On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, while Hamas terrorists were still burning Israeli families alive, beheading people, raping women and dragging hundreds of hostages into Gaza, their Western sympathizers from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the largest European organization for “Palestinian rights,” were calling the London police to organize a mass march, not against the murderers but against their victims.
During the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, London rang with chants comparing Israel to apartheid and Zionism to racism. The city was flooded with Palestinian flags and banners equating the Star of David with the swastika.
Even before the first Israeli bomb struck terrorist positions in the Gaza Strip, pro-Palestinian activists were accusing Israel of committing “war crimes” and “genocide.” Hamas’s slaughter of men, women and children in communities in southern Israel was presented as a legitimate act of “resistance against Zionist colonialism.” What might have looked like a spontaneous outburst of anger to outsiders was, in fact, the product of decades of systematic campaigning with a single goal: to delegitimize the State of Israel.
The roots of reflexive anti-Israel rhetoric go back to the 1960s, when the Soviet Union unleashed a global ideological war against Zionism. Moscow poured massive resources into building a sophisticated propaganda arsenal designed to weaken U.S. influence in the Middle East and portray Israel as a colonial and racist project. This cynically manufactured language, full of lies and manipulative symbols, survived the fall of the “Evil Empire” and still poisons public debate today.
Zionism began as a national liberation movement of the Jews, a people striving to regain political sovereignty in their historic homeland. Its modern form was shaped in the 19th century by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist of Jewish origin, who envisioned a safe refuge for Jews and worked to realize his vision through pragmatic political strategy. He focused on securing international recognition and building diplomacy that would allow Jews to exercise their right to self-determination. It was a legitimacy that later became the main target of Soviet propaganda.
The Holocaust made Zionism a matter of survival. Survivors of the Shoah, rejected by many countries, saw the Jewish state as their only chance for a dignified life. The idea of return gained strong support even from those on the left, who viewed Israel as the struggle by the oppressed against oppression. Its creation became a symbol of justice and of the universal fight for freedom.
Shortly after World War II, the Soviet Union actually supported the establishment of Israel. It was among the first to recognize the new state diplomatically and, through Czechoslovakia, supplied weapons that enabled Israel to survive its first war with the Arabs. Moscow saw this as a chance to weaken British influence in the Middle East and hoped the new state would join the socialist bloc.
But geopolitics shifted quickly. Israel’s cooperation with Britain and France during the Suez crisis dashed Moscow’s hopes for an ally. Antisemitism, deeply rooted in the Stalinist era, resurfaced. The decisive turning point came in 1967. The Six-Day War, fought by Israel out of fear for its very survival, ended with a lightning victory over Arab armies backed by the Soviet Union. Israel gained new territories and offered the principle of “land for peace.” The Arab states, however, responded with the Khartoum Resolution and the “Three No’s”: No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel. Moscow twisted this reality, portraying Zionism in its propaganda as an expansionist colonial project and a tool of Western imperialism.
Meanwhile, Soviet Jews were increasingly demanding the right to emigrate, with growing support from Jewish communities worldwide. For the Kremlin, Zionism became a threat. For KGB chief Yuri Andropov, it was no longer a simple national movement but an alleged global, antisocialist conspiracy that could only be countered through a carefully orchestrated international propaganda campaign.
The Soviet strategy relied on what Hitler once called the “big lie,” using colossal falsehoods and repeating them until they seemed believable. In the Soviet version, the lie was the equation of Zionism with racism. At international conferences, in the press and on campuses, rhetoric has spread that linked Israel with apartheid, colonialism, even Nazism. Criticizing Israel became synonymous with moral virtue.
The most prominent stage for this campaign was the United Nations, created to prevent new conflicts and promote peace. But in the 1960s and 1970s, its structure changed dramatically as membership expanded mainly with the creation of new member states in Africa and Asia that had just freed themselves from colonial rule. These countries often lacked democratic traditions and were natural targets for Soviet propaganda and financial support. As a result, Moscow secured an automatic majority in the United Nations. Anything that harmed the West or Israel had a good chance of success.
In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the infamous Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism.”
Though rejected by the West, it was supported by a large majority from the Eastern bloc, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The resolution gave Soviet propaganda a stamp of legitimacy; the lie became part of official international discourse. Thus, the United Nations became the platform for institutionalizing modern antisemitism. Countries that would not openly spread Jew-hatred could vote against “Zionism” instead and pretend they were defending human rights.
The repeal of the resolution in 1991 was largely a geopolitical move to facilitate Middle East diplomacy, not to correct a wrong. That same year, the Madrid Peace Conference sought to launch direct talks between Israel and its neighbors, but the ideological framework built by decades of Soviet propaganda continues to shape perceptions of Israel. The resolution is still cited by anti-Israel activists today.
Another key element of the Soviet anti-Zionist strategy was the systematic cultivation of a distinct Palestinian national identity. Until the 1960s, the term “Palestinian” referred to all residents, including Jews, of the British Mandate of Palestine, and Arab nationalism emphasized broader Arab unity. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Moscow, in cooperation with certain Arab regimes, actively promoted the idea of a separate “Palestinian nation” as a tool to delegitimize Israel.
According to Ion Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc officer ever to defect to the West, this campaign was deliberate and crafted by the KGB. Its chief, Andropov, realized that Islamic societies were particularly receptive to anti-Western rhetoric. He channeled this natural hostility against Jews and Israel, deliberately reframing the conflict not as a religious jihad but as a nationalist struggle for human rights and self-determination. This new language appealed to Western intellectuals, activists and politicians as well.
The campaign deployed thousands of Soviet bloc agents across the Middle East to spread propaganda in Arabic, including editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated and vile document, while providing funding and ideological guidance to local Arab movements.
At the center of the project was the Palestine Liberation Organization. Founded in 1964 under Soviet patronage, the PLO became the perfect vehicle for constructing a new national identity. Pacepa later revealed that the 1964 Palestinian National Charter, the PLO’s ideological foundation, was written in Moscow.
Strikingly, the charter did not call for sovereignty over the West Bank or Gaza, which it explicitly recognized as Jordanian and Egyptian, respectively. Instead, it focused entirely on the destruction of Israel. It was in this Soviet-written document that the modern political term “Palestinian nation” first appeared.
Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian engineer mentored by Soviet intelligence, became the face of the newly created identity. He admitted that Palestinian nationality was being formed “through the conflict with Israel.” His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, later revealed as a KGB agent, defended a dissertation in Moscow downplaying the Holocaust and portraying Zionism as a collaborator of Nazism, directly adopting Soviet propaganda themes. Both men presented themselves in the West as pragmatic politicians, while at home they supported terror and rejected genuine peace with Israel. Zuhair Muhsin, a PLO executive committee member, candidly admitted the artificiality of the Palestinian identity in 1977: “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. The existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new weapon in the ongoing battle against Israel.”
Through its propaganda, Moscow created one of the greatest political myths of the 20th century. The Palestinian movement is historically unprecedented: The only “national” project whose aim is not to build its own state, but to destroy another.
The Soviet anti-Zionist campaign spread through leftist networks, NGOs and Islamist movements. It used Communist-front organizations that organized conferences linking the Palestinian cause with other “anti-imperialist” struggles, from Vietnam to South Africa to Cuba. Delegates from Third World countries and the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as Western radicals, adopted these narratives and brought them back home, pushing them in political, academic and activist circles.
Soviet-Palestinian propaganda ranks among the most successful in modern history, having fused ideology, history, and moral symbolism into enduring narratives. It presented anti-Zionism as morally noble, connected it to anti-imperialism, and cloaked it in the language of “global peace.” Propagandists skillfully exploited Western guilt over colonialism. The continuity is visible today: Russian disinformation campaigns on Ukraine employ the same tactics of denial, inversion of reality and moral manipulation. The KGB may be gone, but its most successful operations live on.
Soviet propaganda not only undermined Israel’s legitimacy on an international basis but also corrupted the very language of human rights. It turned the Jewish national movement into a supposed symbol of oppression, a stark reminder of propaganda’s destructive power when left unchallenged. The persistence of these narratives lies in the fact that the networks and structures that spread them never disappeared. Today’s leftist anti-Zionism is less a response to events in Gaza than a continuation of recycled Soviet ideological nonsense, passed from one generation of intellectuals and activists to the next. The liberal West, victorious in the Cold War, largely failed to confront this legacy.
Moscow turned Zionism into a slur, and from this lie emerged the modern face of antisemitism. Zionism is exactly what the Soviet narratives denied: a national liberation movement of the Jewish people, grounded in the universal right to self-determination, a right that is unquestioningly granted to every other nation.
