How Israeli agents in America helped seed the myth of Soviet Jewish genocide
Israel’s goal was to activate American Jews and use them to pressure the Soviet Union — all while staying in the background.
While working on the fourth installment of my series about the forced Soviet Jewish migration to Israel (you can read parts one, two, and three here), I got sidetracked and started digging once again into the origins of America’s movement to Save Soviet Jews that took off in a big way in the 1970s.
I knew that Israel was involved but I never appreciated just how involved they were. Looking at some of the evidence again a bit more closely, it’s clear that Israel’s role was a massive one. It got the whole movement started with a years-long covert disinformation and influence campaign meant to guilt trip American Jews and convince them that their Soviet brothers and sisters were on the verge of being wiped out by a second Holocaust — this time by the commies. Israel’s goal was to activate American Jews and use them to pressure the Soviet Union through America, which would allow Israel to leverage a much more powerful force for its own use — all while staying in the background and not confronting the Soviet Union directly, which Israel did not want to do.
Israel did back then what today’s paranoid disinfo hunters at the Atlantic Council would call “foreign meddling” and “active measures” — the sneaky dangerous tactics that we’re constantly being told are unique to “the Russians.”
Many American Jews got duped into believing that the Soviet Union was as bad for Jews as Nazi Germany. From a 1973 protest in Washington, D.C. (Source: National Museum of American Jewish History)
It was an incredibly successful op that took a kernel of truth about Jewish repression and discrimination in the Soviet Union and blew it way out of proportion and added all sorts of malicious exaggerations to achieve a specific political result. It weaponized Jewish-American journalists, academics, religious and community leaders, politicians, and authors as willing participants in the campaign. Even Ellie Wiesel was involved, producing a very successful propaganda book that guilt-tripped American Jews — all with the help of Israeli secret agents. And the op ensnared all sorts of unwitting big names, including Martin Luther King Jr.