Tarnished with the brush of the ‘Big Lie’

MICHAEL BELLING

It was not just a lie, it was a Big Lie, a term invented by Adolf Hitler, who said: “If you tell a big enough lie, and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

The Big Lie was mastered by the Germans – it is a propaganda technique used primarily by totalitarian regimes – but perfected by the Soviet Union, which even set up a special department for this purpose in the KGB, at that time the world’s largest spy and state security machine.

This lie started several years earlier, in the late 1960s, after the Arab clients of the Soviet Union suffered an ignominious defeat following their 1967 aggression on Israel. Russian rulers were worried about a revival in the godless communist country of Jewish consciousness and identification, which they felt could threaten their doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist totalitarian philosophy, the reason for the existence of the Soviet state.

The Soviet leaders referred it to the KGB propaganda and disinformation department, hoping to discredit the unwelcome Jewish renaissance and put a stop to it. They clearly felt they had to undermine Israel and Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement. By doing so, they hoped to discourage Soviet Jews from identifying with their Jewishness and with Israel – they failed, but not for want of trying.

The KGB probably felt it could not use religious anti-Jewish accusations, as the Soviet Union had no religion other than communism. Racist anti-Semitism had been discredited after Hitler, so they hit on a modern, post-Second World War human rights theme, inverting Hitler’s real race hatred, and coming up with the totally baseless claim that Zionism is racism.

This Big Lie was accepted with alacrity and promoted by Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies who, along with the Soviet Union, were the leading proponents of Jew hatred after 1945.

With the Soviet bloc, these countries had an automatic majority in the major international organisations, which they used to advance this claim. By 1973 it was already being adopted by some United Nations bodies.

But the campaign peaked on November 10, 1975 when the Big Lie was adopted by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 3379, stating that Zionism was a form of racism.

The resolution was severely criticised at the time. For example, Daniel Moynihan, US Ambassador to the United Nations, termed it “an infamous act”.

He continued: “What we have here is a lie – a political lie of a variety well known to the 20^th century, and scarcely exceeded in all that annal of untruth and outrage. The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that is it not… whatever else Zionism may be, it is not and cannot be ‘a form of racism’.”

In 1991, 16 years later, the General Assembly came to its senses on the issue and repealed the resolution, something never done before or since. This and the subsequent confirmation of rediscovered Jewish identity in the former Soviet Union, were possibly the biggest slap in the face for the KGB originators of the libel, as close to a million Jews used the opportunity they then had to emigrate to Israel.

Unfortunately, the saga of this Big Lie did not end there. It was resuscitated with additions and refinements a mere 10 years later in all its poisonous hatred, at the notorious so-called 2001 Durban anti-racism conference – officially the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, under United Nations auspices.

The conference was hijacked by vile Jew hatred and anti-Israel rhetoric, including anti-Jewish pamphlets and the distribution of the worst anti-Semitic false accusation of the previous century, the notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Participants even called for the reintroduction of the discredited “Zionism is racism” resolution by the United Nations General Assembly. The conference became a launching pad for a new and vicious anti-Semitism.

This time the Big Lie focused on accusing Israel of what Jonathan, Lord Sacks, former Commonwealth Chief Rabbi, called “the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide”. It also often compared the conduct of Israel and its leaders to the Nazis.

The language of human rights has been the ideal since the Second World War. The new Big Lie latched onto them to attack Israel falsely. Israel has been singled out so disproportionately for these attacks that most Jews feel that humanitarian concerns are not the motive behind them, but far more sinister anti-Semitism.

To take just one example of this egregious discrimination, the UN Human Rights Council, established in 2006, has condemned Israel more often than all the other countries in the world combined, including many of the worst real human rights violators, passing 62 resolutions against Israel to a total of 55 against all other countries.

In 2013 the UN General Assembly itself adopted no fewer than 21 resolutions singling out Israel for censure, with only four protesting the actions of other countries.

Since 2005, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement – founded by Israel’s enemies – has latched onto this Big Lie and motivated many boycotts against Israel, from using often intimidatory tactics against prominent people visiting, or artists performing in Israel, to academic boycotts and more.

BDS denies being anti-Semitic and claims to be pro-Palestinian, but this rings hollow in view of its total silence on Palestinians persecuted and killed elsewhere in the Middle East (thousands killed in the Syrian civil war alone) and its leaders openly advocating the destruction of the State of Israel.

This call for the end of the Jewish state is part of the new anti-Semitism. The old anti-Semitism denied Jews rights as individuals. In its newest incarnation, Jew hatred denies the right of the Jewish State to exist among the family of nations and of Jews to have a state like any other people.

All this has also led to open old-fashioned Jew hatred again emerging in recent years on the streets of Europe and even in South Africa, with one local BDS leader singing “Shoot the Jew” at a demonstration and a pig’s head being placed in what the perpetrators believed was the kosher section of a shop.  

Jews are feeling unsafe in several European countries. There have been fatal attacks on Jews in countries such as France and Denmark, apart from open expressions of anti-Jewish views in demonstrations and even in public discourse.

The letter and spirit – and hatred – of the 1975 Big Lie live on in full force. While repetition of the falsehood may get it believed, the truth is that Zionism is not a dirty word. It is no more than the Jewish national liberation movement for the right of self-determination, like other peoples, in their ancestral ‎homeland.

• Michael Belling was a foreign correspondent in Israel and is a freelance journalist and a former Israeli advocate.