Key takeaways:
- The Soviet Union created Operation SIG to weaponize antisemitism and erase Jewish history by fabricating a new “Palestinian” national identity.
- The USSR launched the “Zionism = racism” smear through UN Resolution 3379 and global propaganda, flipping Israel’s image from survivor state to oppressor.
- The legacy continues today, with Qatar and Western academia amplifying Soviet-era narratives by investing in academia and activist groups.
Long before TikTok slogans or campus protests, the Soviet Union’s KGB launched a global propaganda war that reshaped how the world talks about Israel, and what the word Palestinian even means.
From Socialist Ally to Soviet Enemy
When Israel was founded in 1948, the USSR was among the first to grant it full legal recognition. Stalin believed Israel’s socialist kibbutzim model signaled an affinity for communism that might one day make it an ally and help Moscow push Britain out of the Middle East.
But those hopes collapsed within two decades. Israel sided symbolically with the United States during the Korean War, joined Britain and France in the 1956 Suez campaign, and most humiliatingly for Moscow, defeated Soviet-armed Arab militaries in the 1967 Six-Day War.
That was the tipping point when the Kremlin stopped seeing Israel as a potential partner and began treating it as a Western proxy to destroy through information warfare.
Operation SIG: Rewriting History
The KGB’s answer was Operation SIG, short for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva (“Zionist States”), a decades-long disinformation campaign (1967–1988) to erase Jewish history from the land of Israel and invent a new, politicized Palestinian identity to replace it.
Before Israel’s establishment, the term Palestinian was used to refer to local Jews and their institutions: the Palestine Post newspaper, the Palestinian Philharmonic Orchestra, Palestine Airways, to name a few. Arab residents of the land rarely used that label.
But Moscow saw an opportunity. Within the USSR, antisemitism was already systemic; Jews were distrusted as potential “Western agents.” By exporting that prejudice to the Arab world, the Soviets could weaponize hatred of Israel to rally allies and weaken the West.
Manufacturing a People’s “Movement”
The KGB helped found the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, drafting its charter in Moscow. That original charter didn’t even claim the West Bank or Gaza as land for a state: it demanded the dismantling of Israel itself.
Its 422-member council was hand-picked by Soviet handlers: journalists, lawyers, and political operatives loyal to Moscow’s line. The goal wasn’t self-determination for the new Palestinian identity, but erasure of the Jewish state.
Yasser Arafat — born in Cairo, not Jerusalem — was recruited and trained by the KGB. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West, the KGB even forged Arafat’s birth records to claim a Jerusalem origin.
Mahmoud Abbas also appears in Soviet archives under the codename “Krotov.” He wrote his doctoral dissertation in Moscow, which promoted Holocaust-denial themes accusing Jews of colluding with Nazis.
The Soviets then flooded the Middle East with Arabic translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, films portraying Jews as Nazis, and thousands of “agents of influence” spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories.
By 1977, senior PLO figure Zuheir Mohsen openly admitted: “The Palestinian people do not exist… Only for political and tactical reasons do we say so.”
The “Apartheid” Smear
The next stage of the campaign was to recast Israel as a racist oppressor. Soviet propagandists produced books such as Zionism and Apartheid, along with posters equating the Star of David with a swastika.
The culmination came in 1975, when Moscow pushed UN Resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism.”
Although repealed in 1991, the damage was permanent. As defector Ion Pacepa revealed, KGB chief Yuri Andropov personally ordered the apartheid narrative, explaining that the goal was to “instill a Nazi-style hatred for Jews throughout the Islamic world.”
By flipping Israel’s image from survivor state to colonial villain, the Kremlin planted one of the most enduring lies of modern politics — a lie still parroted on campuses and protest signs half a century later.
Training the Terrorists
The KGB didn’t stop at propaganda. It trained and armed the militants themselves. Palestinian terror factions such as Fatah’s military wing, the PFLP, and the DFLP were schooled in Soviet camps across Eastern Europe.
Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu mentored Arafat personally, teaching him to “talk peace in English but wage war in Arabic.” That double-speak became the hallmark of the PLO and its successors.
The Legacy Lives On
The Soviet Union may have collapsed, but its disinformation ecosystem survives, and now with a new sponsor. Today, Qatar funds the same ideology through Western universities, media outlets, and “human-rights” NGOs.
According to a 2024 Middle East Forum report, Qatar channels roughly $235 million per year into U.S. universities, hosts U.S. campuses in Doha, and has expanded its media reach beyond its state-sponsored Al Jazeera network, now hosting a state-of-the-art CNN bureau.
The method is familiar: fund the institutions that shape minds, flood them with anti-Israel narratives, and let sympathetic academics and activists carry the message forward.
Soviet Lies, Modern Echoes
Today’s slogans: “From the river to the sea,” “Israel is apartheid,” “Free Palestine,” echo the language first scripted in Moscow. They turn a regional conflict into a global morality play where Jews are always cast as villains.
Operation SIG succeeded beyond the Kremlin’s expectations. It reframed Israel’s existence as colonialism, recast antisemitism as “anti-Zionism,” and taught the world to see a democracy fighting for survival as a pariah state.
The USSR is gone. Its lies are not. And every time those lies resurface — in the UN, on campus, or online — the real legacy of Soviet disinformation lives on.
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