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Winston S Churchill referred to this in 1920 in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, as a ‘struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’[429]. In writing of Chaim Weizmann, who became first President to Israel, Laurence Krane states of this:

…Some Jews felt that the savior of the Jews would come through political reform such as communism or socialism. Others argued that assimilation would answer the problem of anti-Semitism and ease the economic hardships of the Jew. Still others maintained that immigration to Palestine, as Israel was called then, and by building up settlements in the Land would save the Jews from economic privation and exploitation[430].

As in Czarist Russia, in the Soviet bloc from the time of Stalin, Jews via Zionism were again seen as subversives aligned with Israel and the capitalist powers. The USSR henceforth became a centre of resistance to Zionism, which was described with Marxist rhetoric as an agent of imperialism. Much effort was expended in exposing the character of Zionism not simply as the doctrine of the Israeli State, but as having worldwide ramifications.

One representative example is entitled Zionism: Instrument of Imperialist Reaction, published in 1970[431]. The book is a collection of letters of protest against Zionism and Israel written to the Soviet press, mainly by Soviet Jews, and a selection of articles by various writers that had been published in the Soviet press. For example, Prof. Braginsky’s article ‘The Class Essence of Zionism’, originally published in Pravda,[432] drew on Marxist and Leninist thinking in regard to Jewish autonomy, stating that Jewish assimilation is the ‘historically progressive process’, alluding to Marx’s position on the issue, and quoting Lenin.[433]

In late 1951 Rudolf Slansky, Secretary General of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was arrested for ‘anti-state activities’. A year later he and thirteen co-defendants went on trial as ‘Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist traitors’. It is interesting that Trotskyite and Zionist were used in conjunction. They were accused of espionage and economic sabotage, working on behalf of Yugoslavia, Israel and the West. Eleven of the fourteen were sentenced to death, the other three to life imprisonment. Slansk, et al were hanged on 3 December, 1952. Of the fourteen defendants, eleven were Jews, and were identified as such in the indictment. Many other Jews were mentioned as co-conspirators. They were implicated in a cabal that included US Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, an influential Zionist politico, described as a ‘Jewish nationalist’ in the Czechoslovak indictment, and Mosha Pijade the ‘Titoist Jewish ideologist’ in Tito’s Yugoslavia, that had broken with the Soviet bloc.

The 1952 Prague Trials of Slansky et al, accused of working for Israel, World Zionism and the USA against the State, and other moves against Zionism, were not lost on the radical Right in Europe and the USA. A faction of the Right saw the Soviet bloc as preferable to American global hegemony, and the USA as the harbinger of cultural decay. In the latter respect especially, they were very much in accord with the official Soviet attitude towards ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. Many German war veterans who had fought the USSR had no intention of doing so again for US interests, and Major-General Otto E Remer’s Socialist Reich Party was a particular concern for the post-war Occupation Authorities for its advocacy of a ‘neutralist’ line during the Cold War. In the USA the bi-weekly anti-communist newspaper, Common Sense, adopted a vigorously pro-Soviet line, their primary columnist, Fred Farrel, a widely experienced and travelled veteran reporter, stated the newspaper’s consistent line for several decades until its demise in the 1970s that, ‘the best anti-Communists I have ever known were the Stalinists. They fought Communism with a cold deadly, remorseless, realistic efficiency’.[434]

The Prague scenario was repeated in 1968 in Czechoslovakia and in Poland. Paul Landvai writes of the ‘Zionist plot’ against Poland where the State accused Zionists of ‘an open attack on the political system and its leaders’ in the form of intellectual dissent and student demonstrations, which had been prompted by the State suppression of a student theatrical production. This State action was undertaken in the name of anti-Zionism, and factory and political meetings organised by the Communist party were held under the slogan ‘Purge the Party of Zionists’[435]. Landvai states that since 1966, there had been a ‘Jewish department’ in the Ministry of Interior, led by Colonel Walichnowski, ‘author of the anti-Zionist best-seller, Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany’.[436]

The 1967 Israeli Six Day War had instigated a new Soviet anti-Zionist campaign. In reaction dissident elements had begun to criticise the anti-Israel policy of the regime. The Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress of 26-29 June 1967, addressed itself to the Party leadership. The Congress’ pro-Israel position was aligned with demands for liberalisation[437]. During the May Day demonstration of 1967 students carried Israeli flags and placards demanding ‘Let Israel Live’. The philosophical faculty at Prague’s Charles University issued a petition demanding the resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel.[438]

The opening shots fired by Stalin at World Zionism only intensified after his death.

In 1969, just a year after the attempted weakening of the Soviet bloc through Czechoslovakia, The Publishing House for Political Literature in the USSR, published a particularly cogent book entitled Caution, Zionism! by Yuri Ivanov,[439] the chief Soviet expert on Israel. It is was wide-ranging book not only on Zionism but also on Jewish history since ancient times, and is therefore something far more than simply ‘anti-Zionist’. At the time of its distribution it caused Zionist objections throughout the world.

Pionerskaya Pravda, the newspaper of the 10,000,000 member Young Pioneers, carried an article in 1981 that stated, ‘the major portion of American newspapers and television and radio companies are in Zionist hands’. The article stated, ‘Jewish bankers and billionaires’ were behind the Jewish Defense League, ‘which terrorizes Soviet diplomats and other Soviet officials in the United States’. Pionerskaya claimed that ‘most of the biggest monopolies for the production of weapons are controlled by Jewish bankers. Business and blood bring them enormous profits’[440]. The themes were very similar to those expressed by Ivanov in the widely distributed Caution, Zionism! There were many other such publications on Zionism published by the Soviet bloc and translated into various languages. These included: In the Name of the Father and the Son where the author states that ‘American imperialism’[441] serves Zionism rather than the usual Soviet contention that Zionism serves American imperialism. Creeping Counter-Revolution, which states that ‘anti-Semitism is an elemental response of the enslaved strata of the working populace to their barbaric exploitation by the Jewish bourgeoisie’.[442] Invasion Without Arms, stating that the ‘chief strategic aim of Zion’ is to maintain Jews as the ‘ruling caste of capitalist society’. In words reminiscent of Stalin’s campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitism’, the author states that Zionists attempt to destroy ‘national cultures’ by promoting ‘alien’ and ‘cosmopolitan ideas’.[443] In Class Essence of Zionism it is alleged that the creation of Israel gave rise to ‘dual loyalty’ among Jews towards the states in which they lived, and that they act as a subversive ‘fifth column’. Zionist bankers and industrialists control the world through economic and political subterfuge, with the exception of the Soviet bloc, against which the Zionists were marshalling.[444]