Calling Israel an “Apartheid State” Has Its Roots in Soviet-Style Disinformation Techniques

In the 1980s and 90s, it was a common refrain in some circles of the hard left that the U.S. government had created AIDS or deliberately spread it to kill gays, African Americans, or both. Later on, Soviet defectors explained how the KGB had concocted this theory, planted it in an English-language newspaper in New Delhi, and simply allowed it circulate. A similar process explains the widespread belief, detached from reality, that Israel is an “apartheid state.” And the similarities are not coincidental, write Dan Diker and Yechiel Leiter:

Beginning in the late 1960s, PLO officials regularly underwent military and political-warfare training in Moscow and other Soviet satellite countries such as North Vietnam and Cuba. . . . “Active measures,” [as information warfare was known in Soviet parlance], have been used by the PLO, Hamas, and the Iranian regime. Ironically, the signing of the Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel intensified the phenomenon of disinformation and incitement rather than eliminating it.

Disinformation on American university campuses has metastasized in recent years via both student and faculty groups. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), with over 200 branches on American college campuses, has become a main advocate for Hamas. SJP has also invited former convicted Palestinian terrorists . . . as keynote campus speakers. SJP sponsors the annual “Israel Apartheid Week” on hundreds of campuses across the U.S. and Europe, [which] has led to anti-Semitic assaults and harassment against Jewish students.

In the same spirit, scores of Jewish and Israeli academics signed a public letter of condemnation in 2016 excoriating the German Bundestag’s resolution that the BDS movement is anti-Semitic. Anti-Zionist groups, including If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, have actively advocated the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. . . . In this way, Jewish groups have normalized a propaganda narrative against Israel rooted in Soviet ideology and in such terminology as “settler colonialist,” “imperialist,” and “racist.”

Read more at Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, KGB, PLO, Students for Justice in Palestine, USSR

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF