Six Day war led Moscow to imagine that there was more to Israel than met the eye. The Soviets concluded that they must be facing a dangerous ideological enemy operating in cahoots with the United States, Moscow’s primary Cold War rival, to undermine Soviet interests in the Middle East and around the globe. This was a figment of the Soviet imagination. In the 1967 war, Israel did not enjoy American support. But as with every conspiracy theory about Jews, this one helped explain its exponents’ every problem and setback, and therefore seemed correct. And so, Moscow threw massive resources into defeating Zionism everywhere.
One path Moscow pursued was turning Zionism into the enemy of the global Left and all its causes. Soviet propaganda painted Zionism as a racist, fascist, Nazi, settler-colonial, imperialist ideology that opposed everything that socialism and communism stood for. The fact that Jewish socialists had played a crucial part in founding Israel, and that its establishment received the USSR’s stamp of approval at the UN in 1947, was now erased from memory. In the Soviet portrayal, Israel was now Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa at once; a tool of American imperialism and the shadowy force steering the West to do the Zionists’ bidding. Following the traditionally paranoid Soviet political style, and borrowing a page from antisemitic conspiracy theory, Soviet propagandists presented Zionists as being everywhere and running everything at once. It wasn’t a coincidence that Soviet caricatures of Zionism—hook-nosed spiders and octopuses holding the world in their tentacles—were carbon copies of Hitlerian propaganda.
Although the Soviets claimed that anti-Zionism was not the same as antisemitism (a claim that today’s progressives have also adopted), the version of anti-Zionism they sold to the world was drawn from concepts popularized by an infamous antisemitic fabrication titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Soviet telling, Zionists were a treacherous fifth column in every country. They were greedy and immoral. Where the Protocols talked about “international Jewry” owning the press, banks, and politicians, the Soviets talked about Zionists doing the same. Where the Protocols said that Jews wanted to manipulate the world, Soviet propaganda said the same of Zionists.
Between 1967 and 1991, the USSR produced hundreds of books and tens of thousands of articles vilifying Israel and Zionism in this conspiracist style. It translated them into dozens of languages, making them available in every country Soviet propaganda could reach (in the Soviets’ own estimate, some 100 countries). They used Soviet embassies, international conferences, scholarly events, front organizations, and connections with leftist groups to spread the same message. During the 1970s and ’80s, countless Western leftist publications used Soviet conspiracist anti-Israel language in their writings. The British-Jewish socialist Steve Cohen was a staunch anti-Zionist, but he was alive to the dangers of this rhetoric, and he criticized his fellow British socialists for it in his 1984 classic, That’s Funny You Don’t Look Antisemitic: An Anti-Racist Analysis of Left Antisemitism.
Today, Soviet memes continue to circulate throughout progressive spaces. When progressive political commentator Krystal Ball tells her 580,000 Twitter followers that AIPAC donors own Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman (who supports Israel but hasn’t received any money from AIPAC), she is replicating the anti-Zionist tropes of Soviet propaganda and the antisemitic tropes of the Protocols.
Or consider this tweet by Anya Parampil, a journalist with the Grayzone website:
Parampil accuses Jewish journalist Daniella Greenbaum Davis of presenting Zionists “as history’s lone victim” and “‘God’s chosen people’ divinely ordained to slaughter their enemies based on biblical prophecy.” She goes on to claim that Greenbaum Davis’s Zionist “faith” was about “perpetual victimhood & identity politics that ultimately fuel Jewish Supremacy. … Palestinian men, women, & children (& the rest of us) are dispensable bc Jewish suffering is the only suffering that exists for Zionists. They are ‘chosen.’” (Spelling as in the original.)
But nothing in Greenbaum Davis’s original tweet—a standard affirmation of strength Jews make at moments of existential danger—indicate that she is leaning on the Biblical concept of Jewish chosenness, let alone “Jewish supremacy.” Nevertheless, Parampil decided to interpret it through that lens, which was not only callous but also ideologically inappropriate: аccusing Jews of supremacy based on the concept of chosenness is standard far-Right antisemitic fare. This trope, however, permeated ostensibly left-wing Soviet propaganda. Here’s what the 1984 Soviet pamphlet “Zionism Counts on Terror” has to say on the subject: “The ideological platform of international Zionism envisaged the right of the ‘chosen people’ to ignore the rights of other peoples and rested on the same racist and chauvinist principles that underlie anti-Semitism.” Considering that chauvinist was the 1970s–1980s’ buzzword used to signify phenomena that are dubbed supremacist today, Parampil is simply reproducing a motif from that 40-year-old Soviet propaganda pamphlet.
Looking even further back, here’s an excerpt from the 1969 Soviet bestseller Caution: Zionism!, presaging Parampil’s Twitter diatribe: “Preaching that the Jews were an exclusive and chosen people, the Zionists laid the foundation for the Palestinian version of apartheid.” All of Israel’s “school curricula are designed to cultivate the idea that the Jews are a chosen people and to spread manifestly racialist views.” (Racialist was used in place of racist at the time.) The book noted that the idea of having been thus chosen provided “a justification of present and future seizures of Arab territories.”
To help us understand the context of what today’s progressives unknowingly parrot: the book’s author, Yuri Ivanov, was part of a special group tasked with producing anti-Zionist propaganda for the Soviet state. Members of the group, which was managed by a senior official in the Communist Party’s Central Committee, were known for views that verged on fascism and neo-Nazism. In producing their “leftwing” anti-Zionist concoctions, they leaned on pre-revolutionary Russian pogromist literature, Arab propaganda, and Nazi screeds. They gave age-old antisemitic conspiracy theories of Jewish malevolence and control a Marxist-Leninist makeover suited to the new sensibilities of the global Left.
Ivanov’s Caution: Zionism! was translated into numerous languages, including English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. By the mid-1970s, after several reprints, some 800,000 copies circulated in Russian alone. When I began researching the subject in 2018, I found the English version of the book on a website that had a strong whiff of the far-Right. Other Soviet anti-Zionist books float around the internet in multiple languages, inflaming the conspiracist fantasies of both the far-Left and the far-Right.
This Soviet propaganda heritage is part of the reason it is becoming increasingly difficult on social media to distinguish between progressive, neo-Nazi, and Islamist rhetoric about Jews. Progressives pack their language with vicious anti-Jewish tropes, thinking it’s enough to replace Jew with Zionist. Far-Right Holocaust deniers boost progressives denying Hamas atrocities. The red-green alliance is now a tricolor of red, green, and brown.
For the Soviets, this was precisely the idea. Their anti-Israel campaign was largely driven by a cold calculation of political interests, but they also understood the power of the “Jewish Question.” They knew how to manipulate it to unite illiberal constituencies across the Western and developing worlds, while building sympathy for their cause and creating cracks in Western public opinion.
Someone asked me recently: Couldn’t today’s progressives have independently come up with the idea that Israel is a “shitty colonial state”? Surely they didn’t need to rely on the KGB to provide that conclusion? This question rests on an assumption that what Soviet propaganda said about Israel was objectively true, and that today’s progressives have simply rediscovered and confirmed that truth the way independent scientists confirm their colleagues’ findings.
But there is nothing remotely truthful about these ideas, nor is there anything approaching a scholarly consensus in regards to them. Many scholars disagree with the notion that Israel is a settler-colonial state. The analysis by the human-rights organizations that peddle the apartheid slur—most notably Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—is grounded in poor methodologies and poor knowledge of the subject matter. As a one-time HRW senior editor wrote in her departing email recently, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, the organization has “abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness, and surrendered its duty to stand for the human rights of all.”
The accusation that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza is fiercely contested by some of the most eminent scholars of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. And as for the Zionist-Nazi equation, I explored the distortions it is built upon when I examined the dissertation of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, which he defended in 1982 at the Institute of Oriental Studies led by the Soviet spymaster and future Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. Titled “The Relationship between Zionists and Nazis, 1933–1945,” Abbas’s thesis relied on Soviet anti-Israel fabrications, which he then perpetuated by turning his thesis into a book. The stories that today’s progressives tell about Zionists’ supposed collaboration with the Nazis during World War II rely on the same historical distortions, decontextualizaitons, and falsified sources that one finds in Abbas’s Soviet PhD.
In sum, the anti-Israel rhetoric progressives peddle today is a fiction invented for propaganda and disinformation purposes. Could they have reinvented the fiction—complete with the same stories, metaphors, and turns of phrase—on their own? Your answer to this question depends on whether you believe a novelist could sit down to write a new book and accidentally reproduce Anna Karenina without consulting Tolstoy or ChatGPT in the process.
Does this really matter? So what if progressives are reproducing Soviet agitprop? Some might argue: The USSR is long gone, and if that language helps to criticize the bad actor, Israel, then no harm is done.
But it does matter, and it does do harm. To have a sizeable chunk of the American political, intellectual, and cultural elite reproduce propaganda created to undermine the free world cannot possibly be healthy for our democracy. It matters because this propaganda was produced by antisemites, rests on antisemitic foundations, and has been documented to have harmed Jews in the USSR—often in eerily similar ways to those unfolding across the West today. Suspected of Zionist sympathies, Soviet Jews found themselves excluded from universities, fields of study, professions, and career tracks. Expressing Jewish identity became harder than ever. A few years after Moscow launched its post-Six Day war anti-Israel campaign, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews left the country. Within 25 years, 1.5 million Soviet Jews had fled.
But perhaps progressives could adopt some of this anti-Zionist language, while renouncing its antisemitic import? Could one distance oneself from the more unsavory aspects of past propaganda and repurpose it in the present? British scholar Quassim Cassam rejects this notion. In his book Conspiracy Theories, he asks: Could a white southerner display a Confederate flag on her porch while claiming that it is “just an expression of pride in her southern heritage,” and that it is unrelated to “its history of slavery and racial oppression”? Cassam’s answer is no: “What the flag actually symbolizes isn’t determined by the beliefs and intentions of the individual who chooses to display it,” he writes. “The flag has a life of its own, its own history and meaning, and doesn’t become politically benign just because the person displaying it doesn’t think of it as a symbol of slavery and racism.” People who use certain political symbols and slogans associate themselves with what those symbols represent “regardless of their personal views.”
The anti-Zionist rhetoric that has swept through the West is directly responsible for the current rise of antisemitism. Whether modern progressives like it or not, their version of anti-Zionism is deeply and inextricably intertwined with Soviet antisemitism. They have every right to reproduce KGB propaganda and associate themselves with ghoulish figures such as Ivanov, but they should not be surprised when the rest of us point out that they are doing so and tell them clearly that we do not accept it—in the same way that we would not accept the penetration of anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda into our political discourse.
In one important way, today’s progressives have outpaced the KGB: the eliminationist slogan “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is a recent addition to the genre. While training and financing Israel’s genocidal enemies, Moscow was careful to assert in public that Israel did have a right to exist. The Soviet leadership undoubtedly remembered that the USSR had voted at the UN in favor of establishing the Jewish state, and they understood that calling for the destruction of Israel would invite comparisons between communists and Nazis. So, rather than calling for the elimination of Israel, they called for an Israel without Zionism.
Today’s progressives are no longer afraid to look like Nazis, and they do not remember who voted to establish Israel—or even that there was a vote to begin with. Lacking in historical awareness, they are easy marks for contemporary manipulators feeding them industrial-strength agitprop from years past. In a 1979 video, George Habash—the founder of the Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist Palestinian terror group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—recites Soviet propaganda claims that “our real enemy is not Israel and Zionism only. It is American imperialism, which is backing Israel because Israel is a bodyguard for American imperialist interests.” The clip recently reappeared out of nowhere on anonymous Twitter accounts featuring a hammer and sickle, a clenched fist, or a red rose in their usernames, and a host of the appropriately named “Useful Idiots” podcast reposted it to her 187,000 followers.
It is deeply disturbing that intelligent American progressives are such easy and gullible targets for totalitarian propaganda past and present. Their expensive Ivy League educations have failed to prepare them with basic historical knowledge and critical thinking. This is particularly troubling since propaganda—particularly the sophisticated kind the Soviets developed with state resources—is hard to combat head-on.
The only real approach we have is to educate. We need to teach the next generation how to think. We need to teach them the history of the Soviet Union and its track record of propaganda and ideological subversion. We need to supplement Holocaust education with education about anti-Zionist antisemitism and how to protect our societies from this scourge. We need to teach young people that there is a difference between demonization and criticism, and that there are plenty of ways to criticize Israel without sounding like Russian pre-revolutionary pogromists and Nazis. This path is long. The shortcuts are few. The time to start is now.
Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary antisemitism. She is a Senior Fellow at the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities and a contributing writer at Tablet.
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