The Anti-Zionist Lexicon: How Soviet Propaganda Became Campus Orthodoxy

Not long ago, I wrote about no longer agreeing with my old intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky. I had left the comforts of my Marxist and post-colonial views of the state of Israel, and decided these ways of understanding the state, and Jews in general, were incorrect. I noted elsewhere how post-colonial lenses create an “inverted world” where “Jewish people were colonizers, and….no longer the scattered diaspora of an ancient tribe,” but “the conquering fulcrum of power.”

This change of mine happened shortly before photos emerged of Mr. Chomsky on a private jet with Jeffrey Epstein, and later—grinning beside Steve Bannon at one of Epstein’s soirées.

Zionism, it seems, can have its benefits.

That post marked the end of my anti-Zionism. This one reveals connections that should force anti-Israel activists to question the origin of their ideas about Israel. After reading this, I know I would. I’ve recently come to learn that most of what comes out of this crowd—the unexamined phrases, repetitive insults, and double standards—is largely recycled Soviet propaganda, written by men who’ve been dead for decades. And the scariest part? I don’t think they know.

Since publicly rejecting anti-Zionism, I’ve been graciously welcomed by Jews and allied folks alike. Some comments were so touching and heartfelt, I couldn’t help but be humbled and grateful for this community.

At the same time, I’ve also been called a “hasbara”—with $7,000 supposedly on its way from the state of Israel. Apparently, refusing the destruction of the only Jewish state makes you a propagandist. Wait until they hear I’m friends with Israelis.

Predictably, I’ve also been called a traitor, a fascist, and a “zio.” It’s clear the loudest anti-Zionists don’t want conversation; they want to condemn. I present evidence that Israel isn’t committing genocide or operating an apartheid state, and I don’t get engagement or facts—I get chastised, rebuked, and called rather imaginative names.

When I cite casualty ratios or IDF maps clearing civilians from a drop zone, they respond with what I’ve come to call the Anti-Zionist Lexicon: a curated collection of words and phrases designed not to inform or explain, but to damn. You know the three words. Everyone knows them.

Genocide. Apartheid. Colonizer.

In all my life I’ve never heard words repeated so often. But here’s what most people saying these words don’t know: they’re repeating a script written in Moscow in 1953.

And I can prove it.

The Soviet Blueprint

After Stalin realized Israel wouldn’t become a Soviet satellite state, he launched his “anti-cosmopolitan campaign” in 1948. When Golda Meir arrived in Moscow that year, crowds of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews turned out—an outpouring of Jewish solidarity that terrified the Kremlin. Stalin couldn’t use Hitler’s language—calling Jews “rats and vermin” wasn’t internationally respectable after the Nazis were defeated. With this is mind, the Soviets did something brilliant and evil: they replaced “Jew” with “Zionist” and kept everything else exactly the same.

Following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War over Soviet-backed Arab states, KGB Chairman Andropov responded with Operation SIG (Russian for “Zionist Governments”)—a disinformation campaign that ran from 1967 to 1988. According to Ion Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc defector, the Chairman told him: “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”

By 1978, Pacepa reports, the KGB had deployed approximately 4,000 agents of influence into Islamic countries, distributing Arabic translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion along with a documentary claiming the United States was a Zionist country aimed at subjugating the Islamic world to Jewish rule.

The KGB also helped create the PLO in the early 1960’s. According to Pacepa, the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow. Yasser Arafat was groomed by Soviet intelligence; documents from the Mitrokhin Archive identify him as a KGB asset. Even Mahmoud Abbas, current president of the Palestinian Authority, was a KGB agent codenamed “Krotov.” In 1982, Abbas defended his doctoral dissertation at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies. According to multiple sources, the dissertation argued that Zionists were “fundamental partners” with Nazis and described the six million figure as a “fantastic lie.” Abbas denied that gas chambers were used on Jews, and says Israel executed Adolf Eichmann because he was going to expose their plot to TIME magazine.

Then vs. Now: Am I Saying Russian Propaganda?

Let’s see campus chants match yesterday’s Soviet scripts:

“Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism”

THEN (1971): Pravda’s “Zionism: The Weapon of Reaction” declared the “struggle against Zionism must not be confused with antisemitism.”

THEN (1974): An article in Kommunist magazine stated “antisemitism is an abhorrent racist theory…Zionism, however, is a political movement…of the Jewish bourgeoisie.”

THEN (KGB): Andropov told Pacepa they were “maintaining publicly that ‘anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.'”

NOW: Standard campus protest talking point, repeated verbatim by anti-Israel organizations. In fact, how many times have you personally heard this? I have, numerous times.

“Zionism is Racism”

THEN (1975): UN Resolution 3379, Soviet-orchestrated, declared “Zionism is a form of racism.”

NOW: Protest signs reading “Zionism is Racism”—word-for-word replica of the 1975 resolution.

The Apartheid Libel-

THEN (1970s): Soviet publication “Zionism and Apartheid” distributed globally.

NOW: “Israel Apartheid Week” on campuses—same title, same accusation, fifty years later.

“Settler Colonialism”

THEN (1969-1978): Soviet publications described Zionism as “the front squad of colonialism and neocolonialism.”

THEN (1965): The PLO Research Center in Beirut—founded in the mid-1960s—published Fayez Sayegh’s “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.” It’s the foundational text applying “settler-colonialism” to Israel.

NOW: Students for Justice in Palestine display: “Zionism is racism settler colonialism white supremacy apartheid.”

“Imperial Zionism”

THEN (1969): The KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism.” Pacepa notes: “It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, ‘imperial-Zionism’ was a Moscow invention.”

NOW: The term appears regularly in anti-Israel activist literature and academic papers.

Zionists = Nazis

THEN (1970s): Soviet propaganda posters equated the Star of David with the swastika.

NOW (2022): New York City protest signs reading “The Nazis are still around, they just call themselves Zionists now.”

Robert Wistrich mentions how Soviet propaganda described Zionists as racist, imperialist, colonial, and allied with fascism—the exact charges leveled at Jews for centuries, now laundered through anti-colonial rhetoric. This exchange of “Zionist” for “Jew” meant that one could maintain antisemitic tropes, not only avoiding charges of racism, but having anti-racist credentials added to their repertoire. For its staying power alone, this was probably the most successful rebranding in the history of antisemitism, and unfortunately, it begins with Joseph Stalin. It’s important to note how effective language can be when used deliberately to reshape history. Even changing one word, as we see now, has prolonged effects.

It turns out the Anti-Zionist Lexicon is Russian.

Here’s what the Soviets understood that campus activists don’t: you don’t need to win the argument. You just need to use the right language.

Once “Zionist” means “genocidal colonizer,” it didn’t have to prove anything. The work was already done. Same thing with the Soviet invented charge of apartheid. Israel can open its hospitals to Palestinians, seat Arab judges on its Supreme Court, withdraw from Gaza—none of that matters. The accusations don’t respond to evidence because they were never about evidence in the first place.

They’re about making Israel guilty by definition. When this is accomplished, no facts can exonerate it. It becomes non-falsifiable. Any criticism against it, is just another sign in favor of it.

What This Means

If you’re waving a sign that says “Zionism is racism,” congratulations—you’re quoting a UN resolution the Soviets pushed through in 1975. If you’re calling Israel an apartheid state, you’re using the title of a Soviet pamphlet from the ’70s. If you think Zionists are Nazis, Soviet propagandists drew that cartoon before you were born.

That’s not thinking for yourself. It’s quite literally spouting Russian propaganda from the 1960’s and 1970’s, and fulfilling it’s stated goals.

Noam Chomsky once wrote, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” A noble sentiment from a man who spent fifty years expressing Stalin’s talking points about Jews—sorry, “Zionists”—without ever asking where the script came from. Chomsky built his career on questioning power—American power, corporate power, military power. But when it came to the KGB’s greatest propaganda victory, he never questioned a thing. He just repeated it, footnoted it, and called it scholarship.

Here’s the irony: the man who taught a generation to be skeptical of everything never stopped to wonder why his “radical” critique of Israel sounded exactly like what Leonid Brezhnev’s propagandists wrote in 1975. Turns out you can spend your whole life exposing manufactured consent and still manufacture it yourself.

Some flights you take willingly.