We can see then that during the late
Stalinist years of the late 1940s and early
1950s, there was a reversal of Soviet
policy toward Israel, from one which
viewed Israel as an anti-imperial and
anti-fascist ally to one which saw it as
an imperial force hell-bent on the
destruction of Communism. In direct
relation to this, the Soviets under
Stalin also unleashed a series of
"anti-cosmopolitan purges." Though starting off
as a wider attack on elements deemed as
a threat to Soviet patriotism, these
purges quickly turned into a thinly
veiled fierce antisemitic campaign that
targeted mainly Jewish Communists,
falsely accusing them of promoting
Zionism. Jewish writers, politicians,
scientists, and intellectuals were
arrested and executed. Particularly
remembered is the infamous Doctor's Plot,
a modern-day blood libel, in which a
group of prominent Moscow doctors,
predominantly Jews, were accused of
conspiring to assassinate Soviet leaders.
Throughout this onslaught, the Soviets
were careful not to overtly state that
they were targeting Jews, all the while claiming
it was an attempt to purge the Soviet
Union of harmful, Zionists
and bourgeois-nationalist elements.
Taking the Soviet perceptions and actions that
emerged during these years into
consideration, let's now return to the
form and content of the Soviet
anti-Zionism of the late Stalinist years,
better clarifying its historical
importance to the development of
contemporary Far-left anti-Zionism.
When the Cold War solidified, broke out
in 1948-9, the Soviet Union changed its
policy in the course of the anti-
cosmopolitan purges in Europe. Rather
than view Zionism and the State of Israel
as part of the history of anti-fascism,
Stalin now began to view Zionism as
part of the Western imperialist
conspiracy directed against the Soviet Union.
The Communists performed a historical
act of great importance. Nobody in the
world would have paid any attention
to ex-Nazis who made the case that Zionism was
a form of racism, or Zionism was a form
of aggression, or Zionism was a form of
colonialism. If a bunch of ex-Nazis had
made these arguments, people would have
said that's just the nonsense you said
during World War II. Nobody cares what you
said. You're a bunch of criminals.
We don't care anything. You're out. You're
finished. What the Communists did, what
the Soviet Union accomplished from 1949
to 1956, was to redefine the meaning of
anti-fascism - to lend the moral and
political prestige of the war against
Nazi Germany to the attack on the State
of Israel. This was not something that
any ex-Nazi could have done and so it
was a remarkable accomplishment on the
part of the Communists. Now anti-Zionism
was somehow associated with trying to
build a better world and struggle
against colonialism and imperialism, rise
up against American imperialism. So
the Soviet Union
and Stalin brought that change about.
The extreme Soviet anti-Zionist campaign and the Soviet military support for the
Arab states intensified during and after the Six Day War that took place in June 1967.
This brief war ended with Israel's
decisive victory, which included the
capture of the Sinai Peninsula, and the Gaza
Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East
Jerusalem from Jordan and the Golan
Heights from Syria. The Israeli control
of these territories and their
Palestinian residents would subsequently
become a major point of contention in
the Arab-Israeli conflict, while Sinai
would eventually return to Egypt
following the Egypt-Israel peace treaty
of 1977, and in 2005 Israel would
disengage from the Gaza Strip and North
Samaria in the West Bank. The Soviet
Union played a key role in the
escalating tensions in the Middle East
in the 1960s, backing Arab armies and
countries in an attempt to gain a
foothold in the region as part of the
power struggle of the Cold War.
Israel's swift victory deeply encroached
on Soviet aspirations. It subsequently
broke off diplomatic ties with the
Israeli state and began a full-blown,
vitriolic, anti Zionist, and anti-Israeli
campaign characterized by clear
antisemitic imagery and rhetoric.
The Soviets took side 100 percent with the
Arab population for example in 1967 and
published an immense number of anti-
Zionist propaganda in the context of
this war and the years that followed
this war and even the years before the
war, actually, in which they identified in
the literature Jews - well, not Jews -
Zionists with fascism. And you have many
caricatures that were very widespread in
the Soviet Union in publications such as
Krokodil which was very widespread.
At the time of Moshe Dayan, for example, who
is depicted as Hitler or is depicted as
Hitler's ally so that you have
Zionism that is turned into fascism
that is turned into Nazism. And I do
believe that this plays an important
role in the left, in the European left,
in legitimizing a discourse that is
a one-sided discourse that demonizes
Zionism as fascism, regardless of  - you
know - the various political views of
the persons making this argument.
But you do have this nexus that is
facilitated by the Soviets - you know -
besides the fact that the Soviets
were also very active in training
members of the PLO. But as far as
literature goes, as far as propaganda, as
far as the message that the Soviet Union,
Soviet Communism is conveying to
European communism and the European left
I do believe that it facilitated
the identification of Zionism with
fascism.
The Soviet form of antisemitic
anti-Zionism was not limited to the
Soviet Union alone. We will see later how
it seeped into the Western radical left,
strongly influencing and shaping its
perception of Israel. It also spread
across to the Soviet bloc States, the
communist nations closely allied with
the Soviet Union. The extreme anti-Israel
and anti-Zionist stance took a
particularly predominant role in the
communist dictatorship of East Germany.
In 1949, following the end of the Second
World War and the solidification of the
Cold War, Germany was divided into two
separate states - the non-Communist
Federal Republic of Germany, or West
Germany, and the Communist German
Democratic Republic or East Germany.
The leaders of the Federal Republic of
Germany, especially Konrad Adenauer, but
also men named Theodor Heuss and a
social democrat named
Kurt Schumacher  argued that, in order for
this new Germany to convince the world
that there was another Germany, that
something had changed, that this Germany
needed to help the Jewish survivors of
the Holocaust, that it needed to give
some kind of restitution payments to
this new State of Israel and to do no
more harm to the Jews. The Germans
hadn't turned into angels overnight but
the famous slogan of the medical
profession 'Do no more harm!' is one way of
summarizing West Germany's policies
towards Israel after the Second World War.
Just do no more harm. If you can do
some good, that's all very nice but at a
minimum don't do any more harm. The East
Germans interpreted the meaning of
overcoming Nazism very differently than did the West Germans.
Their argument was that the primary
victim of the Second World War was the
Soviet Union and that the Jews were
among many many people in Europe who had
been victimized by the Nazis. The Jews,
the Zionists were rather selfish in
their view. Why should people pay so much
attention to the six million Jews who
were murdered, when there were 25 million
soldiers and civilians of the Soviet
Union who died in the Second World War
and three million non-Jewish Poles and
millions of others and on and on? What was
so special about the Jews? They're so
selfish - the Jews. And anyway the main
cause of Nazism was not an
ideological antisemitism - although that's bad enough -
it was capitalism. So please spare us
these marvelous speeches about
antisemitism and the Holocaust because
really the only thing that matters is
whether or not you get rid of capitalism.
If you leave capitalism intact, then all
the bastards and all the
criminals are still there and save us
the very moving speeches of
Bergen-Belsen. East Germany was seventeen
million people, much smaller than the
Soviet Union. And yet the interesting
thing about the history of East Germany
is not only that it never had diplomatic
relations with Israel, but that it became
a huge fan of the Arab states at war
with Israel and of the Palestine
Liberation Organization; and in the 1960s
and 1970s and 80s became a base for
training, and money, and arm shipments,
and weapons deliveries to Hafez al-Assad's
Syria, first Nasser's Egypt, Saddam
Hussein's Iraq,
Omar Qaddafi's Libya as well as the
Palestine Liberation Organization,
including its militant organizations - the
Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine and the Popular Democratic
Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The interesting aspect of this is
that we have a German state after the
Nazis which of course did not actually
send its soldiers to war with Israel. It
did not engage in a Holocaust or a
genocide. Nobody is suggesting that. But
did do more harm to the Jews. I think in
the long history of antisemitism, the
era of the Cold War and the era of
communist antisemitism, and then the era
of leftist antisemitism since then is
unique - unique because at the same time
that these states were arming the states
and movements that were attacking the
Jewish citizens of Israel  - and the
non-Jewish citizens of Israel as well -
the citizens of Israel, at the same time
that they were doing things that actually harmed living Jews,
they insisted they had
nothing to do with antisemitism.
This hadn't been the case before. Previously when antisemites attacked Jews, they said
we attacked Jews because they're Jews;
because we don't like Jews.
I think that's one of  the
defining features of secular leftist and
communist anti-Zionism.
One West German leftist leader said that
the very accusation that attacks on
Israel had anything to do with
antisemitism was - what he said was - in
his words, "an old Zionist trick."
