July 31: Ismail Haniyeh Is Dead

U.S. military could lose war with China; U.S. military lost money on The Rock; What did the Trump shooter believe?

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The Big Story

Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, is dead. Early in the morning on Wednesday, the Palestinian terror group announced that Haniyeh had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Tehran, shortly after attending a swearing-in ceremony for the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Pezeshkian, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have all vowed revenge. 

The assassination of Haniyeh, the highest-level Hamas figure to be killed since Oct. 7 (indeed, the highest-level figure in Hamas), was the second in a brutal one-two punch delivered by the IDF late Tuesday and early Wednesday. Hours earlier, the Israelis had killed Fuad Shukr, the No. 3 man in Hezbollah and the group’s top military commander, in an airstrike in Beirut—a target that the “Biden” administration had explicitly warned Jerusalem against striking. (Shukr was also wanted by the FBI for his role in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed more than 300 people, including 241 American service members.) Together, Israel’s twin killings deliver an unmistakable message to the Axis of Resistance: We can hit you anywhere and the Americans can’t protect you.

On Wednesday afternoon, reports circulated on social media that the IDF had assassinated IRGC commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh in Damascus. These reports had not been confirmed at the time The Scroll closed today. But if they are true, they offer further confirmation that the last 24 hours have been the IDF’s most successful since the start of the war. 

We cannot say for certain why the Israelis decided to strike when they did, but they may be calculating that their window of opportunity for settling accounts with the Axis is now, as Lee Smith observed in our Monday edition. Biden has been effectively castrated as president, while Kamala Harris is finding her footing and, at any rate, is still only the vice president. Biden’s people still run the State Department and the National Security Council. It is unclear, even to informed Americans, who—if anyone—is making foreign policy decisions. 

Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to the United States now appears to have been a masterstroke. Netanyahu consolidated his support on the American right and delivered a blistering, if veiled, rebuke to the White House. He politely listened to Harris’ lectures about how she will not “remain silent” on Gaza. He then flew home to Israel and ignored her, gambling that the apparatchiks now running the United States would be unable to mount a response. Judging by the initial reactions from Washington officials—Secretary of State Antony Blinken meekly announced Wednesday morning that reaching a cease-fire was “the enduring imperative”—Bibi’s gamble is paying off. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Izabella Tabarovsky on the American left’s addiction to warmed over Soviet anti-Zionism

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The Rest

→The United States might lose a war with China, according to a Monday report from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a team of policymakers and defense experts tasked with evaluating U.S. progress in implementing the 2022 National Defense Strategy. The “U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident that it can deter and prevail in combat” with China, according to the report, in part due to the collapse of the U.S. defense industrial base. The report suggests that in a potential war with China, the United States would “largely exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks, with some important munitions (e.g., anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days,” and replenishing those stocks would take “years.” The report also highlights increasing military cooperation between China and Russia (as well as Iran and North Korea), noting that any one of those powers would be able to rely on economic and military aid from the others in the event of a conflict with the United States. The report is only the latest warning about the United States’ withered defense-manufacturing capabilities. As The Scroll noted on July 23, a recent Reuters investigation cited a “decade of strategic, funding and production mistakes” to explain why NATO and the United States have proven unable to match Russian production of artillery shells. 

Read the report here. 

→The U.S. military is also facing “significant recruiting challenges that threaten the viability of the all-volunteer force,” per the report. And its recruiting pushes don’t seem to be helping. Military.com reports that the U.S. Army’s $11 million marketing deal with the United Football League and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has failed to net a single recruit and might have damaged recruiting, according to internal Army documents. Per the report, Army staff warned against partnering with the UFL, a minor football league, citing low viewership numbers and the experience of the National Guard’s $88 million partnership with NASCAR from 2011 to 2013, which also failed to net a single recruit. But Army leadership pushed the deal through, agreeing to pay Johnson, the UFL’s owner, $5 million for five social media posts promoting the Army. Johnson made only two of the posts, and the Army is now trying to recoup some $6 million from the UFL and the Rock. 

→At a Tuesday congressional hearing, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said that law enforcement had discovered a YouTube account that it believes belonged to Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be Trump assassin. In 2019 and 2020, according to Abbate, the account posted comments that “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence.” Abbate also confirmed claims from Gab CEO Andrew Torba that the FBI had identified what it believes was Crooks’ Gab account. Contrary to the views of the YouTube comments, the Gab account, which made nine posts over a period of roughly two weeks in January and February 2021, defended COVID-19 lockdowns and Biden’s early executive orders on the southern border. In response to questioning from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Abbate acknowledged that Crooks’ Gab account “does have differing points of view” from Crooks’ YouTube comments, made when Crooks was 14 years old. 

→Haniyeh’s death wasn’t welcomed by everyone, of course. Officials from Qatar and Egypt condemned the assassination, warning that it would damage hostage deal talks, while in the United States, a local leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations promised that Haniyeh’s “martyrdom is not vain”: 

→In our Post of the Day, Noah Pollak weighs on the implications of the strike for the presidential race:

→And, finally, in our Quote of the Day, Michael Brendan Dougherty drops the hammer on Harris: 

Kamala Harris is a new skin suit stretched over the unimpressive record of the Biden administration. The skin suit can talk, but it has to defend not only everything Kamala Harris said in 2020 but also everything Biden did and continues to preside over now—whether it’s an economy that has squeezed the last bit of hope of home-ownership out of young Millennials and Gen-Zers, or the transformation of the Democratic coalition into a safe encampment for the Hamas-kids of Columbia University, or a mainly unconstitutional Court-packing scheme.

Kamala Harris is the final test for liberal groupthink. Her sudden Taylor Swift–level stardom is as faked as intelligence-agency assessments of Hunter Biden’s laptop. If the Kamala Harris psyop proves a success this November, prepare for even wilder social-programming experiments in the future.

Read the whole thing (it’s short) here. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Sounds of Summer, by Rokhl Kafrissen

It’s a great season for new Yiddish music

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Zombie Anti-Zionism

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

by Izabella Tabarovsky

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.

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.

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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. 

Read the rest of the essay here.