Mick Hartley

Izabella Tabarovsky at Quillette on Holocaust Inversion, 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. 

Ring any bells?

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….

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….

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….

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.