Izabella Tabarovsky writes for Tabletmag July 30, 2024:
Herbert Aptheker, a senior member of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and influential scholar of Marxism, argued for framing the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms of “imperialism and colonialism versus national liberation and social progress,” as well as through the lens of racial oppression. Contrary to Israeli rulers’ claims, he declared, the greatest threat facing Israel came not from Arabs but from Israel’s own extremist right-wing government, which had turned Israel into the “handmaiden of imperialism and colonialist expansionism.” He equated Israel with Nazi Germany by referring to the recent Six-Day War as a blitzkrieg, a quintessentially Soviet propaganda term meant to evoke Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Today, said Aptheker, it was Jews who were “acting out the roles of occupiers and tormentors” of the oppressed. He called on the audience to work tirelessly to unmask “the horror of the June war and its aftermath.” So closely did Aptheker’s speech follow the anti-Israel logic and idiom of Soviet propaganda that it may well have been written for him in Moscow.
The two documents the conference unanimously adopted—the “Appeal to the Conscience of the World” (reportedly signed by 100 members of the Indian parliament) and a “Declaration”—conveyed similar messages with even more bombast. Evoking classic antisemitic tropes, they accused Israel of having cynically violated all “standards of human decency,” and declared that it had made “a mockery of all human moral values.” They dubbed Palestinian terrorism—aka “resistance”—as “righteous and justified.” In an attempt to make the Middle Eastern conflict more relatable, they equated it with the central cause animating the Western left at the time: the war in Vietnam. They called for all the people on the planet to resist “imperialist-Zionist propaganda” and expressed appreciation for the “progressive and peace-loving” Soviet Union and other socialist states and Non-Aligned countries that “supported the Arab cause.”
The message echoed throughout the global leftist universe. The CPUSA, which was almost wholly subsidized by the Soviet Union, published Aptheker’s speech and both statements in full in its theoretical journal Political Affairs. The African Communist, the Soviet-financed quarterly organ of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which was deeply intertwined with the African National Congress (ANC), ran a piece titled “Zionism and the Future of Israel,” closely reflecting the language of the New Delhi conference, complete with the word blitzkrieg. Its author, who claimed to be a South African living in Tel Aviv, accused Zionist “fanatical zealots” of exploiting the biblical concept of Jewish chosenness to fan the flames of Jewish supremacy (“chauvinism” in the language of the day), while equating Israel with apartheid South Africa.
What’s so interesting about this half-century-old Soviet propaganda is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7. Today’s left, too, speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state; equates it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; disparages Jews for having turned into oppressors; and proclaims Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist their colonial oppression by any means necessary.
