OPERATION SIG
The Soviet Union began exporting antisemitic propaganda to the Arab world as early as the 1950s, when it disseminated Nazi-era, German-made propaganda films.
But following the 1967 Six Day War, the Soviet regime saw the perfect opportunity to strengthen its sphere of influence over Arab nations.
To do so, it launched a covert operation known as “Zionist Governments,” or “Operation SIG,” after its Russian acronym. It was overseen by top Soviet intelligence officers, including KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov and Romanian defector Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa. Pacepa later spoke to the Western press about their roles in the operation.
The goal of the operation was to portray Israel and the United States as imperialist threats to Islam, as well as to infiltrate academia in both the Middle East and the Western world, rewriting the history of both Israel’s establishment and the Zionist movement.
SIG’s core messages were the following:
- Jews and/or Zionists create or fake antisemitism to elicit sympathy.
- Zionist organizations engage in espionage, which is why Jewish and/or Israeli organizations carry out humanitarian work and help impoverished communities.
- Zionism is a Trojan horse for racism and imperialism in the developing world.
- The Zionists worked with the Nazis during the Holocaust.
- The State of Israel is the new Nazi Germany.
METHODS
Over the decades, SIG strategically employed a number of methods to carry out its disinformation campaigns, including:
- Repetition: the Soviets repeated the same accusations against the Jewish state over and over again, until the substance of the accusation was no longer questioned and instead was accepted as fact.
- Guilt by association: whenever anything bad happened in the world, the Soviets used tenuous connections to link it back to the Jewish state.
- Deception, but most importantly, distortion: Soviet lies about the Jewish state included small kernels of (distorted) truth, which made them all the more believable.
- Weaponization of the public’s empathy: the Soviets deliberately used tragic images to turn public sentiment against Israel.
EXAMPLES
- Distortion: in 1976, the Soviet Union accused Israel of “racial genocide” after several Palestinians were killed in clashes in the West Bank. There was no substance to the accusation; while death is always tragic, it is not, in the vast majority of cases, indicative of genocide.
- Guilt by association: when, in 1969, a Australian Christian fundamentalist tourist named Denis Michael Rohan set fire to Al Aqsa Mosque. Though Rohan was not Israeli and was tried in court, deported, and confined to a psychiatric facility, the Soviet Union ran an international campaign blaming Israel for the incident.
ZIONOLOGY
"[Zionologist books] perceptibly [stir] up antisemitism under the flag of antizionism."
SOVIET HISTORIAN AND ACADEMIC M. KOROSTOVTSEV IN A LETTER TO THE SECRETARY OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY, 1975
Zionology was a pseudoacademic discipline invented by the Soviets in the 1960s and 1970s. It laundered Soviet state-sponsored discrimination against Jews and age-old antisemitic conspiracies, using the language of sociology and political science to present antizionism as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist endeavor.
To do so, Zionologists produced countless books, brochures, and academic journals delegitimizing Zionism and intellectualizing antizionist discrimination. Some of these titles included Beware: Zionism!, Zionism: The Essence of Man-Hatred, Fascism Under the Blue Star, Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination, Invasion Without Arms, and more.
RESOLUTION 3379
Without a doubt, the most successful outcome of Operation SIG was the passing of United Nations Resolution 3379, also known as the “Zionism is racism” resolution.
With the support of Arab and African nations under its sphere of influence, the resolution passed 75 to 35, with 32 abstentions.
- Resolution 3379 never defined Zionism.
- Resolution 3379 never explained why or how Zionism is a form of racism.
The resolution was repealed in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union – that is not a coincidence – but it forever left its mark on Israel-Palestine discourse.
Upon its repeal, the Russian government admitted that Resolution 3379 had been a Cold War propaganda ploy, calling it “a relic of the Ice Age.”
DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGNS
In the West, Soviet disinformation campaigns notoriously exploited racial tensions and infiltrated marginalized minority groups. The Soviets then fed these minorities antizionist propaganda.
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Though the Soviet Union discriminated heavily against its own ethnic minorities, the KGB successfully infiltrated the American Civil Rights movement, sowing discord among activists, radicalizing leading figures, and discrediting those it saw as a problem, in particular Martin Luther King Jr., who was famously a friend of Israel.
Some civil rights activists, like Angela Davis, who became a folk hero in the Soviet Union, were “adopted” by the Soviets. In fact, Soviet dissidents and political prisoners accused figures like Davis of hypocrisy for fighting against the American incarceration system while condoning the Soviet regime, which imprisoned political dissidents.
- In spite of heavily repressing its own indigenous populations, the Soviet Union exploited the Native American struggle in its propaganda campaigns. Native American leaders were invited to visit socialist countries, and when American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier was imprisoned, the Soviet Union spearheaded an international campaign for his release.
- “And yet you are l*nching N**roes”: in the Soviet Union, the phrase became a political catchphrase used as a “gotcha” against the United States when Americans brought up the USSR’s human rights abuses and is emblematic of the USSR’s disinformation campaigns that exploited the plight of American minorities. The phrase in fact predated the Soviet Union and is traced back to a 1905 political joke, in which an American condemns the Russians for the Kishinev Pogrom, and the Russian responds, “And yet you are l*nching N**roes.”
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One of the most notorious Soviet disinformation campaigns targeting the West exploited the fears and struggle of the American LGBTQ+ community, despite the fact that the Soviet Union criminalized homosexuality. Gay men were sentenced to up to five years of hard labor in labor camps, while lesbians were often sent to psychiatric institutions.
In the 1980s, the Soviets disseminated a conspiracy titled “Operation Denver,” in which they claimed that HIV/AIDS had been created in an American military laboratory in order to use as a biological weapon.
- Beyond minorities, the Soviets also infiltrated American academia, using US-Soviet academic exchanges as opportunities for espionage and the dissemination of disinformation. The Soviets used tactics such as the use of “useful idiots” (well-meaning but ignorant leftists), “ideological subversion,” and more.
ANTIZIONIST COMMITTEE OF THE SOVIET PUBLIC
In 1974, the Soviet Union’s Central Committee Propaganda Department proposed the creation of an antizionist committee to discourage Jewish refuseniks from trying to emigrate. Its suggested name would be the Committee for the Struggle Against Zionism, which was meant to echo the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a group that raised $33 million for the Soviet war effort during World War II (its members were later arrested, tortured, and executed by the Soviet regime).
The Committee for the Struggle Against Zionism was never established, but in 1983, the Soviets founded the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, or AKSO, for its Russian acronym. In the Russian media, AKSO portrayed the refusenik issue as a Zionist, imperialist psychological campaign against the Soviet Union, through which the Zionists fostered anti-Soviet sentiment around the world.
But it didn’t end there. AKSO also published countless propaganda booklets portraying Zionism as a tool of American imperialism and equating Zionism to Nazism, even inspiring current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s PhD dissertation.
TRACING BUZZWORDS
Virtually every single accusation lobbed against Israel today was first employed by the Soviet Union as part of its SIG operations.
- In 1965, former member of the Syrian Nazi-aligned party Fayez Sayegh first wrote an academic paper titled “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,” under the auspices of the Soviet-funded Palestine Research Center in Beirut.
- In 1969, to detract from criticism of its treatment of the Soviet Jewish population, the Soviet Union unsuccessfully attempted to add a clause charging that “Zionism is Nazism” to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
- On May 11, 1976, the New York Times reported that the Soviet Union had accused Israel of “racial genocide” at the United Nations.
- In 1975, the Soviet Union spearheaded Resolution 3379, or the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations.
- In 1991, Iron Curtain defector Ion Mihai Pacepa admitted that the fourth chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov (1967-1982), had personally ordered the dissemination of the narrative that Israel is an apartheid state, through the publication of books and propaganda booklets such as “Zionism and Apartheid.”
"[The goal was to] instill a Nazi-style hatred for Jews throughout the Islamic world."
ION MIHAI PACEPA
"We had only to keep repeating our themes—that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews."
ION MIHAI PACEPA
BUT...WHY?
- Everything the Soviet Union did vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine must be understood in the context of the Cold War, as the two world powers, the USSR and the United States, competed to grow their respective spheres of influence, especially among developing nations. It’s no coincidence that the Soviets began exporting antisemitic propaganda in the Middle East when Israel grew closer to Western nations in the 1950s.
- The Soviets were constantly under international pressure over their human rights violations. Sponsoring and even creating revolutionary movements in the developing world was a way to exert influence, deflect, and throw the accusation back at the West. The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, for example, was created specifically to delegitimize refuseniks.
- The Soviets suppressed nationalist movements of their ethnic minorities, considering them a threat to their territorial integrity.
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