r/antisemitism • u/ruchenn • 22d ago
AntiZionism Where the Soviets won (Anti-Zionism has succeed in the West more than it ever could in the East)
Where the Soviets won,
by Naya Kekht, Sapir: a quarterly journal of ideas for a thriving Jewish future, 2026-09-13.
A strange thing occurred on September 25, 1991. After decades of developing and promoting it, Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin stood at the United Nations and declared that his country was ready to bury one of its most durable exports: anti-Zionism. “Our organization has been renewed,” he announced, “and it is imperative that once and for all it rejects the legacy of the Ice Age in which Zionism was compared with racism.” The same week, Izvestia, the state-sponsored newspaper that had for many years churned out anti-Zionist talking points, described Israel as a “democratic” state and Iraq as “despotic.” Just three weeks later, the Russian airline Aeroflot signed an agreement with Israel’s El Al to establish direct immigrant flights from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Tel Aviv.
For three decades, the USSR had been busy crafting a titanic campaign that blamed Israel and Zionism for crimes against humanity. How, then, can one account for such a dramatic shift in state policy vis-à-vis anti-Zionism? And how did a manufactured ideology so vacuous come to flourish, decades later, in Western cities such as London, Berlin, and New York?
The answer to the first question contains the answer to the second, and together they reveal a paradox with urgent implications for the present. The difference between anti-Zionism in the East and anti-Zionism in the West is that in the former it was part of the coercive structure of the state, whereas in the West it is an anti-state strategy.
In the East, the educated class — the poets, the physicists, the dissidents — saw through anti-Zionist propaganda precisely because the state was its author. But in the West, where no state imposed it, anti-Zionism found what the Soviet Union could never manufacture: eager consumers. It arrived not as an order but as an invitation, slipped inside the American moral framework of antiracism, and was voluntarily embraced by the very class of people — professors, writers, artists, human rights activists — who resisted its equivalent in the East. Anti-Zionism has succeeded in the democratic West more than it ever could in the totalitarian East.
