When Israel was founded in 1948, the USSR was among the first to grant it full legal recognition. Stalin believed Israel’s socialist kibbutzim model signaled an affinity for communism that might one day make it an ally and help Moscow push Britain out of the Middle East.
But those hopes collapsed within two decades. Israel sided symbolically with the United States during the Korean War, joined Britain and France in the 1956 Suez campaign, and most humiliatingly for Moscow, defeated Soviet-armed Arab militaries in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Within the USSR, antisemitism was already systemic; Jews were distrusted as potential “Western agents.” By exporting that prejudice to the Arab world, the Soviets could weaponize hatred of Israel to rally allies and weaken the West.
The culmination came in 1975, when Moscow pushed UN Resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism” the ultimate goal was to “instill a Nazi-style hatred for Jews throughout the world and especially the Islamic world.”
The double-speak which became the hallmark of the PLO and its successors was taught to Yasser Arafat by the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who advised him to “talk peace in English but wage war in Arabic.”
Soviet defector Vasily Mitrokhin who was a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service and later demoted to KGB archivist revealed that Mahmoud Abbas appears in Soviet archives under the codename “Krotov" (mole).
While a student at Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, which promoted Holocaust-denial themes accusing Jews of colluding with Nazis. Mahmoud Abbas wrote his doctoral dissertation, "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism"—a lampoon of blatant lies, including Holocaust denial and accusations that Zionists "assisted" Hitler—was completed in May 1982 and released as a book two years later.
In 1982 Abbas returned to Lebanon and used the PLO archive to spread Soviet propaganda prepared by the KGB and the Stasi, which accused "Western Imperialism and Zionism" of cooperating with the Nazis.
This was done as part of a widespread propaganda campaign run by the KGB at the time, which attempted to create a link between anti-Soviet elements and the Nazis by flooding the Middle East with Arabic translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, films portraying Jews as Nazis, and thousands of “agents of influence” spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories—the ultimate symbol of evil.
Israel was now recast as a racist oppressor. Soviet propagandists produced books such as Zionism and Apartheid, along with posters equating the Star of David with a swastika. This propaganda material was later seized in an Israeli Military Intelligence raid of the PLO archive in Beirut, and it constitutes, at the very least, additional circumstantial evidence attesting to the links between Fatah and Abbas and the Soviet intelligence services.
The Soviet Union may have collapsed, but its disinformation ecosystem survives, and now with a new sponsor. Today, Qatar funds the same ideology through Western universities, media outlets, and “human-rights” NGOs.
According to a 2024 Middle East Forum report, Qatar channels roughly $235 million per year into U.S. universities, hosts U.S. campuses in Doha, and has expanded its media reach beyond its state-sponsored Al Jazeera network, now hosting a state-of-the-art CNN bureau.
The use of the KGB methodology, outlaid in the Active Measures campaign of the 1960's. is used by the Qataris today: fund the institutions that shape minds, flood them with anti-Israel narratives, and let sympathetic academics and activists carry the message forward.
The slogans heard in anti-Israel demonstrations throughout the world first scripted in Moscow: “From the river to the sea,” “Israel is apartheid,” “Free Palestine,” turn a regional conflict into a global morality play where Jews are always cast as villains.
As seen today throughout the world Operation SIG succeeded beyond the Kremlin’s expectations as it reframed the lone Jewish state of Israel’s existence as that of a country of "Outsiders /Colonists" discrediting the indigenous reality of Jews from Judaea. It recast hatred of the Jews found in crass antisemitism as “anti-Zionism,” and taught the world to see a democracy fighting for survival as a pariah state.
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