"Soviet policy threatens the Jewish group with extinction"
An Israeli active measures campaign pushes the Soviets = Nazis line.
Yasha Levine
Mar 10
So I've been digging into the Israeli covert influence op that back in the
1960s and 70s seeded the myth of a coming Soviet genocide against the Jews.
A few nights ago an old propaganda pamphlet that I bought that was part of
this campaign finally arrived in the mail.
I got ahold of this piece of influence op history from Bolerium Books in San
Francisco. Apparently it once belonged to William Marx Mandel, an old
leftwing author and radio broadcaster from Berkeley who was investigated by
Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. I had never
heard of him until I got this pamphlet - which has his name stamped on it.
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The pamphlet is from 1967. It was published by the Conference on the Status
of Soviet Jews, a group set up by Moshe Decter, an American working as a
secret agent for Israel.
These days, Moshe is all but forgotten by history. But starting in 1960, he
worked as a covert employee of Nativ, the intelligence agency set up by
Israel to find ways to bring Soviet Jews to Israel. He was paid $25,000 a
year - which in today's dollars is closer to $220,000 according a handy
inflation calculator. Not a small sum for a one-man shop. Nativ didn't pay
him directly, as that would have forced him to register as a lobbyist. So it
conspired to have the World Jewish Congress funnel the money to the American
Jewish Congress that then paid Moshe and gave him office space in its New
York headquarters - out of which he ran his front group: Jewish Minority
Research.
Moshe was once a leftwing anti-communist in New York and hung around
Commentary, the once-upon-a-time-leftwing Jewish magazine that then became
the nucleus of America's neoconservative movement. And true to form, Moshe's
relations are spread around the neocon world: Midge Decter, the hardcore
anti-feminist, was his wife. She divorced him to marry neocon brain bug
Norman Podhoretz. Meanwhile, Moshe's daughter Rachel married Elliott Abrams
- who Trump had brought back from the grave to be his point man on
Venezuela.
Moshe's job for Nativ was to take information given to him by Israeli
intelligence about how badly the Soviet Union was treating its Jews, inflate
the data dump, and then inject these concerns into American-Jewish
communities. The point of his efforts was to convince Americans that the
USSR had unleashed a brutal campaign against its Jewish population and that
three million people were just one step away from total extermination. He
was incredibly successful, and even managed to rope in people like Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert Penn Warren and Walter Reuther, the head of the
United Automobile Workers.
Why was Israel financing this covert illegal influence campaign on American
soil? It wanted to use the American government to pressure the Soviet Union
to let its Jews immigrate to Israel - part of Israel's plan to pad its
population against the superior demographics of the Palestinians. (You can
read more about that op here and here.)
This pamphlet is just one of the many artifacts left over from that time.
And as you can see from its black on crimson swastika cover design, Moshe
didn't shy away from making the Nazi = Soviet connection very explicitly.
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The pamphlet came out right after the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic
relations with Israel - after the Six-Day War.
The notion that Moshe was trying to push with it was that the Soviet Union's
turn against Israel over the war was nothing but cover for a larger and
deeper antisemitic campaign - a campaign of discrimination and repression
and hate against Jews that was on the verge of boiling into something bloody
and deadly, threatening "the Jewish group with extinction." And so he was
reprinting a bunch of virulent antisemitic Soviet newspaper political
cartoons as proof of just how dangerous and bad things were getting over
there.
As Moshe wrote in the intro:
"The Soviet cartoons that follow speak for themselves. They appear as
stringent critiques of Israel in the Middle East crisis. But in the Soviet
context they are unmistakably calculated to revive, bolster and perpetuate
anti-Semitic prejudice in a country where it is pervasive, endemic, and
persistent. . The cartoons bring Soviet propaganda almost to the end of the
line. Virtually nothing has been left to the Soviet public's imagination -
nor of ours as we contemplate the fate of three million Jews, silent and
isolated."
To the end of the line? Nothing left to the imagination? Moshe's being as
explicit as possible without actually writing the word "genocide."
Seems scary! But was it true?
I asked my parents and Evgenia asked her mom about their recollections from
that time. They were all in their mid-teens in 1967, living in three
different cities - Moscow, Leningrad, and Kingisepp.
Did they remember a huge and violent antisemitic campaign that year? Nope,
they didn't recall anything like that happening at all.
"Maximum, the kind of antisemitism that I experienced as a kid, as a
teenager in Kingisepp, was when I'd be hanging out with my friends in some
park and some local alcoholics would point at me and say, 'See. There's a
Jew.' I don't remember exactly what they said to me, but they underlined
this fact and spoke it out loud. Maybe there was something written in the
newspapers, I don't remember.But an increase in antisemitism? I was in tenth
grade. No, there was no antisemitism at the time that I can remember. No one
told me, you're a lousy kike go to Israel."
As my dad pointed out, he experienced "official" antisemitism only later in
life and it was never overt or explicit but structural in nature: hidden
quotas on Jewish students in universities, some limits on the kinds of jobs
you could hold and the kind of travel you could do because you were
considered a flight risk, and a total lack of access to Jewish and Yiddish
cultural life, at least if you lived outside of the comic Birobidzhan Jewish
Autonomous Oblast that Stalin put way out east on the border with China as a
kind of epic troll of the Jews.
So if there was a wild antisemitic campaign embroiling the entire Soviet
society in 1967, it totally passed our families by. But maybe they were
lucky?
I picked up the pamphlet, thinking maybe it would show that they were indeed
the exception - that they somehow were able to escape the torrent of hate
directed at Jews. Here was going to be a collection of some really vile and
horrific antisemitic images pushed on Soviet society through the press!
But now that it's in my hands and I'm flipping through it.I realize I was
set up for a big letdown.
Sure the cartoons are anti-Israel, which would make sense in the wake of the
Soviet Union cutting its ties with Israel following the Six-Day War. But if
there is a general theme that unites these cartoons beyond just being
against the Israeli government, it's that they're broadly anti-American (and
anti-British): Israel is portrayed not as some unclean, nefarious global
Jewish conspiracy - the standard antisemitic tropes you'd get with Nazi or
even Ukrainian fascist propaganda about "the Jews" - but as a puppet of
American imperial and corporate interests.
What's interesting is that William Mandel, the broadcaster who originally
owned this pamphlet, seemed to be just as surprised as I was by this lack of
antisemitism in a publication whose whole point was to show the existence of
a virulent antisemitic campaign. You can see him constantly scribbling in
the margins: "not A.S." and "non-ethnic." You can also seem him nothing that
Israelis weren't the only
You can make up your own mind. I guess these are the best examples of
"official" Soviet antisemitism that Israel's Nativ agents in the USSR could
collect and forward on to their man Moshe in New York for broader
distribution: