The ideologues of Soviet antizionism — the “Zionologists” — operated in a Marxist-Leninist ideological context and spoke in left-wing idiom, but their personal views were informed by Russian far-right conservative thought, which had always disdained Jews. They imbibed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi theories, both of which were prohibited literature in the USSR.
The antizionist ideology they developed for the Brezhnev regime was grounded in that antisemitic framework. They talked about Zionists, but their tropes were those of the Protocols-informed conspiracy theory.
An easy way to understand this is to look at these two images, which I always display side by side at the beginning of my lectures and am using here for educational purposes only.
The image on the left is the cover of a French edition of The Protocols. The image on the right is from a 1972 May Day parade in Moscow.
Ignore the words and you can see that it’s the same image.
Read the words, and you understand the ideological difference: One says “The Jewish danger,” and the other, “Zionism is a weapon of imperialism.”
These images illustrate better than anything else that the only thing separating antizionism from antisemitism is that one speaks of Zionists and the other speaks of Jews.
Underlying both is the same conspiracist belief in the omnipotence and malevolence of Jews/Zionists seeking to gain control over the world. It’s about the Jew/Zionist who is both subhuman and superpowerful. The rest is details.
Once you understand that, it’s no longer surprising that the far left and the far right converge on the same anti-Israel and antizionist rhetoric.
It’s precisely why the anti-Israel left suddenly finds itself nodding to Tucker Carlson and why Candace Owens can rail about Zionists without becoming a leftist.
Soviet antizionism shows that left-wing antizionism and right-wing antisemitism share the same DNA.
It’s precisely why antizionism is a subset of antisemitism and inseparable from it.
Mick Hartley 
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