The following article has been published in the Aus­trali­an Institute of Inter­na­tion­al Affairs by Alex Ryvchin.

Zionism has become perhaps the most maligned and distorted term in the ver­nacu­lar of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  The origins of modern anti-Zionist discourse needs to be explored and the asso­ci­ation to the Jewish national lib­er­a­tion movement with racism and Nazism needs to be ques­tioned.

The Arab-Israeli conflict traverses decades, manifests in regular wars, terrorism and endless political skir­mishes in inter­na­tion­al forums. It is also a battle to establish nar­rat­ives – victims and aggressors, Davids and Goliaths, oppress­ors and oppressed. Language and the meaning given to basic concepts form a key part of this battle. It is easy for Jewish people to establish a claim to the territory known as Judea and Samaria. The later for­mu­la­tion “West Bank,” coined by the Jord­ani­ans following their occu­pa­tion of the area in 1948 is a bland geo­graph­ic descriptor that strips the territory of its his­tor­ic­al sig­ni­fic­ance. The Asso­ci­ated Press recently stumbled into the morass of political language when it declined to identify the men who tortured and killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 as Palestini­an ter­ror­ists, instead calling them “guerillas” and “gunmen.” There is also no term in the ver­nacu­lar of the conflict that is mis­ap­plied and distorted more than “Zionism.”

Zionism, correctly under­stood, refers simply to the return of Jewish people to “Zion,” one of several names given to Jerusalem and the sur­round­ing lands in which the Jews lived and governed in ancient times. In the late 19^th century, the idea of returning to those lands shifted from a seemingly intan­gible ideal and wistful age-old expres­sion of yearning for freedom, to a precise, secular, political movement.

The aim of Zionism was to recon­sti­t­ute a Jewish state in the territory the Jews knew as “Eretz Yisrael” (The Land of Israel), and which had been renamed “Palestine” following the sup­pres­sion of the final Jewish rebellion by the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the year 135 CE. The Balfour Declar­a­tion, United Nations General Assembly Res­ol­u­tion 181 (II), and a suc­ces­sion of binding instru­ments of inter­na­tion­al law from the San Remo Res­ol­u­tion to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, had all recog­nised that the Jews were a distinct people with an unbroken con­nec­tion to the land and a right to reform their state in some part of that land.

Zionism therefore was the found­a­tion­al movement of the modern state of Israel. As such, those determ­ined to erase an autonom­ous Jewish presence from the Middle East have assessed that if they can succeed in depicting Zionism as something loathsome and unjust, the case for Israel can be dra­mat­ic­ally under­mined.

The con­tem­por­ary campaign to distort the meaning of Zionism and to associate it with popular concepts of evil, largely has its origins in the rapid deteri­or­a­tion of Soviet-Israeli relations, which con­di­tioned attitudes to Israel in the political left.

Zionism was once cel­eb­rated by the left as an organic movement of national return and a model for national lib­er­a­tion and decol­on­isa­tion movements through­out the world.

Israel’s victory in its War of Inde­pend­ence and refusal to succumb to far mightier foes was pos­it­ively awe-inspiring to adherents of political movements pre­dic­ated on toppling struc­tures of power. As chron­icled by Philip Mendes in his study of Zionism and the political left, “all inter­na­tion­al communist parties supported partition and the creation of a Jewish State.” The US Communist Party called Israel “an organic part of the world struggle for peace and democracy,” while the French Com­mun­ists viewed the Jewish fighters as the comrades of res­ist­ance fighters through­out the world.

But as Israel charted its own course, emerged from its wars eco­nom­ic­ally and mil­it­ar­ily superior to the Arabs, and became more ambitious and assertive in how it conducted its security affairs, the support of the Soviet Union and of the inter­na­tion­al left entered a sharp decline, followed by a complete reversal.

As the Cold War set in, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, assured the US Ambas­sad­or that Israel was “western in its ori­ent­a­tion, its people are demo­crat­ic, and realise that only through the co-operation and support of the US can they become strong and remain free.”

Israel’s “western ori­ent­a­tion” became abund­antly clear to the Soviet Union when it joined Britain and France in the Suez Campaign in 1956 to liberate a key maritime route linking Asia to Europe amidst threats to nation­al­ise the canal by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a key Soviet ally.

The campaign, seen by Moscow as a direct threat to its strategic power in the Middle East, sent the Soviets into a state of foaming apoplexy, resulting in threats to deploy nuclear weapons against the British and French and to anni­hil­ate Israel entirely.

The Soviet Union had already cut dip­lo­mat­ic relations with Israel in February 1953, only weeks before the death of Stalin and after a period of rapid escal­a­tion of state antisemitism, cul­min­at­ing in the notorious “Doctors’ Plot,” in which Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union were accused of plotting to poison Party officials.

Soon the state media was saturated with anti-Zionist pro­pa­ganda, depicting bloated, hook-nosed Jewish bankers and all-consuming serpents embossed with the Star of David.

Anti-Zionism had become virtually indis­tin­guish­able from antisemitism. As the British political theorist Alan Johnson observed, “what ‘the Jew’ once was in older antisemitism – uniquely malevol­ent, full of blood lust, all-con­trolling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely deserving of pun­ish­ment, and so on – the Jewish state now is…”

In time, these depic­tions would reach not only the Soviet reader but through Soviet satel­lites in Europe, South America and the Middle East, and through communist parties and pub­lic­a­tions through­out the world. These ideas would hence nestle in far-left circles in the West, including political parties, human rights organ­isa­tions, militant trade unions, and of course, campuses.

The pro­pa­ganda was highly com­pel­ling and steeped in long-estab­lished themes of Jewish bloodthirsti­ness, greed, cor­rup­tion, manip­u­la­tion and cunning. It would contend that the very existence of a Jewish homeland was not only a plot of imper­i­al­ism, but a mortal danger to the peace of the world.

It was what Hitler called the “big lie” – the use of dra­mat­ic­ally overblown fiction to deceive the public. Hitler, the supreme pro­pa­gand­ist, observed that the bigger the lie the more believ­able it was: “It would never come into people’s heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infam­ously …”

The big lies about Zionism would soon find their way into the most influ­en­tial forums in the world. When a sub-com­mis­sion of the United Nations was tasked with drafting a con­ven­tion on the “elim­in­a­tion of all forms of racial dis­crim­in­a­tion,” the pro­ceed­ings naturally focused on apartheid, neo-Nazism and antisemitism. But the Soviets viewed the reference to antisemitism as a direct rebuke to their anti-Jewish measures, and served up an amendment that “was almost a joke,” even to the Soviet del­eg­a­tion itself.

The amendment inserted Zionism into the listed forms of racism. According to sources close to the delib­er­a­tions, the Soviets under­stood “full well that the idea that Zionism is racism is an indefens­ible position,” yet they floated it anyway, in part to turn the US-led ini­ti­at­ive into farce, and in part perhaps, to see how far a “big lie,” could go.

Ulti­mately, the Con­ven­tion was adopted with neither antisemitism nor Zionism referred to – the ploy had worked. But the seed has been planted.

On 10 November 1975, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed res­ol­u­tion 3379 on the “elim­in­a­tion of all forms of racial dis­crim­in­a­tion,” which determ­ined that “Zionism is a form of racism and dis­crim­in­a­tion.”

The US Ambas­sad­or to the United Nations Patrick Moynihan called the res­ol­u­tion “a great evil …” that had given “the abom­in­a­tion of antisemitism the appear­ance of inter­na­tion­al sanction.”

The pro­pos­i­tion that the Jewish eman­cip­a­tion movement was actually a form of racism, now declared to be truth by the United Nations, could then be used to purge main­stream Jewish voices from liberal campaigns and civil society organ­isa­tions.

In 1977, student unions across Britain debated motions along the lines of Res­ol­u­tion 3379. York, Salford, Warwick and Lancaster went further, passing motions to expel their Jewish societies “on the grounds that they are Zionist and therefore racist.”

The concept of denying platforms to fascist and white suprem­acist speakers on uni­ver­sity campuses was now being applied to stifle main­stream voices who expressed support for the state of Israel.

Moynihan foresaw this. An earlier UN res­ol­u­tion had, at the instig­a­tion of the Soviet Union, viewed “racism to be merely a form of Nazism.” It followed that if racism was merely a form of Nazism and Zionism is a form of racism, then Zionism is a form of Nazism.

On this basis, anti-Zionist students could harass Zionists and be seen as taking a noble stand against Nazism. This twisted logic was applied by anti-Israel students at Sydney Uni­ver­sity in 2015 when they attempted to stop the public lecture of a retired British colonel for his earlier state­ments in support of Israel. This was also exper­i­enced by the organ­isers of the Chicago Dyke March who blocked Jewish par­ti­cipants from marching with Stars of David on the basis that Zionism was a form of “white suprem­acism.”

The theme of Jews becoming the new Nazis, a double blow that asso­ci­ates Zionism with supreme evil and mocks the victims of the Holocaust by equating them with their murderers, has become a mainstay of anti-Zionist discourse.

In a conflict as deep-seated and volatile as this, it may seem like a trifling pursuit to seek to restore accurate meaning to ter­min­o­logy. But there can be no hope for peaceful coex­ist­ence between Israelis and Palestini­ans so long as the movement on which Israel was estab­lished seven decades ago, the movement that expresses Jewish hopes and Jewish rights, is so poorly under­stood and so suc­cess­fully distorted.

Alex Ryvchin is co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry. His new book is “Zionism – The Concise History”

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be repub­lished with attri­bu­tion.