Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

May 22, 2019

The Soviet Roots of Anti-Zionist Anti-Semitism

In accusing Israel of racism and colonialism, KGB agents drew liberally on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Nearly every theme now commonplace in attacks on the Jewish state—that Israel practices “apartheid”; that Zionism is a form of racism, colonialism, and imperialism; that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis; and that Jews exaggerated the horrors of the Holocaust in order to gain sympathy for Zionism—can be found in Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda carefully cultivated by the KGB and its predecessors. This rhetoric, writes Izabella Tabarovsky, can be traced back at least to the Slansky trial in 1952, when Stalin purged the Czechoslovakian Communist party of mostly Jewish high-ranking members, if not further back than that. She writes:

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