The anti-Zionist tract that the Soviet Union gave away to Arabs

In the middle of an anti-Israel article in Jordan's Ad Dostour the author Marwan Soudah writes:

 In the context of exposing Zionism with the pens of our foreign supporters, in 1969 in Moscow there appeared from the Novosti Soviet News Agency a book written by the martyr of thought and the word, Yuri Ivanov, entitled "Beware of Zionism!". .... I remember that these books were distributed in Amman for free and on a large scale to the pioneers of the Soviet Cultural Center, and personally I received my share of them from the hand of the Librarian of the Center, the late great friend Amin Afaneh, and the director of the center.

 In his realistic definition of Zionism, Ivanov says, “Modern Zionism is the ideology, a ramified system of organisations and the practical politics of the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie which has closely allied itself with monopoly circles in the USA and other imperialist countries. The main content of Zionism is bellicose chauvinism and anti-communism.”

 Citing facts, Ivanov goes on to state that the World Zionist Union seeks to enrich by all means, to guarantee within the framework of the imperialist system, power and parasitism, as well as intellectual and political domination...while recalling the integrated system of Herzl ideas that adopted the displacement of the Arabs. 

I knew that Soviet antisemitism and "anti-Zionism" was pushed to the Arab world, but I never saw an Arab describe exactly how.

Ivanov's book was one of the seminal works of official Soviet anti-Israel propaganda. The English translation is online. It clearly is meant to put a pseudo-academic gloss on the oldest hatred, yet its arguments are still being used by the anti-Israel Left today, even though they try mightily to tone down the anti-Jewish parts of the arguments.

For example, the Zionism is Racism argument started off here as Judaism is Racism:

What lies behind this protracted and deliberately confused uproar? Is it but another example of the open racism of the Zionists and the "fathers" of the Jewish religion?...Partly yes, but the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. The arch-reactionary nature of the Jewish faith has long been no secret—one has only to open the Bible for one's eyes to fall on numerous racist sentences. Even less of a secret is the racism of the Zionist leaders, for after all that was what they started from. 

Or this passage, again sounding like the far-Left do today, with the same thinly-veiled Jew-hate:

The Israeli authorities try to conceal brutalities, which are carried out with their sanction. Information on the crimes of the Israeli military has to get by a double barrier—Israeli military censorship and the censorship of international Zionism outside Israel. This must be borne in mind by anyone wishing to make a realistic estimate of the scale and degree of the brutal persecution of the Arabs by the Israeli militarists. Early in 1969, the Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdul Karim al Sheikli sent a letter to the United Nations Secretary General U Thant, informing him of one of the latest crimes of the Israeli racists, the burying alive of 14 Arab prisoners-of-war. 

That accusation was complete fiction.

The destruction of Arab villages, shooting on peaceful demonstrations of women and children, torture in interrogation, the widespread use of paid hirelings to organise the "elimination" of people refusing to serve the Zionist interests, and other equally heinous criminal acts, are on the conscience of those like Golda Meir, who is able to put to her listeners the rhetorical question: "Why when a house is destroyed do people start raising cries of barbarism?"!

Meir never said that.

In sowing fascist methods in Israel, carefully cultivating racism there, and oppressing hundreds of thousands of Arabs, international Zionism—a tool and agent of imperialism—often dons all kinds of garb to appeal to small peoples and national groups on the grounds of "common interests." Sometimes, as is the case in Africa, for example, ignorance of the true nature of Zionism enables it to carry out the most base acts of provocation, on orders from London and Washington. 

Remember, this was written in 1970. Anti-Israel literature before this was crude and more openly antisemitic, pushed mostly by Arabs and Christians. The Soviet anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda is still openly used and accepted as fact after generations of indoctrination - mostly in academia. 

It is really scary how successful it has been. 

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