Key Takeaways:
- Modern antizionism did not emerge organically. It was developed and globalized by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
- Soviet antizionism attempted to transform Zionism, the Jewish movement for self-determination, into a symbol of racism, colonialism, fascism, and global conspiracy by repackaging traditional anti-Jewish myths into modern political language.
- The legacy of Soviet antizionism continues today. Ideas first disseminated through Soviet propaganda still shape contemporary discourse about Jews, Israel, Zionism, and Jewish sovereignty across universities, activist movements, and international institutions.
Today, many people misunderstand antizionism as a political response to the State of Israel. It is not. In reality, it is a contemporary form of anti-Jewish racism.
The language and imagery of contemporary antizionism was developed and globalized by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The USSR worked to transform Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination in the Jewish indigenous land, into a symbol of racism, fascism, colonialism, white supremacy, and imperialism. This redefinition matters. Like all peoples, Jews possess the right to define their own identity, history, and liberation movement. Attempts by non-Jews to redefine Zionism, a Jewish concept created by Jews for Jews and rooted in thousands of years of Jewish history, impose external distortions onto Jewish identity, which are illegitimate. Modern antizionism cannot be understood separately from the Soviet Union’s systematic effort to recast Jewish self-determination as an illegitimate form of nationalism.
Jewish Anti-Zionism Before the Shoah
Before examining Soviet antizionism, it is important to distinguish it from earlier forms of Jewish anti-Zionism. Prior to the Shoah and the establishment of Israel in 1948, some Jews opposed Zionism for religious, political, or ideological reasons. Ultra-Orthodox Jews believed Jewish sovereignty could only come through divine intervention. Some Jews embraced communism as a universalist path to equality. Bundists believed in a form of socialism rooted in Yiddish culture and Jewish life in the diaspora, while assimilationist Jews in Western Europe feared Zionism would reinforce accusations of dual loyalty. However misguided, the latter three positions, like Zionism itself, were responses to the Jewish Question and attempts to secure Jewish safety in the non-Jewish world.
Ultimately, these remained internal Jewish debates about the future of Jewish life. Jewish anti-Zionists still understood Jews as a people with shared history, continuity, and collective identity. What they did not do was portray Jewish self-determination as inherently racist or fundamentally illegitimate, nor frame Zionism as a global conspiracy threatening humanity itself.
Soviet antizionism was fundamentally different from earlier Jewish anti-Zionism. It was not opposition to Zionism as it actually existed. It constructed a mythical and conspiratorial “Zionism” that bore no resemblance to the Jewish national movement, much as the traditional Jew-hater constructed an imaginary “Jew” detached from real Jewish life.
The Bolsheviks and the Yevsektsiya
The USSR emerged from the former Russian Empire, which had been the site of some of the worst anti-Jewish violence and persecution in European history. Pogroms, legal restrictions, and conspiracy fantasies about Jewish world control were deeply embedded within the culture inherited by the Soviet state. Although the Bolshevik Revolution formally rejected Tsarist Jew-hate, traditional anti-Jewish ideas were repackaged into Soviet political language and institutions.
Following 1917, the Soviet regime viewed Zionism as a threat because it represented an independent form of Jewish identity and organization outside Communist control. To combat this, the Bolsheviks established the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Communist Party.
The Yevsektsiya worked to dismantle Jewish communal life outside Soviet authority, targeting Hebrew language schools, Zionist organizations, religious institutions, and broader expressions of Jewish national consciousness. Hebrew was outlawed because it embodied Jewish history, peoplehood, and Zionism itself. Jewish religious practice was attacked as reactionary, while Zionist activity was criminalized. In practice, this amounted to a campaign of cultural destruction directed against Jewish civilization within the Soviet sphere.
The tragedy was compounded by the fate of the Yevsektsiya’s own leaders. Many of the Jews who enforced these policies were later purged, imprisoned, or executed by the Soviet regime itself. It was a chilling lesson that would repeat throughout history: attempts to prove loyalty by distancing oneself from Jewish identity do not guarantee safety.
Stalinism and the Criminalization of Jewish Identity
After the end of the Second World War and the Shoah, the Soviet regime intensified its attack on Jewish life. Jewish intellectuals, writers, and cultural figures were arrested, executed, or purged. Jewish institutions were dismantled. Hebrew remained suppressed. Jewish cultural life was constantly under attack and was treated with deep suspicion. What had begun under the Yevsektsiya evolved into a broader campaign aimed at severing Jews from their collective identity, historical memory, and national consciousness.
This culminated in a series of anti-Jewish campaigns during the late Stalinist period. Jews were denounced as “rootless cosmopolitans,” accused of disloyalty, foreign allegiances, and subversion. These accusations repackaged older anti-Jewish myths, once again casting Jews as hidden manipulators behind unrest, subversion, and international conflict.
The infamous Doctors’ Plot of 1952 falsely accused predominantly Jewish doctors of conspiring to poison Soviet leaders. The campaign, rooted in classic anti-Jewish conspiracies, sparked fears that Stalin was preparing a much broader assault on Soviet Jewry, including mass deportations, akin to those of the Shoah. That same year saw the Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, one of the defining moments in the evolution of Soviet antizionism. Rudolf Slánský, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, along with thirteen other officials, many of them Jewish, were accused of participating in a vast “Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist” conspiracy tied to Western imperialism.
The trial fused Jewishness, Zionism, espionage, capitalism, and subversion into a single conspiracy narrative. Defendants were repeatedly described as Zionists, cosmopolitans, and agents of foreign powers. Jews alleging Jew-hate were portrayed as manipulators weaponizing victimhood for political gain, while Jewish solidarity and attachment to Israel became evidence of conspiracy and dual loyalty.
Over time and partly as a response to geopolitical developments, Soviet antizionism gradually evolved from suppressing Jewish identity within the USSR into an international ideological campaign aimed at delegitimizing Zionism and isolating Israel on the world stage.
1967 and the Globalization of Soviet Antizionism
The Soviet Union initially supported Israel’s establishment in 1948. But relations deteriorated once Israel aligned more closely with the West. Israel’s rapid defeat of Soviet-backed Arab states in the Six-Day War in 1967 was a profound humiliation for Moscow. In response, the USSR launched an enormous propaganda effort designed to delegitimize Israel internationally and recast Zionism as the great evil of the modern world.
This was when many modern anti-Israel narratives were systematized and exported. Soviet propaganda increasingly portrayed Zionism as racism, fascism, Nazism, colonialism, apartheid, white supremacy, and imperialism. Ultimately, it was indistinguishable from classical Jew-hate, including that of the Nazis. “Zionists” were depicted through familiar conspiracies: global manipulation, dual loyalty, bloodlust, and secret control of governments and media. The word “Zionist” was a substitute for “Jew,” allowing the USSR to recycle ancient anti-Jewish myths while simultaneously denying being anti-Jewish.
A central feature of Soviet antizionism was inversion: transforming Jews from victims of racism, fascism, and genocide into symbols of those very crimes. The Soviet Union accused Israel of colonialism while maintaining its own empire, condemned Zionism as racist while suppressing Jewish (and other) culture, and denounced Israel as fascist while operating one of the world’s most authoritarian systems. Like so much other Jew-hate, Soviet antizionism functioned through projection. Jews were accused of committing the very crimes historically perpetrated against them.
Moreover, while the Soviet Union denounced Zionism as racism and fascism abroad, Soviet Jews themselves faced discrimination in education, employment, and public life. Those who sought to emigrate to Israel, or elsewhere, were denied exit visas and became known as “refuseniks,” harassed by authorities, fired from jobs, imprisoned in the gulags, or branded traitors to the Soviet system.
For Soviet Jews, Zionism was not an abstract political theory or imperial project. It was the simple desire to live openly as Jews among the Jewish people in the Jewish homeland. Boris Kochubievsky, one Soviet Jew seeking permission to emigrate, wrote in a letter to Leonid Brezhnev:
I am a Jew. I want to live in the Jewish state. That is my right, just as it is the right of a Ukrainian to live in Ukraine, the right of a Russian to live in Russia, the right of a Georgian to live in Georgia. I want to live in Israel. That is my dream, the goal not only of my life but also of the lives of hundreds of generations that preceded me, of my ancestors who were expelled from their land. I want my children to study in the Hebrew language. I want to read Jewish newspapers, attend a Jewish theatre. What is wrong with that? What is my crime?
This was the reality Soviet antizionism sought to suppress: Jewish life itself.
The USSR aggressively exported antizionist ideology throughout the world. It spread through newly decolonized states, communist parties, left-wing movements, and international institutions. Even American figures such as Angela Davis visited the Soviet Union and participated in networks shaped by Soviet anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist frameworks. Within these movements, Jews were transformed from an indigenous Middle Eastern people into “white European colonizers,” while Jewish historical continuity in the Land of Israel and the history of Jewish exile and persecution were erased from the narrative altogether.
Zionology and the Academic Legitimization of Antizionism
One of the Soviet Union’s most significant anti-Jewish developments was the creation of “Zionology,” a pseudo-academic field devoted to the study and denunciation of Zionism. Soviet “intellectuals” produced books, journals, and institutes portraying Zionism as racist, fascist, expansionist, and conspiratorial.
The intellectual roots of this propaganda lay in older antisemitic conspiracy traditions, particularly The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous Tsarist forgery later weaponized by the Nazis. Soviet antizionist propaganda reproduced these conspiracy myths almost exactly. “International Zionism” was depicted as a hidden global force manipulating governments, finance, media, and foreign policy from behind the scenes.
This gave antizionism so-called academic legitimacy. Soviet propaganda presented itself as scholarship grounded in anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Many ideas now common in activist and academic discourse around Israel have roots in this Soviet framework: Israel as a uniquely illegitimate “settler colonial” entity, Zionism as white supremacy, comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, and the portrayal of Jewish nationalism as inherently racist while other national movements are treated as legitimate.
“Zionism is Racism”
The culmination of this Soviet ideological effort came in 1975 with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” This resolution did not emerge organically. It was the product of years of Soviet lobbying, propaganda, and diplomatic coordination across the Communist bloc and parts of the developing world.
The resolution represented a historic turning point. For the first time, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people was officially branded by the international community as racist. Jewish self-determination was transformed from a legitimate expression of indigenous nationhood into a moral crime.
Although Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, its ideological legacy survived. Today, accusations that Israel is a “settler colonial white supremacist apartheid state” are often presented as modern progressive analysis, yet this language descends directly from Soviet antizionist propaganda developed decades earlier.
The Contemporary Legacy
The collapse of the Soviet Union did not end the ideological legacy of Soviet antizionism. Its narratives were spread into universities, activist movements, international institutions, and political discourse across the world.
This legacy also shaped a small but growing minority of contemporary Jewish antizionists. Many were radicalized within left-wing spaces where Zionism and Jewish peoplehood have been reframed as illegitimate. Many have come to believe they must choose between their Jewish identity and acceptance within progressive movements. Like the Yevsektsiya before them, many believe distancing themselves from Jewish collective identity or Jewish sovereignty will protect them from Jew-hate. History has demonstrated time and again that they are sadly mistaken.
Legitimate criticism of Israeli governments and policies is entirely valid. Israel, like every other country, can and should be criticized when necessary. Antizionism is something different. It denies to Jews the right to self-determination in their indigenous land and rejects the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself.
Decades of Soviet antizionist propaganda helped shape contemporary assumptions about Zionism, Israel, and Jews. In doing so, Soviet antizionism translated historic anti-Jewish ideas into the political language of the modern world. Its legacy continues to shape how millions understand Jews, Israel, and Jewish sovereignty today.
Liked this article? Follow HonestReporting on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to see even more posts and videos debunking news bias and smears, as well as other content explaining what’s really going on in Israel and the region. Get updates direct to your phone. Join our WhatsApp and Telegram channels!
© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
