In April, I wrote an article about the Soviet effort to equate Zionism with Nazism to 1971. I can now take that documentary trail back another six years. In 1965, the Soviet Union tried to insert Zionism into a UN racial-discrimination provision alongside antisemitism, Nazism and neo-Nazism.
And that wasn’t the biggest thing I found
In 1965, the United Nations was drafting the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Brazil and the United States proposed language specifically condemning antisemitism. The Soviet Union responded with an amendment that would have placed antisemitism, Zionism, Nazism and neo-Nazism together with the “policy and ideology of colonialism, national and race hatred and exclusiveness.” Bolivia proposed removing “Zionism” from the Soviet amendment, and Moscow’s language ultimately failed.
The date is important. This was 1965, two years before the Six-Day War and before Israel controlled the West Bank or Gaza. Moscow was already working to move Zionism into an international political framework built around racism, colonialism and racial hatred. A decade later, the United Nations would declare Zionism a form of racism, but the attempt to establish that association had begun much earlier.
What happened during those ten years reaches far beyond UN speeches. Soviet intelligence files, East German Stasi reports, and other Eastern-bloc records document relationships with Palestinian organizations that included covert operations, weapons, intelligence contacts, and military training. The public campaign and the clandestine relationships were developing simultaneously.
On Aug. 21, 1969, Denis Michael William Rohan, a 28-year-old Australian, set fire to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The fire ignited outrage across the Muslim world, and seven days later KGB chairman Yuri Andropov sent Top Secret memorandum No. 2169-A to the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Andropov described the incident as the arson of Al-Aqsa “by the Israelis” and relayed a proposal from the KGB station in India to organize as many as 20,000 Muslims outside the United States Embassy. The demonstration was expected to cost 5,000 Indian rupees, paid from Communist Party funds allocated for Soviet “special measures” in India.
The operation reveals how Moscow could use the Middle East inside its wider confrontation with the United States. An incident in Jerusalem could generate a Soviet-supported demonstration in India aimed at Washington, with the KGB working invisibly behind the crowd. The Palestine issue was becoming more than a regional conflict for Moscow; it offered an emotional and political instrument capable of mobilizing audiences far beyond the Middle East.
Soviet political language surrounding the Palestinians was changing during the same period. Palestinian claims increasingly appeared in the language of national rights, anti-imperialism and national liberation, while Israel and Zionism were associated with imperialism, colonialism and racism. This vocabulary fit the politics of the period extraordinarily well because European empires were collapsing across Asia and Africa, and newly independent countries were entering the United Nations, carrying recent memories of colonial rule and national liberation struggles.
Moscow had spent years presenting the Soviet Union as an ally of those movements and the United States and its allies as defenders of Western imperial power. The Arab-Israeli conflict could be placed inside that same framework, with Palestinians incorporated into the national-liberation world, Zionism presented as colonialism and Israel associated with Western power. None of this language had to remain confined to communist countries. Colonialism, racial oppression, foreign domination and national liberation were already among the most powerful political concepts circulating across Africa, Asia and the developing world.
While that framework spread through international politics, Soviet intelligence was developing much more tangible relationships with Palestinian organizations.
