Whipping up the Soviet Jewish genocide myth
“One wonders whether genocide of the spirit is more or less grave than destruction of the body.”
I’m gonna be switching away from Israel’s America-centered propaganda campaign to explore other dimensions of this story. But before I do that, I’d like give two more examples of the kind of stuff that was published in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to whip up the notion that the commies were about to carry out a genocide against the Jews — just so you get a better sense of the mood that was being built up with Israeli backing.
I just got these books in the mail. One of the authors, Gunther Lawrence, is a public relations and Broadway entertainment guy who produced the book with the help of Moshe Decter, a Nativ agent working out of New York. The other, Arie Eliav, is an Israeli political operator who worked for Nativ in Moscow and for a time headed up the secret agency tasked with transferring Soviet Jews to Israel.
As these two books help to further demonstrate, Israel’s fingerprints were all over the “Save the Soviet Jews from genocide” campaign. You can see various people, including Elie Wiesel, parachuting into the Soviet Union and all coming out with books that push the same basic bullshit narrative — a narrative that then would be repeated over and over by grassroots Jewish activists all across America: there is a sort of genocide going on and we must do something or our Soviet Jewish brothers and sisters might end up in a mass grave.
It’s safe to say that the issue — and the disinformation narrative that underpinned it — wouldn’t have built up such a big momentum without Israel providing the first sustained propaganda push. It was all cutting edge back then but makes for some rather dull and repetitive reading today.
—Yasha Levine
“More than three million Jews live in the Soviet Union today. Most are European; some Oriental. … All are protagonists of one of the great ongoing tragedies of our time — the attempt to strangulate Russian Jewry.”
“…three million Jews in the Soviet Union are being systematically extinguished. One wonders whether genocide of the spirit is more or less grave than destruction of the body.”
Want to know more? Check out the rest of my series the Soviet Jewish migration to Israel.
Part Two: Soviet Jews and a Zionist Population Transfer Dream Deferred
Part Three: Zionists, Palestinian kidnappers, and the forced migration of Soviet Jews to Israel.
Part Four coming soon…