Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse – Izabella Tabarovsky
Contemporary left-wing antizionist discourse reproduces with stunning fidelity some of the central tropes of Soviet antizionist propaganda, which demonized Israel and Zionism. The article explores the background of these tropes, looks at the biographies of the right wing Soviet ideologues who developed them, and examines the mechanisms through which they reached the West. The article concludes that these tropes are inextricably linked to antisemitic conspiracy theory, containing seeds of anti-Jewish violence that we ignore at our own peril.
Download the whole piece, from the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, open access, on a PDF, here.
Izabella Tabarovsky is a Research Fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, a Senior Program Associate at the Kennan Institute (Wilson Center), and a contributing writer at Tablet Magazine. She is a 2022 research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP). Her research and writing focus on Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism, Soviet Jewry, Holocaust in the USSR, Stalin’s repressions, and politics of historical memory. In addition to Tablet, her writings have appeared in Sapir, Newsweek, The National Interest, the Forward, Wilson Quarterly, Times of Israel, Fathom, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and others.
Lesley Klaff, the Editor of the JCA, writes in her introduction to Izabella Tabarovsky’s article:
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in 1903, were forged in Moscow by secret organs of the Russian state. Frequently it is asked when antizionism “crosses the line” into antisemitism. But arguably, the Protocols, which perhaps constituted the very foundation of twentieth-century totalitarian antisemitism, were a response to Jewish, political, national self-organization, specifically the Zionist Basel Congresses. Perhaps the clue was in the name. So Russian, state-sponsored, antisemitic antizionism predates the Holocaust, and predates the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and the foundation of the State of Israel. This is not to say that anti-Zionism was always or necessarily antisemitic, but to say that some of it was; some of it was antizionism. Antizionism as an anti-Jewish ideology can be traced back to the Protocols and before.”
“There is perhaps a straight line, inside the secret official offices in Moscow, from the Protocols to the show trials, to the Doctors’ Plot, to the Slansky trial, to the antizionist purges in East Germany and Poland in 1968, to the left antizionism of the New Left, to Zionism=Racism at the UN, to Durban, and to the populist troll farms of the twenty-first century. This is a whole research agenda, and these two papers are perhaps a beginning or an introduction. One hundred and twenty years of expertise and practical experience can be seen in the current Russian propaganda effort. Today, it is telling the world that Ukraine is not a real nation or an authentic state, that Ukrainians are Nazis, and that Ukraine is nothing but a tool of imperialism that must be dismantled by an invading army.”