Israel’s 1967 victory triggered Soviet anti-Zionist demonization of the classical anti-Semitic type

Evidence

Until the Israeli victory of 1967, however, the problem of Zionism in the U.S.S.R. was manageable, and individual suppression sufficed. The Israeli victory in the Six-Day War generated enormous enthusiasm among Soviet Jews and a certain amount of sympathy even among Soviet non-Jews; for the first time, Zionism was seen as a serious problem, comparable with other nationalist move­ ments which had plagued the colonial administrators of Tsarist Russia and their Soviet successors. The results were immediately visible in a vehement campaign of abuse, particularly in the attempt to equate the Israelis with the Nazis as aggressors, invaders, occupiers, racists, oppressors and murderers. Some of the literature produced at the time in the Soviet Union and its satellites was anti- Semitic and not merely anti-Zionist, sometimes even resorting to such classical themes as the world Jewish conspiracy and the use of Gentile blood for religious purposes. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1370

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Islam-West representation cluster: a concrete case where an external event (1967 war) caused a demonological propaganda machinery to activate against a target group — a mechanism parallel to how Western audiences’ image of Islam shifts with political events. — connects to: Soviet antisemitic campaigns revived the charge that fascism equals communism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 429
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how much of the post-1967 Soviet anti-Zionist demonology template later circulated into anti-Islamic representation in the same sphere — the transfer of a ready-made demonological vocabulary between targets.