I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when my older cousin Jill came to Hebrew school carrying a sign that read, “Zionism Is Not Racism.” Busy with my guitar and girls, I had little idea what my more politically astute cousin was so passionate about.

As it turns out, she was decades ahead of the curve.

The slogan she carried was not a response to some passing controversy. It was a response to one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the twentieth century.

That resolution was the culmination of a decades-long Soviet campaign to redefine the terms of international political discourse—to take the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and rebrand it, systematically, as an ideology of oppression. Understanding that campaign, and where its vocabulary went after the Soviet Union collapsed, seems to me one of the more important and neglected questions in contemporary political analysis.

The Soviet Union was not always Israel’s enemy. In 1948, Moscow was among the first governments to recognize the new Jewish state. Soviet leaders initially saw potential in Israel’s labor movement, its kibbutz socialism, and its capacity to weaken British influence across the Middle East. Israeli founders like David Ben-Gurion were careful not to burn the relationship early.

History, as it usually does, had other ideas.

Military rivalry alone, however, cannot explain what came next.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Soviet Union launched a political campaign of remarkable ambition and sophistication. Its goal was not merely to arm Israel’s enemies or to block Israeli interests in international forums. It was to transform how the world understood Zionism itself—to detach the word from its actual history as a movement for Jewish self-determination and reattach it to a cluster of concepts already condemned by postcolonial and leftist political thought.

The campaign ran through multiple channels simultaneously: Soviet state media, the Communist parties Moscow supported across Europe, Africa, and Latin America, sympathetic academics and intellectuals, and eventually the United Nations itself, where the Soviet bloc, Arab states, and much of the Non-Aligned Movement—a coalition of newly independent nations that sought to remain outside both Cold War power blocs—often voted together on Middle East issues.

The vocabulary it produced was carefully chosen. Much of it has become strangely familiar: colonialism. Imperialism. Racism. Apartheid. These were not random accusations. They were the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)