Soviet’s Anti-Semitic Operation SIG

Operation SIG was the KGB’s operation to use lies, which the Soviets referred to as disinformation to target Muslims with hatred of Jews and Israel throughout the world. The propaganda was intended to increase terroristic attacks against both using similar means as the Nazi’s. SIG was short for the Russian being translated to Jewish, Zionist Government.

In 2019, Informing Science released, THE KGB’S OPERATION SIG: A 50-YEAR CAMPAIGN TO INCITE HATRED OF ISRAEL AND JEWS. It has numerous pages of citations explaining how Operation SIG continues to impact the world through the misinformation campaign, which is the purposeful spread of false information, including fabricated history. Just about every false notion anti-Semites have about Israel and the Jewish people today, including the belief of Israel being an apartheid state, originated with Operation SIG.

From the section, Inventing a new narrative, Claiming Jews as the aggressor, of the paper:

“In 1948 the fledgling democratic State of Israel was attacked by five Arab armies bent on its destruction. This reality did not support the ambitions of the USSR, and so the KGB created a replacement narrative of Israel as the aggressor. That new narrative started by talking about the Arabs of the region as a distinct people, the Palestinians, even though these Arabs failed to meet the commonly held criteria of peoplehood. Peoplehood typically is understood as having distinctness in language, religion, history, culture, historical sovereignty, national literature, and such. For example, the Kurds, Armenians, Catalonians, Bangladeshis, Slovakians, Slovenes, and Jews are peoples. The uniqueness of Arab Palestinians needed to be constructed whole cloth but was and is essential to claim the land of Israel as the homeland for Arab Palestinians. “Historically, the Palestinian ‘desire for statehood’ and ‘need for liberation’ was invented in large part by the Soviet Union” according to Christopher Fish writing in the Stanford Review (2008). He writes “Palestinian nationalism is, therefore, a historical fabrication born out of a communist thirst for expansion and an Arab resentment of the existence of Israel.”

The Soviets were opposed to all democracies, including Israel. Creating the false narrative of Palestinian nationalism purposely resulted in terrorist attacks against Israel, and violent attacks against Jews throughout the world.

Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, former deputy chief of Romanian intelligence service was directly involved in Operation SIG. He was one of the highest-ranking Soviets to ever defect.

From 2013, Tablet Magazine, Former Soviet Spy Sees the Long Arm of the KG in Today’s Muslim Anti-Semitism, stated:

“By 1978, when Pacepa left Romania for good, the KGB had dispatched 500 undercover agents to target Islamic countries, he writes. Most of them were engineers, medical doctors, teachers, and art instructors. They were part of a Soviet force Pacepa estimates at 4,000, whose job was to spread anti-Semitic and anti-Western hate. The KGB, he writes, distributed several hundred thousand copies of the Protocols in Arabic via these agents and others.”

The Protocols referred to are the debunked, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Just like other anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns of the past, the truth had no bearing on the purposeful lies told to bring about hatred of the Jewish people.

Every vile lie embraced by anti-Semites about Israel and the whole of the Jewish people can be traced back to Operations SIG. It is important to counter the hatred started by the Soviets with the truth.

Propaganda, no matter how effective, can never rewrite history.