https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18094/israel-apartheid
The breakdown in Israel-Soviet relations was later compounded by Israel’s defensive victories against the Arabs in 1967 and again in 1973. Over this period all hope of Israel becoming a Soviet client had steadily evaporated. Arab armies sponsored, trained and equipped by the USSR had been humiliated, and so had Moscow. Thus the Soviets progressively developed a policy of undermining Israel. Their primary objective was to use the country as a weapon in their Cold War struggle against the US and the West.
“We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.” — Yuri Andropov, Chairman of the Soviet KGB, later General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, as reported by General Ion Pacepa, former chief of Romania’s intelligence services.
As well as mobilising the Arabs to the Soviet cause, Andropov and his KGB colleagues needed to appeal to the democratic world. To do so, the Kremlin decided to turn the conflict from one that sought simply to destroy Israel into a struggle for human rights and national liberation from an illegitimate American-sponsored imperialist occupier. They set about transforming the narrative of the conflict from religious jihad — in which Islamic doctrine demands that any land that has ever been under Muslim control must be regained for Islam — to secular nationalism and political self-determination, something far more palatable to Western democracies. This would provide cover for a vicious terrorist war, even garnering widespread support for it.
To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to Pacepa, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1960s, as they had also orchestrated so-called national liberation armies in several other parts of the world. He says the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow. This document was fundamental to the invention and establishment of an artificial Palestinian nationhood.
The details of Moscow-sponsored terrorist operations in the Middle East and elsewhere are set out in 25,000 pages of KGB documents copied and then smuggled out of Russia in the early 1990s by senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and now lodged in the UK, at Churchill College, Cambridge.
The initial charter did not claim the West Bank or the Gaza Strip for “Palestine”. In fact, it explicitly repudiated any rights to these lands, falsely recognising them respectively as Jordanian and Egyptian sovereign territories. Instead, the PLO claim was to the rest of Israel. This was amended after the 1967 war when Israel ejected the illegal Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers, and the West Bank and Gaza for the first time were re-branded as Palestinian territory.
Moscow first took its campaign to brand Israeli Jews as the oppressors of their invented “Palestinian people” to the UN in 1965. Their attempts to categorise Zionism as racism failed at that attempt but succeeded nearly a decade later in the infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379.
Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, admitted in 1977: “The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”
The Mitrokhin documents show that both Yasser Arafat, and his successor as PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, now President of the Palestinian Authority, were KGB agents. Both were instrumental in the KGB’s disinformation operations as well as its terrorist campaigns.
For his dealings with Washington, Ceaușescu told Arafat in 1978: “You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over.”
Ceaușescu’s advice was reinforced by North Vietnamese communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, whom Arafat met several times: “Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand”.
Like his predecessor Arafat, Abbas’s consistent rejection of every offer of peace with Israel, while concurrently talking the talk about peace and while sponsoring terrorism, shows the continuing influence of his Soviet masters.
Meanwhile the Palestinian movement created by Moscow, in the words of American historian David Meir-Levi, is “the only national movement for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its only raison d’être.”
Moscow’s campaign was significantly undermined by the 2020 rapprochement between Israel and Arab states. The lesson here is the importance of American political will against authoritarian propaganda, which led to the game-changing Abraham Accords.
Last month the UN General Assembly re-affirmed its implacable hostility to one of its own member states. It voted overwhelmingly — 125-8, with 34 abstentions — to fund an unprecedented permanent Human Rights Council (UNHRC) commission of inquiry (COI) into allegations of war crimes and human rights abuse by Israel. Taxpayers’ funds will pay an eyewatering $5.5 million budget in the first year alone, well over twice that of the UNHRC commission investigating the Syrian civil war.
