History of the Jews (102 page)

When Lenin came to write his own thesis on the subject, at Zurich in the spring of 1916, he complained of a shortage of books. ‘However,’ he wrote, ‘I made use of the principal English work on imperialism, J. A. Hobson’s book, with all the care that, in my opinion, this work deserves.’
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Hobson’s theory, in fact, became the essence of Lenin’s own. The result,
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
(1916), laid down the standard doctrine on the subject for all states under Communism, from 1917 to the present day. Leninist theory, in one form or another, likewise formed the attitudes of many Third World states towards imperialism and colonialism, as they acquired independence in the 1950s and 1960s.

Granted the theory’s anti-Semitic roots, it was not difficult to fit into it the concept of Zionism as a form of colonialism and the Zionist state as an outpost of imperialism. There were, it was true, the awkward historical facts of Israel’s birth, with Stalin acting as one of the principal midwives. These in themselves demolished the Soviet theory of Zionism completely. But like many other facts in Soviet history, they were buried and forgotten by the official propagandists. In any case the entire history of anti-Semitism demonstrates how impervious it is to awkward facts. That ‘Zionism’ in practice stood for ‘the Jews’ became quickly apparent. The 1952 Slánsky trial was the first occasion in the history of Communism that the traditional anti-Semitic accusation of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Israeli government constituting the modern Elders of Zion, was put forward officially by a Communist government—an ominous milestone. The reality behind the scenes was even worse. The Jewish Deputy Foreign Minister Artur London, sentenced to life imprisonment but released in the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, was then able to reveal the anti-Semitic fury of the chief prosecutor, Major Smole: ‘[He] took me by the throat and in a voice shaking with hatred shouted: “You and your dirty race
we shall exterminate it. Not everything Hitler did was right. But he exterminated Jews and that was a good thing. Far too many of them managed to avoid the gas chamber but we shall finish where he left off.” ’
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From the early 1950s, Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, growing steadily in intensity and comprehensiveness, stressed the links between Zionism, the Jews in general, and Judaism. ‘Judaic sermons are the sermons of bourgeois Zionists,’ announced a Ukrainian-language broadcast from Korovograd, 9 December 1959. ‘The character of the Jewish religion’, the Kuibyshev newspaper
Volszhskaya Kommuna
wrote on 30 September 1961, ‘serves the political aims of the Zionists.’ ‘Zionism’, wrote
Kommunist Moldavia
in 1963, ‘is inseparably linked to Judaism…rooted in the idea of the exclusiveness of the Jewish people.’
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Hundreds of articles, in magazines and newspapers all over the Soviet Union, portrayed Zionists (i.e. Jews) and Israeli leaders as engaged in a world-wide conspiracy, along the lines of the old
Protocols of Zion
. It was,
Sovietskaya Latvia
wrote, 5 August 1967, an ‘international Cosa Nostra’ with ‘a common centre, a common programme and common funds’. The ‘Israeli ruling circles’ were only junior partners in its global plots.
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In the twenty years after the 1967 Six Day War, the Soviet propaganda machine became the main source for anti-Semitic material in the world. In doing so it assembled materials from virtually every archaeological layer of anti-Semitic history, from classical antiquity to Hitlerism. The sheer volume of the material, ranging from endlessly repetitive articles and broadcasts to full-scale books, began to rival the Nazi output. Trofim Kychko’s book,
Judaism and Zionism
(1968), spoke of the ‘chauvinistic idea of the God-chosenness of the Jewish people, the propaganda of messianism and the idea of ruling over the peoples of the world’. Vladimir Begun’s
Creeping Counter-Revolution
(1974) called the Bible ‘an unsurpassed textbook of bloodthirstiness, hypocrisy, treason, perfidy and moral degeneracy’; no wonder the Zionists were gangsters since their ideas came from ‘the scrolls of the “holy” Torah and the precepts of the Talmud’.
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In 1972 the Soviet embassy journal in Paris actually reproduced parts of a Tsarist anti-Semitic pamphlet put out in 1906 by the Black Hundred, who organized the pre-1914 pogroms. In this instance it was possible to take action in the French courts, which duly found the publisher (a prominent member of the French Communist Party) guilty of incitement to racial violence.
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Some of the Soviet anti-Semitic material, circulated at a very high level, almost defied belief. In a Central Committee memorandum of 10 January 1977, one Soviet
anti-Semitic expert, Valery Emelianov, claimed that America was controlled by a Zionist-masonic conspiracy ostensibly led by President Carter but actually under the control of what he called the ‘B’nai Brith Gestapo’. The Zionists, according to Emelianov, penetrated goy society through the masons, each one of whom was an active Zionist informer; Zionism itself was based on ‘the Judaic-masonic pyramid’.
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The keystone of the new Soviet fantasy-edifice of anti-Semitism was provided in the 1970s, when the charge that the Zionists were the racist successors of the Nazis was ‘proved’ by ‘evidence’ that Hitler’s Holocaust itself was a Jewish-Nazi conspiracy to get rid of poor Jews who could not be used in Zionist plans. Indeed, it was alleged, Hitler himself got his ideas from Herzl. The Jewish-Zionist leaders, acting on orders from the millionaire Jews who controlled international finance capital, helped the
SS
and the Gestapo to herd unwanted Jews either into the gas ovens or into the kibbutzim of the Land of Canaan. This Jewish-Nazi conspiracy was used as background by the Soviet propaganda machine to charges of atrocities against the Israeli government, especially during and after the Lebanon operations of 1982. Since the Zionists were happy to join with Hitler in exterminating their own discarded people, wrote
Pravda
on 17 January 1984, it was not surprising that they were now massacring Lebanese Arabs, whom they regarded as sub-human anyway.
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These sinister developments in the anti-Semitic policy of the Soviet government were more than a reversion to traditional Tsarist practice, though they included most of the familiar Tsarist mythology about Jews. For one thing, Tsarist governments always allowed the Jews escape through mass emigration. For another, the Soviet regime had a record second only to Hitler’s in exterminating entire categories of people for ideological purposes. The equation of Jews with Zionism, a capital offence in Soviet doctrine, would make it the easiest thing in the world for the Soviet leadership to justify in ideological terms extreme measures against Russia’s 1,750,000 Jews, such as reviving Stalin’s 1952-3 plan to deport them
en masse
to Siberia, or even worse.

Another disturbing factor was the close resemblance between Soviet anti-Jewish propaganda and similar material put out by Russia’s allies in the Arab world. The difference was more of form than of substance. The Arabs were less thorough in their use of ideological jargon and they sometimes openly used the word ‘Jews’ where the Russians were usually careful to employ the code-term ‘Zionists’. Where the Russians drew from the
Protocols of Zion
without acknowledgment, the Arabs published it openly. This tract had circulated widely in the
Arab world, published in innumerable different editions, ever since the early 1920s. It was ready by such diverse Arab leaders as King Feisal of Saudi Arabia and President Nasser of Egypt. The latter evidently believed it, telling an Indian journalist in 1957: ‘It is very important that you should read it. I will give you a copy. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the fate of the European continent and that they elect their successors from their entourage.’
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Nasser was so impressed by the book that yet another Arab edition was published by his brother in about 1967. Extracts and summaries were used in Arab school textbooks and in training material for the Arab armed forces.
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In 1972 yet another edition of it appeared at the top of the Beirut best-seller list.

All these editions, it should be added, were specially edited for Arab readers and the Elders were presented in the context of the Palestine problem. The
Protocols
were not the only anti-Semitic classic to live on in the post-war Arab world. Blood-libel material, published in Cairo in 1890 under the title
The Cry of the Innocent in the Horn of Freedom
, resurfaced in 1962 as an official publication of the UAR government called
Talmudic Human Sacrifices
.
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Indeed the blood libel periodically reappeared in Arab newspapers.
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But the
Protocols
remained the favourite, and not only in Arab Islamic countries. It was published in Pakistan in 1967 and extensive use was made of it by the Iranian government and its embassies after the Ayatollah Khomeini, a fervent believer in anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, came to power there in 1979. In May 1984, his publication
Imam
, which had already printed extracts from the
Protocols
, accused the British task force in the Falklands of conducting atrocities on the advice of the Elders of Zion.
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Khomeini’s propaganda usually portrayed Zionism (alias the Jews), which had been at work ‘for centuries everywhere, perpetrating crimes of unbelievable magnitude against human societies and values’, as an emanation of Satan. Khomeini followed the medieval line that Jews were sub-human or inhuman, indeed anti-human, and therefore constituted an exterminable category of creature. But his anti-Semitism hovered confusingly between simple anti-Judaism, Islamic sectarianism (Sunni Moslems ruling his enemy Iraq were Zionist puppets as well as devils in their own right) and hatred of America, ‘the great Satan’. He found it difficult to decide whether Satan was manipulating Washington via the Jews or vice versa.

Arab anti-Semitism too was an uneasy blend of religious and secular motifs. It was also ambivalent about the role of Hitler and the Nazis.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had known of the Final Solution and welcomed it. Hitler told him that when his troops reached the Middle East they would wipe out the Jewish settlements in Palestine.
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After the war, many Arabs continued to regard Hitler as a hero-figure. When Eichmann was brought to trial in 1961-2, the English-language Jordanian newspaper,
Jerusalem Times
, published a letter congratulating him for having ‘conferred a real blessing on humanity’. The trial would ‘one day culminate in the liquidation of the remaining six million to avenge your blood’.
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On the other hand, Arab anti-Semitic propagandists often followed the Soviet line that Jews and Nazis had worked hand-in-glove, and that the Zionists were the Nazis’ natural successors. Particularly in their propaganda directed at the West, Arab governments compared the Israeli air force to the Luftwaffe and the
IDF
to the
SS
and Gestapo. At one time or another (sometimes simultaneously) Arab audiences were informed that the Holocaust had been a fortunate event, a diabolical plot between Jews and Nazis, and had never occurred at all, being a simple invention of the Zionists. But when had anti-Semitic theorists ever been disturbed by internal contradictions in their assertions?

The quantity of anti-Zionist material flooding into the world, from both the Soviet bloc and the Arab states, was augmented first by the 1967 Six Day War, which acted as a powerful stimulant to Soviet propaganda against Israel, then by the oil-price revolution following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which greatly increased Arab funds made available for anti-Zionist propaganda. Inevitably the scale and persistence of anti-Israeli abuse had some effect, notably in the United Nations. The old League of Nations had shown itself singularly ineffective in protecting Jews during the inter-war period. But at least it had not actively encouraged their persecution. The 1975 session of the United Nations General Assembly came close to legitimizing anti-Semitism. On 1 October it received in state President Idi Amin of Uganda, in his capacity as Chairman of the Organization of African Unity. Amin was already notorious for his large-scale massacres of the Ugandan population, some of which he had carried out personally. He was also well known for the violence of his anti-Semitic statements. He had sent a cable to the
UN
secretary-general on 12 September 1972 applauding the Holocaust, and he announced that, since no statue to Hitler had been erected in Germany, he proposed to set one up in Uganda. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he was well received by the General Assembly. Many
UN
delegates, including the whole of the Soviet and Arab blocs, gave him a standing ovation before he began his speech, in which he denounced the ‘Zionist-American conspiracy’
against the world and called for the expulsion of Israel from the
UN
and its ‘extinction’. There was frequent applause during his grotesque philippic and another standing ovation when he sat down. The following day the
UN
secretary-general and the president of the General Assembly gave a public dinner in his honour. A fortnight later, on 17 October, the professional anti-Semites of the Soviet and Arab publicity machines achieved their greatest triumphs when the Third Committee of the General Assembly, by a vote of 70 to 29, with 27 abstentions and 16 absent, passed a motion condemning Zionism as a form of racism. On 10 November the General Assembly as a whole endorsed the resolution by 67 to 55 with 15 abstentions. The Israeli delegate, Chaim Herzog, pointed out that the vote took place on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Nazi
Kristallnacht
against the Jews. The US delegate, Daniel P. Moynihan, announced with icy contempt: ‘The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, and it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.’
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