PSCRP-BESA Reports No 15 (November 6, 2023)
Four weeks have already passed since the barbaric attack by the Hamas terrorist organization on communities in southern Israel, which claimed numerous lives. The resulting IDF’sย Swords of Iron Military Operation has caused, as usual, an outburst of anti-Semitism around the world. However, unlike previous military confrontations with terrorists, this time the world’s anti-Semitic reaction to Israel’s actions was not only much stronger but also affected countries and regions that usually refrain from displaying violent anti-Israeli rhetoric and positions. One of such regions, which massively joined the anti-Semitic frenzy, turned out to be the post-Soviet space, where, mainly on the part of the Russian Federation, seemingly long-forgotten themes in relation to Israel and the Jewish question in general began to be heard.
It cannot be said that the countries of the former Soviet Union were completely devoid of anti-Semitism. Until 1991, the Soviet Union was invariably among the world leaders in this field. Moreover, anti-Semitism, and mainly anti-Israelism, became one of the foundations of the Soviet ideological export, the peak of success of which was the adoption of the infamous UN resolution 3379 of November 10, 1975, which declared Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, a form of racism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the situation, while changing for the better, was still unacceptable, both in terms of anti-Semitic rhetoric and the volume of anti-Semitic vandalism and violent incidents. It was not until the beginning of the new millennium that the situation began to improve. In contrast to the situation in the West, in the former Soviet Union, with the exception of isolated localized outbursts of anti-Semitic rhetoric, such as the MAUP affair in Ukraine in the mid-2000s or in Kyrgyzstan around the 2010 revolution, anti-Semitism declined. The situation with violent manifestations was even better, and they have almost completely subsided. As for manifestations of anti-Israelism, one could say with complete certainty that the phenomenon had almost completely disappeared. Public anti-Semitism, including its anti-Israeli offshoots, became almost entirely the domain of social and political fringe groups, graphomaniacs and people with mental disabilities.
However, starting from the second decade of the 21st century, the trend that had been declining sharply changed its vector. Political upheavals that affected the post-Soviet space: Public protests in Russia in 2012; the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent Russian occupation of Crimea and the eastern regions of the country, as well as political, social and economic instability in the country; the election campaign in Belarus in the summer of 2020 and the unprecedented mass public protests that followed; the Armenian-Azerbaijani (second Karabakh) war in the fall of 2020; and, finally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, have all led to the fact that, after three decades of marginalization, anti-Semitism has once again become a prominent factor in the post-Soviet space. It is clear that at this stage we are not talking about the so-called “state anti-Semitism” that was the basis of the Soviet approach to the “Jewish question”. It is clear that everyday anti-Semitism, which accumulates all negative perceptions of the Jew, has not disappeared: the most prominent manifestation was, and unfortunately still is, the Christmas Nativity scenes (Vertepy) in Ukraine, which year after year present a caricatural image of a cunning and devious, money-hungry “Zhyd”.
However, over the past decade, not only marginalized people, but also quite mainstream and even official figures have been involved in anti-Semitic incidents. The most well-known of such manifestations of anti-Semitism were, for example, the undisguised anti-Semitic innuendos of Russian official media and politicians about the origins of representatives of the so-called liberal opposition, coupled with hints at Jewish control over the world. On January 23, 2017, Pyotr Tolstoy, deputy speaker of the Russian State Duma, blamed Jewish liberals for the 1917 revolution and for opposing attempts to transfer St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg to the Russian Orthodox Church. And on November 13, 2016, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova talked about Jewish control of the U.S. presidential election on federal television, accompanying it with an unsubtle and utterly un-diplomatic apery that can certainly be considered anti-Semitic. In Ukraine, after an almost complete absence of anti-Semitic manifestations after the 2014 Maidan, in 2016-2019, crude anti-Semitic incitement against political opponents began again, becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon in the local political arena. In early 2019, after former Putin advisor Sergei Glazyev voiced the myth of an impending Jewish takeover of Ukraine’s lands in the Russian anti-Semitic newspaper Zavtra, this theme was not only picked up by the Ukrainian political elite, but also became a significant propaganda weapon against the newly elected Jewish president, Vladimir Zelensky.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, and especially after it, the Belarusian pro-government propagandists allowed themselves an absolutely explicit, extremely anti-Semitic rhetoric against not only the political opponents of the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko, but against the entire mass protest movement that shook the country. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, brought not only numerous victims, but also raised to the surface an unconcealed anti-Semitic discourse that has almost completely returned to the “good old Soviet times”: even the axiom “a Jew is identical to a Nazi” was brought out of oblivion.
The period described above also saw the resurgence of such a seemingly completely disappeared phenomenon as anti-Israeli rhetoric on the part of factors associated with the authorities. As a result of the Syrian air defence systems hitting the Russian IL-20 airplane, which resulted in the crash of the aircraft and the death of all 15 crew, the Russian official media simply “exploded” with the volume of anti-Israeli statements, often bordering on blatant anti-Semitism. Statements by Russian politicians, such as Defence Minister General Sergei Shoigu, only added fuel to the fire. Only after a week, did the anti-Israeli rhetoric uttered by Russian officials for the first time in nearly three decades, subside. During the Armenian-Azerbaijani armed conflict in the fall of 2020, the Armenian side not only unleashed anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic statements that resulted in several acts of vandalism and threats to the security of the country’s small Jewish community. Since then, and especially during 2022-2023, local society has not only been permeated with anti-Semitic perceptions, but has often engaged in the dissemination of anti-Israel stereotypes, the source of which has been the Tehran regime. This surge of anti-Semitism peaked around the latest round of armed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19-20, 2023, and included anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli rhetoric, profanation of Holocaust commemoration by the top political leadership of both Armenia and the so called “Artsakh Republic” enclave, and even vandalism of a synagogue in Yerevan on October 3.
It should be noted that over the past 10 years, the main manifestation of anti-Semitism in the post-Soviet space has been anti-Semitic rhetoric, expressed mainly in anti-Semitic political propaganda and anti-Semitic discourse. The volume of anti-Semitic violent crime was insignificant, with the exception of anti-Semitic vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, Holocaust memorials, and facilities related to Jewish communal activities.
Thus, the sharp upsurge in anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism following the launch of Operationย Swords Iron , which almost entirely echoed the unparalleled Soviet anti-Semitic style, was unsurprising, culminating a decade of “moral preparation” of the society. Despite a dramatic increase in the volume of incidents reported or detected by Israel’s monitoring structures (Nativ and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs), the number of violent manifestations during the first three weeks of fighting seemed to be negligible. With the exception of an act of vandalism against a synagogue in the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev (which cannot be directly linked to the events in the Middle East), a few attempts to desecrate the Israeli flag in Moscow and Tbilisi, and calls for the expulsion of Jews from the Russian North Caucasus and Kyrgyzstan, anti-Semitic manifestations have been limited exclusively to anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli rhetoric. It can be assumed that verbal attacks on those who could be identified as Jewish may have taken place, but the author has no public confirmation of this.
However, at the end of October the situation changed dramatically in the Muslim regions of the former USSR. Thus, on October 29, it became known about an attack on Chabad envoys in Tashkent. Most likely, it was a localized incident, which cannot be called systemic in any way. At the same time, the events that shook the Russian North Caucasus: Kabardino-Balkaria and, mainly, Dagestan, reminded not only of Soviet anti-Semitic rhetoric, but brought back the times of anti-Jewish pogroms initiated by the authorities of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The attempted torching of the Flamingo Hotel in Khasavyurt, the arson attack on a Jewish cultural center under construction in Nalchik, and the mass assault on a plane carrying Israelis in Makhachkala cannot help but raise questions about both the role of Russian security agencies in preventing the actual pogrom and the Russian authorities’ attempts to combat anti-Semitic appeals in general. Statements by Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, do not provide an unambiguous answer to this question.
In the four weeks since the beginning of the war, the patterns of anti-Semitic propaganda disseminated in the post-Soviet space fully coincide with those of the past few years: the main centers of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli rhetoric are Russia, Belarus, which is following in its footsteps, and, with certain reservations, Armenia. At the same time, while Russia is engaged not only in the dissemination but also in the accumulation of anti-Semitic ideas, Belarus basically repeats the anti-Semitic motifs of Russian propaganda, although it sometimes improves them by adding more rhetoric of hatred towards Jews and the Jewish state, often repeating the propaganda of Hamas and Iran. And while in Russia this is mostly done by third-tier media and propagandists, in Belarus we are talking about the “first pro-regime press pool”: persons such as Grigory Azarenok, Andrei Mukovozchik, Ksenia Lebedeva and the “Yellow Plums” Telegram channel linked to the pro-governmental structures, who have already flashed their anti-Semitic rhetoric.
In addition, it should be noted that while the term “new anti-Semitism” can be used in relation to anti-Israeli manifestations in Western countries, the term “new” will sound absolutely incorrect in relation to the countries of the former Soviet Union, since this position is not only classic for the region since Soviet times, but as the American-Israeli researcher Izabella Tabarovsky proved, Western “new” anti-Semitism has been influenced by the old Soviet anti-Semitism disguised as “anti-Zionism”.
Thus, since the beginning of hostilities in the Middle East, the following anti-Semitic motifs and myths promoted by Russian and Belarusan propaganda can be pointed out.
Russia’s traitors who fled to Israel from the war in Ukraine will now also betray Israel that gave them shelter. The image of a Jewish liberal traitor in warring Israel, which has become one of the main motifs of Russian Z-propaganda since the beginning of 2022, was previously developed during the IDF’s Operation Breaking Dawn in Gaza in early August 2022. Thus, mocking and ridiculing the “opponents” of the war was not new. However, in light of the liberal relocants’ unconditional support for Israel, the style of propaganda has changed, emphasizing the liberals’ traitorous behaviour towards Russia, where they had made their prominence. On October 14, Abbas Djuma, a Russian journalist of Syrian origin who has become one of the mouthpieces of Hamas and Iran in the Russian media, published a post in his Telegram channel comparing the negative statements of Russian Jews regarding the war in Ukraine with their pro-Israel statements. Such a step can be called a direct incitement to anti-Semitism. Taking into account the background of the author, it is impossible to ignore the fact that behind this publication stands a third party, not located in Russia, interested in inciting interethnic hatred in the Russian Federation.
The “dual loyalty of Jews who are traitors of Russia” motif has developed into a demand to expel Jews from Russian media space. After the scandalous statement on October 17 by Jewish activist and one of the most vocal interpreters of pro-Kremlin propaganda Yevgeny Satanovsky, in which he spoke unkindly of some leading employees of the Russian Foreign Ministry, there were demands to deprive not only him but also other pro-Kremlin Jews of the right to “voice Zionist propaganda on the Russian airwaves”. Alexander Dugin, one of the main ideologists of the modern Russian regime, went further, openly pointing out the dual loyalty (or, rather, disloyalty) of Russian Jews in general: “This is very serious, because Jews, just as under the Bolsheviks, play a huge role in modern Russian politics. Some will choose Russia. Others will be forced to follow Satanovsky’s path. And how sincerely he called for bombing the West. But the Motherland is really very deep and important. There is nothing more important.”
The Jewish theme has become one of the main vectors of Russian propaganda in the armed conflict with Ukraine. Events in the Middle East upgraded this motif to a new level: in the first days of the war, Russian propaganda made fun of Ukraine, which would soon lose Western support in favor of Jews. The Jewishness of President Zelensky became, from the point of view of Russian propaganda, another proof of Jewish betrayal of Ukrainian interests. At the same time, in Israel and Western countries, the motif of Ukrainian corruption was being promoted, which led to a massive leak of Western arms supplied to Kiev to terrorist organizations, including Hamas. And this was done not only through well-known propagandist, albeit marginal resources, such as Tsargrad, but also from the mouths of quite respectable persons, such as one of the pillars of Russian propaganda, Israeli Yakov Kedmi, or even Russian President Putin himself.ย The purpose of such insinuations is clear: the information war should lead to a split and discord between Israel and Ukraine, and the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric and visualization should awaken in the Ukrainian side not only hatred of the Jewish State, but deepen the split in Ukrainian society around the image of a Jewish president.
However, the most promoted anti-Semitic motif associated with the war in the Middle East around the Ukrainian topic was the myth of “Heavenly Jerusalem” (aka “New Khazaria”): the mass flight of Jews from Israel to Ukraine, whose lands are being freed for this purpose from the native Slavic Orthodox population. “…The war between Palestine and Israel was instigated by the Mossad in order to move Israelis to Ukraine,” Belarusian propagandist Ksenia Lebedeva announced on October 11.ย On October 13, Ilya Kiva, a pro-Russian former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, who has been repeatedly exposed as an ardent anti-Semite, wrote in his Telegram channel: “Israel will lose to the Muslim world in this war and will perform its sacral resettlement!!!”.ย Later, on Russian TV he explained, “The Jews will make their sacral relocation to where the Tzadiks came and indicated 300โ500 years ago. And when they died, they left their graves as a fairway for their people to move to the fertile lands of western Ukraine. In fact, to the place where they always lived once upon a time.” Hundreds of similar posts flooded not only Russian- and Ukrainian-language social networks, but also quite respectable media. It is worth noting the fact that such an anti-Semitic myth of Russian propaganda was condemned back in early March 2022 by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who accused the Ukrainian side of spreading it in 2019.
Year after year, Russian propaganda made use of the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, presenting the USSR, and later Russia, as the main, and partly the only defender of the memory of the Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide; however, gradually leading to the abolition of the very fact of the “final solution of the Jewish question”, which, in the words of Maria Zakharova, “was the persecution and mass extermination by the Nazis of members of various ethnic and social groups”, i.e. had nothing to do exclusively with Jews. The war in the Middle East changed the vector of this propaganda theme: on the one hand, in the typical Soviet style, Israel’s actions began to be compared to Nazism, and on the other hand, voices calling for the complete abolition of the memory of the Holocaust began to be heard. Thus, Alexander Prokhanov openly speaks about the unnecessariness of the Jewish memory, which now has, in his words, no right to exist. “The Holocaust aroused great compassion for the Jews among other nations, making the Jews a nation of martyrs. Humanity is inclined to be compassionate. The entire world culture is imbued with compassion. This compassion surrounded the Jewish people with the holy wall of the Holocaust, impenetrable to evil. Now the State of Israel has broken down that wall, it has begun to destroy an entire people, and yesterday’s martyrs have become torturers. Israel is perpetrating a Palestinian holocaust. And now anyone who approaches the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem will be spattered with the blood of murdered Palestinians.”
Denying Israel the right to self-defense, like the Soviet Union did, the Russian side nevertheless does not take a similar stance towards Hamas terrorists, neutrally referring to its members as “Palestinian movement”. And while the official Russian representatives, despite their undisguised position, still refrain from expressing direct sympathy to the Palestinian terrorists, the official media of Belarus crossed even this line. Only a day after the bloody pogrom in southern Israel, Minskaja Praลฉda, the official organ of Minsk District (which published anti-Semitic content many times in the past) published a column by Igor Molotov, editor of the Russian news agency RT, in which the author openly called for Israel’s defeat, claiming that “the victory of Palestine is the victory of Moscow and Minsk“. Although later the column was conveniently deleted, all leading pro-governmental propagandists in Belarus were engaged in praising Molotov’s position on their private pages in social media (also later cleaned up). Thus, having expressed unconditional support to Hamas, Belarusian propagandists found themselves in the same boat with Russian neo-Nazis from the movement “Rusich”, who expressed regret that because of their “busyness” on the battlefield in Ukraine they could not join the victorious march of Hamas.
While Russian and Belarusian propaganda often used Soviet rhetoric to spread blatant anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli perceptions, Armenia continued to confine itself to the anti-Semitic terminology that has become widespread in the country over the past three years. Not yet recovered from the defeat in the conflict with Azerbaijan, Armenian social networks responded to the Hamas attack with joy, and began to massively disseminate visual propaganda of Palestinian terrorists. All this was accompanied by scathing remarks against Israel, which had “suffered a deserved punishment” because its “praised weapons” failed to protect it. At the same time, there were also not infrequent cases of not just expressing joy, but explicit calls to support Hamas, or even attempts to compare Israel and Azerbaijan with Nazi Germany. It got to the point that a political commentator known for his anti-Semitic positions, Vladimir Poghosyan, even started threatening Jews with reprisals. Armenian diasporas, mainly in the Middle East, also adopted an extremely anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic stance. Thus, the Lebanese Armenian daily Aztak accused Israel of crimes not only in Lebanon, but also against the entire Armenian people of Nagorno-Karabakh. And the Syrian Armenian battalion named after Nugzar Ozanyan openly called on Armenians to side with Hamas.
Special attention should be paid to visual propaganda, namely the dozens of caricatures that appeared not only in the Russian press, but also were massively disseminated on social networks. The underlying tone of the visual propaganda fully corresponded to the characteristics of the main motifs of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic propaganda. At the same time, some of the motifs were identical to the motifs of Soviet-era anti-Israeli propaganda, both in content and style, which also often had both anti-Semitic form and content[1]. An excellent example of the generational continuity of visual anti-Semitic propagandists can be seen in the crude anti-Semitic remarks of Alexander Umyarov, a member of the Union of Artists of Russia, who drew Soviet anti-Zionist cartoons back in the early 1980s.
Thus, we can summarize that the sharp upsurge of anti-Semitic rhetoric in the countries of the former Soviet Union, mainly in Russia, Belarus and Armenia, was not a surprise to those who have been tracking the rise of anti-Semitic sentiments over the past ten years. The war in the Middle East accelerated the emerging processes, some of which, in terms of content, simply threw the countries of the region more than three decades back, reviving the old from historical oblivion. Regarding Armenia, one can unambiguously say that there is some underlying resentment towards Israel (despite the fact that Azerbaijan has defence contracts with many countries, including Russia, which is still Armenia’s ally). Therefore, the anti-Semitic stylistics was not so diverse, though often crude. Belarus, which for the most part has no opinion of its own on the Jewish question (other than frozen Soviet perceptions), has for years now served simply as a reflection of anti-Semitic motifs dictated from Moscow. Russia, on the other hand, has not only proved not to be the main accumulator of anti-Semitic tendencies and trends throughout the region, but continues to use anti-Semitism to achieve political goals in both the Middle East and Ukraine, often mixing the characteristics of anti-Semitic motifs. The anti-Semitic unrest in Dagestan has shown that simple and non-committal rhetoric is already a phase that has passed, and if it proves necessary, then like anti-Zionism, violent anti-Semitism can also be returned to the scaffolding of a new reality at any moment.
[1] Zarkor: Russiya. Mivtza Haravot Barzel โ Giluyim Vizualiim shel Antishemiyut ve-Antiyistaeliyut. October 13, 2023. Nativ โ Prime Minister’s Officer.
Dr. Nati Cantorovich, is Director, Information and Research Department, Nativ โ Prime Minister’s Office (known as the Liaison Bureau), Jerusalem. His research focuses on Soviet and Post-Soviet Jewish History; Israeli-Soviet relations; Antisemitism, nationalism and racial intolerance in the Soviet Union and the successor states.
Illustration: IDF official logo of the operation