Izabella Tabarovsky published an important essay last year in Tablet magazine titled “Zombie Anti-Zionism.” Its thesis is that the left is still addicted to “warmed-over Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda from half a century ago.”
That propaganda targeted “the Soviet-sponsored Third World” and started around 1967. Specifically, “the precise language used by the anti-Israel left today to condemn the Jewish state has been a conventional part of left-wing discourse for decades, and that it originated in the USSR,” beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In an earlier piece, she noted that 10 anti-Israel academics and BDS activists had established an Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, a step “toward rebuilding the long-forgotten Soviet discipline of “scientific anti-Zionism” on American college campuses. Its aim is “to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” and “to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism.”
Tabarovsky is a senior advisor at the Kennan Institute, specializing in Eastern European history, and a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary left-wing antisemitism. In an Instagram post promoting her Zombie characterization piece, she emphasizes that the Soviets, after the Six-Day War in June 1967, revved up a linguistic campaign to undermine Israel. They “equated it with the central cause animating the Western left at the time: the war in Vietnam.”
They used terms such as “imperialist Zionist propaganda” and “anti-colonialism,” and promoted the “progressive and peace-loving” involvement of the Soviet Union. Israel was a “white imperial outpost.”
The Kremlin did indeed write the script. Spinoffs of this theme include a YouTube clip that goes back to the 1950s. However, they did not create, as it were, a Palestinian identity.
True, the idea that the Arab residents of Mandate Palestine viewed themselves as Southern Syrians, into the mid-1920s and on, is an important part of the ideological conflict. In 1926, it was suggested to call the Mandate “Southern Syria,” and back in 1920, at least until December, reunification with the territory of Syria was the local Arabs’ representative demand, as was clearly made.
But what was the role of the Communist ideology? And does today’s progressive approach echo it?
On Aug. 26, 1921, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) addressed the Union of Jewish Communists, then called Poale Zion. They were chastised. The idea that the concentration of proletarian Jewish masses in Palestine will lead to the emancipation of the Jewish working class, they were informed, “is utopian and reformistic, and actually counter-revolutionary.” Practically speaking, “it is tantamount to the colonization of Palestine” having to “rely … British imperialism.” They were informed that “the complete liquidation of such ideology” is “a stipulated condition.”
In the Communist news service, the term “settler” was already attached to Zionism; reports bemoaned even the purchase of land because, per force, those fellahin (“peasants”) who worked their land but did not legally own it were forced to move. In that issue of International Press Correspondence (Vol. 5, No. 5, Jan. 15, 1925), Joseph Berger (later, Berger-Barzilai), the main agent of Communist International, or Comintern, described the Socialist parties as engaging in terror against Communists in Palestine.
Berger, in another report from April 23, 1925, portrayed the future Hebrew University as “a Jewish University in Jerusalem (which, by the way, has a thoroughly clerical character, and will be a bulwark of reaction, and with the splendor of which the Jewish bourgeoisie will dazzle the broad Jewish masses in various countries).”
The political line of the Palestine Communists rejected Zionism, as it was a nationalist ideology, but the Yishuv was considered a legitimate community that would develop. In 1930, the language changed, and we read that Zionism was waging “a colonizing struggle of annihilation against the local toiling masses.” The party participated in political activities in the Jewish sector of Palestine while campaigning against “Zionist colonial-settler policy and expropriation of Arab lands.” The ECCI instructed the Palestine communists that Jews’ true task is to fight against oppression (i.e., Zionism) in their own country.”
Berger’s fate, interestingly enough, is astounding, and it would be well worth our current generation’s radical progressive Marxists to ponder his biography. Polish-born, he took part in the founding of the Palestine Communist Party, served as its deputy secretary, and after the August 1929 riots, became secretary of the party.
During the riots, Berger, whose home was in the Arab village of Bet Safafa (now a Jerusalem neighborhood), was saved from the attacks by Arabs in the bojevaja, the Communist Party’s self-defense unit, together with visiting Czech Comintern functionary Bohumír Šmeral.
In 1930, the British authorities expelled him from the country. In 1932, he headed the Comintern’s Near Eastern Department in Moscow but was dismissed from his post two years later and expelled from the party.
Berger was arrested in Moscow in January 1935 and charged with being a Trotskyite agitator. Refusing to “confess,” he spent the next 16 years in various Siberian labor camps. Released in 1951, he was banished to life-long exile in Siberia. In 1956, Berger was officially rehabilitated and allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Poland, and from there, he immigrated with his family to Israel in 1958. Becoming religiously observant, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan appointed him as an associate professor of political science.
The acrobatics of the party’s reaction to the Mufti’s violence based on the slogan “Al-Aqsa is in danger” would not surprise modern-day progressives. A researcher detailed that prior to the attacks, a party leaflet described the armed conflicts as a “civil war,” which he said was a result of colonialism. Britain had fomented racist hatred to divide the communities.
Reactionary Jewish and Arab leaders also played their part in fomenting religious conflict by turning the Western Wall in Jerusalem into a power-struggle symbol.
On orders from Moscow, this was revised, and in October 1929, the riots were characterized as an “Arab anti-imperialist uprising against Britain and the Zionists.” The “revolutionary Arab workers,” regardless of their nationalist and religious slogans, and their subordination to the violent anti-Jewish policy of the Mufti of Jerusalem, predicated upon Islamic fanaticism, were to be unconditionally supported.
The buzzwords and terms existed even then. On Sept. 2, 1929, the Communist press informed: “The country [Palestine] is not the ‘homeland’ of the Jews; it is the homeland of the Arabs.” Arab violence was a “progressive anti-imperialist revolt.”
Despite Hamas and Fatah fanaticism, their immorality, their Islamist nature, lack of human rights for their own population, disdain for gays and women’s rights and more, Gaza and the artificial “West Bank” are the play toys of woke progressives a century later. They are simply replaying the texts and terms of 1920s Soviet-initiated propaganda.
