Pamela Paresky interviews Izabella Tabarovsky, a researcher, writer, and longtime Quillette contributor. Tabarovsky specialises in the Soviet Jewish experience, the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, and the politics of historical memory in the post-Soviet space. Her work examines how narratives of the past are constructed, manipulated, and remembered, particularly in Russia and its former republics. Together, they discuss how the legacy of Soviet repression continues to shape cultural identity and political discourse around Israel and Jewish issues today.

Pamela Paresky: Izabella, you wrote an incredible piece for Quillette about Soviet propaganda and the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Can you talk a little about growing up in the former Soviet Union, and what brought you to the realisation you've had about this particular area that you’ve become focused on?

The Language of Soviet Propaganda

Progressive anti-Zionism and the poisonous legacy of Cold War hatred.

QuilletteIzabella Tabarovsky

Izabella Tabarovsky: Sure. So, I grew up in the USSR in the 1970s and 80s. The thing that a lot of people don’t understand about that country is, well, it kind of went down in history as a country of state-sponsored antisemitism. But what a lot of people don’t understand is that antisemitism officially came in the form of anti-Zionism.

In the 70s and 80s, the USSR had a massive campaign against Israel and Zionism. We can get into why and how that happened, but what occurred was that, under the guise of that campaign, and the USSR itself would say, “We’re not antisemitic, we’re anti-Zionist,” but the way it trickled down from the top to your personal experience was that you experienced it as completely antisemitic, pure and simple. People would tease you in the streets if you were a Jew. You would just know that you were different. You would know that you couldn’t get into certain universities and schools. There were certain professions that were unavailable to you.

So, the effect of that anti-Zionism in your everyday life, if you were a Jew, was pure and simple antisemitism.

A few years ago, I remember that moment very clearly, I saw an item on TV, one of those rallies, probably a demonstration on a campus. Something that we see very regularly now. A bunch of young people were holding placards, “Zionism is racism,” you know, the usual. And then one of them was interviewed, and she said, “Well, we’re just being anti-Zionist. We’re not being antisemitic.” I remember watching it. By then, I had been in the US for about thirty years. And I remember feeling really confused, like how is it that we had this on a campus in the US?

By then, I must have forgotten what it was like in the USSR. But I called my dad and told him what I saw. I said, “And get this, they said that what they’re saying isn’t antisemitic.” And my dad just burst out laughing. He said, “Wow, this we’ve heard before.” Then a kind of lightbulb went off in my head. And I thought: we have heard this before. 

Then I started going through my experiences in the USSR. For example, as a teenager, I wanted to have a career that had something to do with foreign relations. I was really interested in other countries. And the USSR was a closed country. It’s something that a lot of people don’t remember today. You couldn’t just go out and travel easily. And if you were a Jew, there were especially a lot of restrictions. I started thinking about where I wanted to go to college, and people would tell me, “Well, don’t be silly, you can’t get into that school. They don’t take Jews there.”

PP: What schools were you thinking about at that time, that people were saying didn’t take Jews?

IT: They were schools that would have had something to do with foreign relations. There was one school that was a pedagogical institute. And they said, “Well, here are good schools you can start at, except this one doesn’t take foreigners, it doesn’t take Jews. This one you can go to, but it probably won’t open doors for you in a career in any kind of foreign relations. You’ll really just be a teacher. And they’ll probably send you to teach in some Siberian village or something like that.”

PP: Because they didn’t want Jews teaching in the better schools?

IT: No, because in the other school, even though it was still a teacher training college, it opened doors into other careers. You learnt the languages, and then you could go into directions that might take you into foreign trade, foreign relations, whatever it was. But that would put you in touch with foreigners. And that’s what they didn’t want Jews to have. They didn’t want Jews to be in contact with foreigners. Why is that? Because of the anti-Zionist campaign. Jews were viewed as potential assets for Zionist intelligence, for foreign intelligence. They were viewed as the fifth column. And that’s partly why they were excluded from so many professions and careers.

I thought at the time, “Okay, well, the only thing I want to study is foreign languages, so I’ll just make this compromise and we’ll see what happens at the end.” Also, this was already the late 80s and there was perestroika. Things were changing. We were also thinking about leaving already. A part of me thought, “I probably won’t even finish the school. We may leave by then. And so that’s okay. No matter how horrible the career prospects, at least I’ll learn some English, improve my English, and then we’ll leave.”

But that was my personal, direct encounter with how anti-Zionist propaganda translated into antisemitic outcomes.

Now, the way I put it now, I didn’t understand it that way then. I had to look into it. So when, in 2019, I saw that news item and talked to my dad, I really wanted to understand that experience better. I started doing research. That’s when I started to understand exactly what the government was saying and how it was translating into our experiences.

PP: So you were in the Soviet Union when you saw this campus expression of antisemitism and anti-Zionism? 

IT: No, no. We came to the US in 1990. This item on the news, I saw in 2019. So I had already lived in the US for a very long time.

I had never encountered it until then. I just wasn’t paying attention, or maybe it also wasn’t so prominent before then. I don’t know. But 2019, or maybe 2018 more accurately, is when I saw it. And that’s when I started researching the whole thing.

PP: I see. I see. Wow. And so you start researching it, and what happens?

IT: I mean, first of all, it was really, so much of it was a discovery. Because when you live in a country like the USSR, it’s a closed country, and there is so much information that you don’t see or don’t understand. And you’re not able to process your own experience. It’s when I recognised that there was a whole, massive, organised campaign geared against Israel, geared against Zionism, and it was international. That’s the thing I understood. That’s what’s really driven my research. It’s what I’m focusing on now to understand the international dimensions of that campaign.

Because what happens is, I look at what people, progressives, anti-Israel progressives, say today, and they use the exact same language that Soviet propaganda used. Exact same language. Same tropes, same motifs, same explanatory logic, even the same stories that Soviet propaganda used. So, you know, it’s hard to think that somebody just picks something up out of the blue and reinvents it. So I thought, well, there must have been some influences somewhere along the way. 

That’s when I began to discover that there was a directed effort by the USSR to sell these ideas to the West, to various groups in the West that were sympathetic to the USSR. So, you know, communist parties all around the globe, they were all, in any case, supposed to follow the lead of the Communist Party of the USSR, right? So they carried the same ideas, the same articles, the same kind of propaganda. Various other sympathiser groups, various friendship societies. And certainly the Third World, the developing world, for sure. There were many, many channels. Soviet embassies worked to promote these ideas. So you really begin to understand that the influence was spread out from the USSR to various groups. What I think happened is that it became part of left-wing thinking at some point. But it perhaps stayed on the margins. It never really entered the mainstream of American discourse until just the last few years.

We can discuss this, but it can be partly explained by the fact that the extremes are really coming, in general, into the mainstream right now. The extremist viewpoints from both sides of the political spectrum. And this extreme anti-Zionist and anti-Israel sentiment is also coming in with all of that.

PP: So what was the effort on the part of the Soviet Union to create an antisemitic anti-Zionism that would propagate throughout the West? What was the purpose? Why were they anti-Zionist? Why were they antisemitic? Why did they care?

IT: That’s a really great question. 

So, the Bolsheviks were anti-Zionist from the very beginning. Lenin was anti-Zionist. Stalin was anti-Zionist from the very, very early years of the Bolshevik Party. 

There are theoretical reasons for that, and there are practical reasons. 

Lenin really opposed the Zionist effort because, first of all, it’s a nationalist effort. And the Bolsheviks, the socialists and communists, they were internationalists. There was the idea that everybody unites, right? All the peoples of the world unite, proletarians of the world unite, in their class struggle against the oppressors.

This is, by the way, the current rhetoric of “oppressor versus oppressed.” I’m almost amused to see people treat it as something new and original. I mean, that’s really what the 1917 Revolution was about: oppressed versus oppressor. You read Soviet propaganda, Soviet literature, it’s always the oppressed versus the oppressor.

So, they felt that Zionists were pulling Jews away from this proletarian struggle. And the Jews of the Russian Empire were among the most oppressed and most poor. They were an important component of the Bolshevik struggle for power, and they really didn’t want Zionists to pull them away from that struggle.

There were also theoretical considerations. They said, “Zionists are wrong theoretically when they talk about Jews being a nation.” That doesn’t fit the Marxist definition of a nation. Jews are not a nation. So that’s why the Soviets were always opposed to this idea.

So, that’s there from the beginning. And then their attitude towards Zionism evolves in various ways, it’s always hostile. Under Stalin, it acquires conspiracist overtones. But it really grows, really becomes conspiracist, after 1967. That’s a real turning point. It’s the Six-Day War, when Israel wins against Soviet Arab allies. It creates a massive shock for Moscow. It creates a massive problem. They come to the conclusion that Israel couldn’t have done it alone. It must have done it with the United States, which is not correct. But they also believed that there was something to the ideology of Zionism that is particularly anti-Soviet, anti-communist, anti-socialist and that is hostile to them. They developed this whole big story about how Zionists are everywhere and they oppose Soviet interests everywhere. They control everything, they control the press, they control politicians, they control financial flows, and they need to be fought everywhere at once. It’s a completely conspiracist notion.

Perhaps the Soviets didn’t intend to go into that kind of antisemitic crowd, but that’s where they ended up. I think Soviet political culture was always conspiracist. It was natural, maybe, for them to land there. But there were also people who were propagating this idea. It was very much driven by political interests. They felt that their foreign interests were being undermined in the Middle East. They also felt that the campaign for Soviet Jewry that developed around the world was driven by Zionists to undermine the USSR. Nobody could emigrate and after 1967 Soviet Jews began to demand the right to emigrate, and the Soviets said, “This is dangerous. It’s undermining our domestic situation. And who is at fault? The Zionists are at fault.” So they were seeing danger on all ends, abroad and at home, and they really believed there was this Zionist conspiracy operating against them in cahoots with the United States. That’s a really important part.

PP: You mentioned that in 1967, in your article, you talked about how the Soviet conspiracy theory was that the Zionists, the Jews in Israel, could only have won the war with secret help from the United States, right? So that pitted Israel against the Soviet Union as a powerful enemy with a powerful backer. That sounds very much like what Iran thinks: “Big Satan and Little Satan.” Is there a connection between the two? Or are these just two conspiratorially minded, antisemitic entities that aren’t connected to each other?

IT: Well, that’s a really good question. I don’t have a definitive answer to that. I feel that it is connected, I just don’t exactly know how, historically speaking.

I know that the Soviets, some of their propaganda and their thinking about Jews and Zionists and Israel, was very much influenced by the thinking of Arab countries, because they had very strong relationships in the Arab world. It’s very interesting. Some of the people who produced this antisemitic propaganda were Arabists by training. They knew Arabic really well. Some of them were part of the Foreign Ministry and had served in Arab countries. I know that in at least one case, one of the people involved in what was called “Zionology,” people who supposedly knew Zionists and Jews, he was in Egypt at the time. And he picked up some of the Egyptian anti-Zionist propaganda. That propaganda, by the way, was produced by an institute that was headed by a former Nazi. So, just to understand what a toxic mix all of this is. He incorporated some of those ideas from that brochure, that specific brochure that I know of, into his writings. In fact, he was talking about how Israel was a puppet of the United States. 

So, where is the origin of this idea? I don’t know, but the borrowings went multiple ways. Once the Soviets started, they borrowed ideas from various sources and then they would amplify them, using the force multiplier of their propaganda machine. Then it becomes widespread. Where specifically the connection is with Iranian propaganda and thinking, I don’t know for sure.

PP: Talk about the piece that you wrote. It was very powerful. You mentioned, for example, the Holocaust inversion and how that has now resurfaced. And it’s resurfaced in a way in which people like Masha Gessen seem to think they’ve invented it.

IT: Yes. I mean, I have to say, when I read Masha’s piece, I asked myself: how can it be that somebody so educated and so well-informed doesn’t know that this is not just a comparison? This is something that’s known as Holocaust inversion. It’s something that’s been used against Jews again and again. It’s something that’s been used to diminish the meaning of the Holocaust. Deborah Lipstadt calls it a kind of “grain of Holocaust denial.”

PP: Explain what Holocaust inversion is. You talked about what Masha Gessen had thought to have discovered, it seemed. And this is something that you went through in great depth. I’d love it if you could just go through what the parallels are and what exactly this Holocaust inversion is.

IT: Yes, so Holocaust inversion is when people talk about Jews as the new Nazis and Palestinians as the new Jews. The implication is that Jews are perpetrating the Holocaust, or a Holocaust-like action, a genocide, on Palestinians. From there, you get a whole slew of metaphors and comparisons that begin to appear. You get comparisons like Gaza being a Jewish ghetto, like the ghettos that the Nazis put Jews in. Some people go so far as to say that Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto. And what happened on the 7th of October, there were people equating that with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which of course is just the most atrocious thing one could say. It’s insulting and offensive.

This goes back many, many years and decades. If you look at some of the Soviet cartoons, for example, you already see them in 1967 equating what Israel did with what the Nazis did. For example, when they attacked the Soviet Union, the Soviets would use phrases like blitzkrieg, because of course, the Six-Day War was very quick. And blitzkrieg is something that’s firmly associated with the Nazis. There were lots of caricatures and cartoons, where they would portray Israeli soldiers as having swastikas, or dreaming about Hitler, or something like that. So this whole idea that Israelis are really imitating the Nazis and the Palestinians are the new Jews, that comparison goes back decades. 

Now, the Soviets may not have been the first to make that comparison. In fact, there’s some research, I think by Robert Wistrich, a very well-known scholar, who said that the British Foreign Office in the 1930s used to compare Zionists to Nazis.
So yes, there were antisemites in the British Foreign Office. But, you know, it’s one thing when somebody does it in a private office, when it’s buried in diplomatic documents and you don’t know about it unless you dig in the archives.
It’s another thing when a superpower uses that and spreads it, and multiplies it, in multiple languages throughout the world.

So what I wrote about in the piece was Masha Gessen was writing as if she had invented this comparison. I honestly didn’t know if it was a joke. It was a very strange case of ignorance. Because Holocaust inversion, as a concept, has been known. Holocaust scholars have discussed it for decades. And it’s been weaponised against Jews very actively. So it was very strange to read that in The New Yorker.

PP: One of the things you did really beautifully was to look at the false comparison and say what happened in the Warsaw Uprising, and what didn’t happen in the Warsaw Uprising and what happened on 7 October that has absolutely no correlation. Can you just go through that a little bit?

IT: Sure. That comparison, it almost feels ridiculous to be talking about it, because of course, when we look at what the IDF is finding in Gaza right now, it’s just piles and piles of armaments. The tunnels were specifically created to attack Israelis and to hide. And we now know that Israeli hostages are being held there.

The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did not attack Germans. Jews before the Holocaust, they did not do anything to attack the Germans. They did not present a real danger to the Germans. They did not go out and rape German women. Even in the Warsaw Ghetto, they managed to get some weapons, but you can’t compare that. It was a completely desperate act, an uprising against people who were prepared to destroy them. That was the intended goal. And in fact, that’s what happened in the end.

To compare that to Gaza, when Israel left Gaza in 2005, there was this big hope that Gaza would become, I don’t know, the Singapore of the Mediterranean. Tons of money poured in as international help. There were investors, I understand, who were ready to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. There were big plans for a port. And Israel was not there. This whole talk about Israeli occupation of Gaza, Israel hasn’t been there since 2005. It was an independently ruled enclave. The problem is that as soon as Israel left, they elected Hamas. And Hamas then stole all the money and imposed a totalitarian rule. They dedicated themselves to the singular goal of annihilating the State of Israel, to the extent that they could, in alliance with others, particularly Iran.

So the comparison is just so outrageous, so offensive, and so wrong. In fact, it’s interesting that Masha notes in the piece that the comparison doesn’t really work. But then the question is “Why use it?” The reason people use it, I believe, is for its offensive value, for its shock value, completely ignoring the fact that, again, it’s been used against and weaponised against Jews by the USSR, by all kinds of people, by the far right, and by the far left, but also by a superpower, for decades.

So it’s a case of… I mean, I want to trust that it wasn’t intentional, that perhaps she didn’t know certain things. There were other things in the article that I didn’t touch on in my piece, in The New Yorker, in Masha’s piece, that I thought were just… you know, like talking about the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

PP: That’s the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition?

IT: Exactly. Saying that that definition was created specifically to distract attention from Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. I mean, I want to believe that perhaps there was ignorance, rather than malice, right? But I don’t understand how you can write on a topic like this without doing proper research. Because there is so much that’s been written about it that it’s incomprehensible to me.

PP: The IHRA definition is something that antisemites everywhere object to, because it talks about a certain perception of Jews and a certain way of looking at Israel. The claim is that it doesn’t allow for criticism of Israel, which is not the case. It’s not the case at all.

IT: The objection is that IHRA chills speech. I think the only speech that IHRA potentially can chill is the speech that’s obviously antisemitic. So it very much sounds like these are antisemites objecting to not being able to be antisemitic. Because IHRA is not prescriptive. IHRA does not impose anything. The IHRA definition gives you a set of examples, of cases where certain speech about Jews can be antisemitic, and it proposes that you look at context. That you look at that speech in context. It is absolutely not prescriptive.

You know, there’ve been a lot of petitions against the IHRA definition, for all the reasons we’ve mentioned. And when I look at the signatories of these petitions, the thing I notice is that a lot of times they’ll say, “These are scholars of the Holocaust, these are scholars of antisemitism.” And I look at their names, and, unless I miss one or two names, I don’t see any scholars there who understand left-wing antisemitism. Who understand the kind of antisemitism that I write about, that emanates from the far left, that comes under the guise of anti-Zionism. The kind of antisemitism that we saw in the USSR. I don’t see anybody who understands that signing those petitions. So these are people who believe that antisemitism only comes from the right. And that is simply not the case. Millions of Jews in the USSR, in the socialist bloc, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, experienced the kind of antisemitism that comes under the guise of anti-Zionism. And people are just choosing to ignore it. And I think that’s wrong.

PP: Did the rhetoric about anti-Zionism in the former Soviet Union make a distinction between Jews who were avowed Zionists and Jews who weren’t?

IT: It did. It did. It talked about how, of course, not all Jews are terrible. Not all Jews are Zionists. They would say, “Well, our Soviet Jews are good Jews, except for those who are Zionists.” They would put forward some well-known Jews who would speak on behalf of all Jews, and they would say, “We, Soviet Jews, reject Zionism. We reject this campaign for Soviet Jewry. We reject Zionist protection.” That was the phrase they would use. And the Soviet propaganda would also say, “We’re not against Israel or the Israeli people. It’s just that the Israeli people, unfortunately, have fallen under the heel of Zionist rulers.” And what needs to happen is that Israel needs to be de-Zionised. That these rulers need to go, and some other kind of regime needs to come in.

So they made this distinction, and they said all the time, just like the far left does today, that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. “We’re not against Jews. And by the way, our constitution prohibits antisemitism. And in any case, antisemitism doesn’t exist in socialism.” That’s what they would say. That was the theory. 

PP: And yet, Jews were not allowed to go to certain schools. Jews were not allowed to have certain jobs. 

IT: And Jewish culture was completely extinguished. Once you get after Stalin, basically more and more into the 70s and 80s, as you move away from the generations of Jews who used to know Yiddish, there’s maybe one publication in Yiddish left. You’re not allowed to learn Hebrew. You’re not allowed to learn about Jewish history or the history of Israel. Which is why, inside the USSR, this ferment begins after 67, because of the Six-Day War, Israel’s victory, really had an inspiring influence on Jews around the globe, and on Soviet Jews in particular. Because they felt, for the first time, that there was something positive associated with being a Jew. All of a sudden they were like, “Wow. There’s a country that just won this war. They’re building something. Here’s the Jewish people building something. And we are here, why? We’re not wanted here. We want to go. We want to be with our people.” But they also began to ask themselves: “Okay, so we’re Jewish, what does that mean? What does it really mean?” And they understood that, in the Soviet context, the only meaning of their Jewish identity comes from antisemitism. They all talk about how they first learned about being Jewish from being teased as kids in the streets. That was their first awareness of being Jewish. And then that continued. In their identification documents, it said they were Jews. So they couldn’t get into certain schools. Certain jobs were closed to them. Certain careers were closed to them. But what did it mean? It’s interesting. When you look at some of the dissident literature of those years, there were many people who demanded to emigrate and were not allowed. And as soon as you announced that you wanted to emigrate, you were viewed as an enemy of the people. So they were immediately fired from universities or from their jobs. And a subculture formed, a subculture of Jews who had been refuseniks, who had been refused the right to emigrate. You read the literature they produced, and they talk about: “Who am I? What does it mean to be a Jew?” All of the culture was gone. So, antisemitism was there. You were clearly identified as a Jew. But you didn’t know what it meant.

PP: So when you say it was written into the constitution that antisemitism is not allowed, what kind of antisemitism is not allowed, since it’s clearly allowed to discriminate against Jews for being Jewish? What was it that they were thinking of as antisemitism that wasn’t allowed?

IT: That’s a really good question.

I mean, the Soviet Constitution, the Soviet legal code in general, contained a lot of things that were just on paper. I can’t quote exactly what it said, but essentially, it prohibited all forms of racial discrimination. And that would have included antisemitism.

But what did that mean? The Constitution also said you had all kinds of protections, all kinds of rights, and that just wasn’t the case. It was a state that didn’t follow its own constitution.

Actually, in the 70s and 80s, when the dissident movement started, not the Jewish dissident movement, that was a separate story, but among the general dissidents who wanted to reform the country, the way they approached it was to say, “Look, this is what your Constitution says, Soviet state, and you’re not following it. So you need to bring your actions more in line with what your Constitution says.”

But yes, the Constitution was just a piece of paper.

PP: So this antisemitism, this anti-Zionist antisemitism, makes its way into the most elite, most highly selective institutions of higher education in the US over the past couple of decades. Slowly, probably two or three decades ago, and then more quickly. And now it’s exploded. Since 7 October, we’ve really seen the fruits of this anti-Zionist antisemitism. What was that like for you to see?

IT: Well, it’s shocking every time. It’s really, it’s shocking to see the same rhetoric that we used to hear back in the USSR, to hear it in the US. And to know what it leads to and yet to realise that so many people don’t see it that way, now more and more people see it. Certainly in the Jewish community, finally, everybody sees it. But I started writing about it, I believe in 2018 or 2019. And every article I've written since then, I’m pretty sure every article on this subject, I’ve issued a warning. And I’ve said: this kind of rhetoric, it’s not abstract. We can debate questions like ‘Is anti-Zionism the same as antisemitism?’ in theory, but the historical record is clear. And we can see that there is a very rich and extensive historical record of what happens. People are acting as though it’s never happened before. And calling this “anti-Zionism is a new form of antisemitism” and I wouldn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Because there’s nothing new about it. From 1917 onward, but more pronouncedly from 1967 onward, it’s there. It’s in the historical record. So why are we not turning to it? And so much time was wasted on the argument of “Which antisemitism is worse? Far right or far left?” And I just thought: what a waste of time. 

Actually, Sharansky, Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, refusenik, and then Israeli politician, he always used to say: “You know, the one thing Jews used to have was that we could be united against antisemites. And now they’ve succeeded in dividing us even in that.” Because Jews are now pointing at each other and saying, “Well, that antisemitism is worse,” and, “That antisemitism is worse.” They’re all connected. And this is actually something that you see in the intellectual trajectory of Soviet anti-Zionism when you look at the influences they borrowed from. I mentioned the influences of Arab propaganda. That itself, at some point, in Egypt, was run by a former Nazi. The people in the USSR who produced it were very well acquainted with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

A Conversation with Natan Sharansky

Former Israeli politician and refusenik, Natan Sharansky, speaks about his correspondence with Alexei Navalny and his nine years in USSR prisons.

QuillettePamela Paresky

PP: Say a little bit more about The Protocols, for people who aren’t familiar with it.

IT: Sure. So The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are probably the bestselling antisemitic book of all time. It’s a forgery. It appeared in, I believe, the early 20th century. It claims to be a protocol of some Jewish elders getting together and discussing how to rule the world, and what they’re going to do with the world once they rule it. Some early editions of The Protocols even claimed that they were the protocols of the First Zionist Congress. So it’s a forgery. It’s deeply antisemitic. It influenced the Nazis very deeply. There’s a book by a historian, Norman Cohn, who titled his book Warrant for Genocide and that’s really what The Protocols are. It opened the door to mass murder of Jews.

Here’s a good example. A book like that would have been prohibited in the USSR. And yet, in the 70s and 80s, it circulated freely among the party elites, among the Komsomol elites, the young communist elites. And so the people who wrote this anti-Zionist propaganda that we’re hearing today drew on The Protocols.

It’s a conspiracy theory. I can’t remember now if I used this term, but The Protocols are really the conspiracy theory. The antisemitic conspiracy theory. One of the things it talks about is how Jews control the world. They control the press, the finances, the politicians. They want to subvert the whole world and submit it to their influence. And this is precisely what Soviet propaganda said about Zionists. And it’s what we hear from a lot of people on the far, far left. This is the idea they operate with. There are some new touches, some nuances. There’s more of the newer jargon, the postmodern, critical theory jargon. But you still have that idea that Zionists are everywhere. They control everything. They influence everything across the world, geographically, and across various human endeavours. It’s the same kind of conspiracy theory, right there.

PP: And you talked in your essay about this sort of confluence of intersectionality, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and this forgery. It’s such a toxic brew. How does it become so widely accepted, so popular, among intelligent people?

IT: Well, that’s a really good question. I think a lot more of us need to keep investigating it, because in the end, conspiracy theories offer simple answers to complex questions. And we’re living at a time when so much seems to be falling apart that it’s perhaps understandable. One thing people say about antisemitism is that it’s like a virus that appears when the immune system is weakened. And the immune system in the West is really weakened, by all kinds of trends, for all kinds of reasons. So it’s not necessarily surprising that the antisemitic conspiracy theories are showing up.

I just think that right now, the fact that it’s really showing up from the far right, the far left, and we have the Islamist antisemitism, it’s just a trifecta of all of that. The influences of postcolonial critical theory, that’s not necessarily my topic, but what’s interesting here is that they’re using these supposedly newfangled ideas, but they’re still using the language of antisemitic and anti-Zionist conspiracy theory that was created for them decades ago. These ideas aren’t even really new. The whole “oppressor versus oppressed” framework, we may have already mentioned this, is something you already see in 1917. It’s part of Marxist ideology. So yes, Marxism is a big part of this. They’ve created something “new” intellectually, sort of, out of various strands of thought, but when it comes to Jews, Israel, and Zionism, it’s the same old ideas and the same rhetoric. 

The reason they go for that is, first of all, because it’s readily available. It’s what’s there. For the left, this is conventional thinking now. A lot of Soviet literature that was produced in the 70s and 80s was translated into English and into every language under the sun: Arabic, French, Spanish, and so on. Dozens of languages. Some of that literature is still available on the internet. I just saw a left-wing website republish an article written by a member of CPUSA, the Communist Party of the USA, in the 1970s. They presented it as: here’s this American Communist intellectual writing about Zionism and Israel. But I know for a fact he borrowed those ideas from the Soviets. There are documents showing how he came to Moscow in the early 70s to learn how to think about Zionism. He goes back and writes this pamphlet based on what he learned.

So these ideas are very much out there. They’re available to everyone. And I see them being pumped into the flow of social media all the time.

PP: If there’s one thing that people take from the research you’ve done, or from hearing or watching this interview, what’s the most important thing for people to understand?

IT: The most important thing is to understand that a lot of the language we’re hearing today about Zionism and Israel is not actually legitimate criticism. People think it is, but it isn’t. There is legitimate criticism of Israel. And then there is the language of a totalitarian state, language that talks in conspiracist terms about Jews, Zionists, and Israelis.

We really have to, and people are able to, distinguish between the two. But we need to teach that. We really need to learn to distinguish. Criticism is not demonisation. And demonisation is not criticism. It’s not the same thing. We have to understand that part. When progressives are using language that was produced by a totalitarian state, I don’t consider that legitimate discourse in a democratic society. It’s as if someone imported the language of Nazi propaganda into our mainstream discourse. I don’t think we want that. In fact, there are a lot of watchdogs for that. Everyone is very well trained to identify remnants of Nazi discourse. But people don’t have a trained ear, unless they’re like me, to hear the Soviet communist anti-Zionist, antisemitic propaganda. We really need to understand it, because it undermines our democracy.

PP: The language we hear the most now is about “settler colonialists,” “imperialists,” “occupiers,” etc. People think that criticism of Israel as an occupier is legitimate because there are occupied territories. But they don’t seem to understand what territory is being referred to. For example, the Arab, or Arabist, understanding of what is “occupied” is all of Israel.

IT: The Islamist understanding. Yes, exactly.

PP: That’s where the “From the River to the Sea” language comes from. Does that have roots in Soviet propaganda too?

IT: Soviet propaganda used that language all the time. They called Israel a settler-colonial state. They called it an imperialist state. They referred to Zionism as a weapon of imperialism from 1967 onward, and even before. After 67, it becomes really widespread.  So all of that language is there. 

It’s interesting to me to see academics today trying to prove something that was created by propaganda, for propaganda purposes. The point you made is really crucial. This is what makes the topic so difficult. People say, “Why doesn’t Israel do a better job at PR?” This whole area of conversation about Israel and Zionism is permeated with language from state actors who wanted to exert influence. It’s been shaped by various forms of propaganda intentionally, so there’s confusion. Like we were saying, what territories are we talking about? Some people think, “Well yes, of course, they’re occupying the West Bank. They’re occupying Gaza.” But of course, they weren’t occupying Gaza. What Hamas is really talking about, when they say “Free Palestine,” they’re talking about freeing the entire territory of the Israeli state from Jews.

And when they talk about the return of refugees, a lot of people don’t realise, they don’t mean returning Palestinian refugees to Gaza or the West Bank. They mean returning them to sovereign Israel, so that, eventually, it outweighs Israel demographically.

So there’s so much confusion and fog. Part of our job is to keep explaining it. We need to clarify all the places where the confusion is. And I would say, if people in the audience are new to this, or if something seems confusing to them, they should take everything they hear with a grain of salt. Check with different sources.

For example, the filing that South Africa did with the International Court of Justice in the Hague, there were reports saying they presented a very strong case. But Quillette just published an excellent analysis by Norman Goda, a really distinguished historian, who looked at the case closely. And when you read that, you realise it was actually a very shoddy filing. It’s important that we all look very carefully and look at alternative sources of information. Not just what you’re used to. Don’t just rely on The New York Times. Read The Wall Street Journal. Don’t just read The Guardian. Read Quillette. Explore other media that give you other perspectives.

South African Lawfare at The Hague

Motions before any court—criminal or civil, national or international—contain references to hard evidence and a careful reading of legal precedent. The South African ICJ application has neither.

QuilletteNorman J.W. Goda

PP: The final thing I want to have you talk about is this, you’ve identified the borrowing of really old antisemitic language, going back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a hundred years old. This is an ancient hatred. People think if they don’t have hate in their heart for Jews, then they’re not antisemitic or not participating in antisemitism. But the concept of Israel as a settler-colonial state has always struck me as something that, someone said, “It vanishes in the presence of thought.” If you unpack this imperialist idea, what imperium? What colonisers? From which mothership? It’s an impossible concept for Jews who were stateless and persecuted when they weren’t here. When they were there, even before 1948, there were plenty of Jews here, and they weren’t an empire. So what is the imperial impulse? What is the imperial justification? It has to be a forgery. And it just clicked for me, in this interview, that it comes from The Protocols.

IT: That’s right. When you look at Soviet literature, you see the same thing. They’d say, “Well, Jews talked to all these empires in Europe. Herzl talked to the British. Look at the Balfour Declaration.” So, therefore, Jews were a weapon of British imperialism. It requires such a distortion of history to say something like that.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are faced with this and it feels too complex. They just step away. They just think “I don’t want to deal with it. It’s too complicated.” There are layers of distortion, deceit, and lies. And that’s fine. But if you’re going to be someone who wants to form an opinion, or express an opinion, then it’s on you to explore and understand the reality behind these terms and buzzwords. 

Because in the end, why were these buzzwords chosen? The Soviets chose buzzwords that would resonate with the global left. In the 70s, the global left was fighting racism. So they equated Zionism with racism. Then the struggle against apartheid came to the forefront, so they equated Israel with an apartheid state. The global left was against imperialism, so Israel became the imperialist state. Today, the left does the same. Whatever is really horrible, they attach it to Israel. If there’s racist violence in the US, “Well, they learned it from Israel.” From Israeli police, or whatever. 

It’s completely crazy. But people need to understand, this is a long, ongoing tactic. In the 70s, the Soviets used to compare the Vietnam War, what Americans were doing in Vietnam, to what Israelis were doing to Palestinians. And again, if you’re not paying much attention, you think, “Wow, look at that comparison.” It has an emotional impact. And that’s the thing about propaganda. It can be completely wrong on the facts, intentionally wrong, but the Soviets understood that propaganda works first and foremost on your emotions. Once the emotional impact is there, it’s very hard to change things with facts. 

We actually just saw it in this war. All these publications, including The New York Times, reported that Israel bombed a hospital. Five hundred people died. They included a photo and it wasn’t even of that hospital. But when the truth came out, that Israel didn’t bomb it, that it was a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that it didn’t even hit the hospital but the parking lot and that maybe a few dozen people were injured, what had the most emotional impact was the first story. So people who saw that are already more predisposed to believe Israel is committing genocide. That’s what we need to look out for: stories, comparisons, and metaphors that have powerful emotional impact but no truth.

PP: What about stories that do have powerful emotional impact and are true, like what happened on 7 October, and are somehow being discounted? Are people just emotionally pre-dispositioned to hate Israel?

IT: For some people, that’s exactly the case. For others, it’s a very cynical move. There are people who are really driven by the agenda of demonising Israel. So they intentionally turn the tables. But I do think a lot of people, who weren’t part of those groups, were emotionally impacted by October 7. They are perhaps more predisposed now to trust Israel. It was a very powerful moment no doubt. But for certain groups, like the far left, they are politically invested. Their entire identity is grounded in hating Israel, in “showing up” for the Palestinian cause. I don’t even like calling it that. It’s a false cause. It doesn’t benefit real Palestinians. It’s not grounded in the realities of what happens between Palestinians and Israelis. It’s just an abstract idea. They were never going to change their minds.

But our target audience is not the extremes and I don’t think we should try to convince them. The real fight is for the middle. For people who haven’t made up their minds. Who genuinely and honestly want to understand. Who are being swamped by propaganda from every direction, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish propaganda. Those are the people we want to reach.

PP: Thank you very much for this interview and thank you for the essay. It was quite a good read.

IT: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me and thank you for this conversation.