How a Campaign Against Israel Spawned by the Soviet Union Is Resurfacing Today

Why would Spike Lee don a Palestinian-themed outfit to the first National Basketball League’s all-star game featuring an Israeli hoops phenom, Deni Avdija? Why would Hollywood luminaries rush to defend a United Nations official, Francesca Albanese? Why would right wing podcasters dig up the 1967 sinking of the Liberty?Bashing “Zionism” has become all the rage in America and elsewhere. Classic antisemitic themes — wealthy Jews control popular media, whisper treacherous ideas in the king’s ear, and commit unspeakable crimes — are being dressed up as solidarity with Palestinians. Where does it all come from, and why now?The Soviet origins Much of post-October 7, 2023, language can be traced back to a Soviet change of heart. Hoping to create a Middle Eastern Communist satellite, Moscow supported the 1948 birth of Jewish state. Young Israel was ruled by socialists who nevertheless were committed to democracy. Joseph Stalin, who was steeped in traditional Russian antisemitism, soon decided to cultivate Arab antagonism to Jews and the West instead. Moscow was sensitive about being compared to Nazi antisemitism. Rather than targeting Jews, the Kremlin pointed at Zionists. In the aftermath of the 1967 Israeli victory over Soviet-armed Arab armies, the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, created Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or SIG, a campaign to discredit Israel and America.SIG cultivated a national Palestinian identity, which until the late 1960s was an obscure term. A Cairo-born KGB-trained terrorist, Yasser Arafat, became a symbol of Palestinian independence. A young Moscow University student, Mahmoud Abbas, whose doctoral thesis argued that the number of Holocaust Jewish victims was widely exaggerated, is the Palestinian Authority president. The Soviet campaign culminated in a 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, known as “Zionism is racism.” Moscow quietly lobbied developing countries to support the resolution, which remained popular in the UN even after its repeal in 1991, after a long campaign led by President George H.W. Bush. The Jews Do It TooFollowing the holocaust a Polish Jew, Rafael Lemkin, coined the term genocide. Since the October 7 Hamas campaign to kill as many Jews as possible, that term was inverted. South Africa accuses Israel at the UN International Court of Justice of violating the conventions against genocide. America “has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws” against funding countries accused of human rights violations, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez told the Munich security conference. “Unconditional aid,” makes no “sense,” she said. “It enabled a genocide in Gaza.”But I Didn’t Shoot the DeputyMark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, and Annie Lennox are among the 100 celebrities that this week expressed support for a UN “expert,” Francesca Albanese, after France, Germany, the Czech Republic , and her homeland of Italy called for her resignation. At issue is Ms. Albanese’s performance at a recent panel organized by Al Jazeera. The Hollywood luminaries point to Ms. Albanese’s claim that she never called Israel an “enemy of humanity.” Yet the “context” she is posting to prove that claim sounds like a Bob Marley defense on battling law-enforcers. “We who do not control large amounts of financial capitals, algorithms, and weapons, we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy,” Ms. Albanese said. Rather than explicitly naming “genocidal” Israel, she evokes familiar antisemitic tropes — money, media control, weapons — to berate all supporters of the Jewish state. Right Wingers Also Guilty“Today I had the honor of meeting with Maher N. Canawati, the Mayor of Bethlehem (the birthplace of Jesus), who is also a Christian,” a former Republican House member, Marjorie Taylor Greene, writes on X. “He told me about Christian persecution happening in Bethlehem,” which she ascribes to “139 IDF checkpoints” in the Judean city. In 1950, 86 percent of Bethlehem residents were Christians. They now account for less than ten percent. Christians were still the majority there in the mid-1990s, when the Palestinian Authority took over as part of the Oslo Accords. Muslim hostility and economic hardship since that time nearly erased Christian presence at the town of Jesus’ birth.Meanwhile Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where an Arab Christian population is growing and thriving. Conspiracy ReawakenedIsrael bashers, mostly on the right, are now resurrecting a 1967 tragedy as proof of Zionist treachery. They argue the case is proof that Israel is a disloyal ally to its American benefactor — even though Washington at that time imposed an arms embargo on the Jewish state. As Israel battled Arab armies in the Six Day War, the United States Ship Liberty, a spy vessel, was watching events from the Mediterranean. Israelis mistakenly ascribed an explosion in El-Arish to an Egyptian ship targeting its advancing troops. The American ship was wrongly identified as the culprit. The IDF sank it, killing 34 and injuring 171 American sailors. “When you hear that story for the first time, it gives you chills,” the podcaster Candace Owens told the New York Times, which recently cast the Liberty case as a split among MAGA stars. “We’ve reached critical mass on the topic of Israel,” another podcaster, Tucker Carlson, adds. “It’s totally fine to ask about why a foreign government tried to sink one of our ships in 1967,” he says. “That doesn’t make you an antisemite.”Resurrecting a seven-decades-old event in the contest of today’s Israel bashing, though, might qualify. Friendly fire is quite common in wars. As a young IDF soldier in 1973, this writer was in a tank convoy when it was attacked by Israeli jets. They mistakenly identified us as Egyptians.Each time the Liberty story is resurrected “it’s because people are looking for something to blame on the Jews,” a vice president at Advancing American Freedom, Richard Stern, told the Times. The same can be said about casting Israelis as the new Nazis and ascribing all the world’s ills to “Zionists.”

How a Campaign Against Israel Spawned by the Soviet Union Is Resurfacing Today

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