In the wake of the October 7 atrocities, a shocking chorus of rationalizations, equivocations and outright celebrations erupted – not from jihadist strongholds but from Ivy League campuses, progressive nonprofits, and even the halls of Congress.
Incredibly, the language of human rights was twisted to rationalize and even defend the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians, including women and children, since the Holocaust.
How could this happen? The answer lies not in a sudden moral lapse but in a long ideological journey.
Today’s leftwing antisemitism – often dressed up as anti Zionism – isn’t new. It’s the poisonous fruit of a tree planted by the Soviet Union decades ago, when Stalin, having briefly supported Israel’s founding, turned against the Jewish state with venomous intensity. His regime initially saw Israel as a socialist aligned, anti British ally. Czechoslovak arms sales to the Haganah helped turn the tide of Israel’s War of Independence.
But the romance ended abruptly. When Golda Meir arrived in Moscow in 1948 as Israel’s first ambassador, more than 50,000 Soviet Jews defied repression to greet her. Stalin was enraged. The sight of Jews looking to Jerusalem – not Moscow – for inspiration was intolerable.
The response was brutal: Jewish cultural institutions were closed, writers executed, and the infamous Doctors’ Plot accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to poison Kremlin leaders. By Stalin’s death in 1953, antisemitism had become state policy – thinly veiled as “anti Zionism.”
It’s important to note that Stalin’s anti Jewish campaigns did not emerge in a vacuum. They drew on earlier currents of leftist populist antisemitism. In late 19th century Russia, the Narodniks – agrarian socialist intellectuals who aimed to spark a massive peasant revolt – cynically trafficked in notorious slogans like “Jewish blood is the best for oiling the wheels of revolution.” Remarkably, they still attracted some young Jewish supporters, who believed the revolutionary cause outweighed the hatred directed at them.
Stalin’s purges also drew on centuries of traditional Russian antisemitism, retooling old hatreds into state ideology.
After 1953, hostility only deepened. Zionism was recast as colonialism; Jews were excluded from positions of influence and silenced culturally.
Soviet antisemitic propaganda intensified significantly after the 1967 Six-Day War. State-sponsored “anti-Zionist” campaigns often included blatant antisemitism, featuring films, articles and books that vilified Israel, Zionism and, by association, Jews as a group.
Across the Soviet Bloc, antisemitism became part of state sanctioned politics. In Poland, thousands of Jews were purged under the guise of anti Zionist campaigns.
From the late 1960s through the 1980s, the KGB and Soviet bloc intelligence agencies provided substantial support and shelter for Palestinian terrorist groups as part of a strategy to wage a shadow war against Israel and its Western allies. The KGB and their aligned intelligence services also supported international radical left terrorist groups.
Leftwing terrorists joined Palestinians in carrying out joint attacks, including two infamous examples: the 1976 Entebbe hijacking, where German Revolutionary Cells worked with Palestinian hijackers to separate Jewish hostages for execution, and the 1985 Rome airport massacre, where the Abu Nidal Organization, linked to PLO networks, killed civilians at the El Al counter, including Americans and Israelis.
Overall, Western leftwing attitudes toward Israel had shifted by the late 1960s. Before 1967, Israel was admired as a plucky socialist democracy. After its overwhelming victory, the radical left recast it as a colonial oppressor and Palestinians as romanticized symbols of Third World resistance.
This new political line was on vivid display in Paris in the 1968 student uprising, where a banner backing the PLO hung in the occupied Sorbonne University. In the United States, groups such as the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause.
In the 1970s, the critically acclaimed 1966 feature film The Battle of Algiers, which depicted the urban insurgency tactics of Algeria’s FLN in its uprising against French rule, became an effective, pro-Palestinian propaganda tool. The film was screened on college campuses – including Columbia University – and at leftwing activist gatherings to frame the Palestinian Arab cause in anti-colonial terms and to essentially justify bombings of shops and cafes and other terrorist acts as a legitimate form of revolutionary struggle.
Academia provided cover for this campaign. The influential Columbia University professor and Palestinian political activist, Edward Said, characterized Israel’s founding as a manifestation of Western imperialism. Frantz Fannon’s writings on revolutionary violence, which glorified the use of force by colonized people against their “oppressors,” were widely adopted as intellectual justification for terrorism by Third World movements.
Soviet propaganda reinforced the narrative. The 1975 UN General Assembly resolution declaring “Zionism is racism” was a crowning achievement of Soviet influence. The resolution was repealed after the fall of the Soviet Union, but never erased from activist rhetoric.
By the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, a UN-sponsored event, anti Israel bias had fully metastasized. In the NGO forum, which was a massive parallel gathering, Jewish participants were harassed, blood libel imagery was circulated and observers reported chants calling for violence against Jews. What was billed as an anti racism conference became a festival of antisemitism.
These trends weren’t confined to the UN and NGOs.
Intersectionality, a social science framework for analyzing how overlapping social identities interact, has been weaponized to exclude Jews, now dismissed as “white” or “privileged,” regardless of complexion or socioeconomic status. Jewish suffering is minimized, while Jewish connection to Israel is cast as complicity in “settler colonialism.”
And this ideology has champions in Congress. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib have repeatedly used rhetoric that downplays Palestinian and Islamist atrocities while vilifying Israel in language echoing Soviet era propaganda. These members of “The Squad” represent the mainstreaming of ideas once confined to the radical fringe.
In cultural and media institutions, anti Israel bias grows unchecked. In academia, hiring and tenure can too often depend on embracing the new dogma.
In short, what we are witnessing is not just the perversion of progressive ideals but the fulfillment of a decades long ideological project: seeds sown by Stalin, nurtured by Soviet disinformation, weaponized by radical groups allied with the PLO, and now amplified by America’s leftwing political elite.
