The Soviet Gift of Holocaust Inversion (Jews as the New Nazis): A "Gift" That Keeps on Giving (and Polluting)

Thought I'd share a passage from my current read, Robert Wistrich's From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel. In it he describes how years and years of the Soviets spewing the Big Lie about Zionism and the Jews--poisonous nonsense which, ironically, drew on Czarist tropes of Jew-hate--paid huge dividends by infected the hearts and minds of leftists in other countries, especially those in Western Europe:

Left-wing "revisionists" in France, as we have seen, did not shrink from using the argument that Zionism was engaged in a vile conspiracy against the Palestinians. They shared the belief of many on the Left that the Zionists were powerful, ruthless and diabolically cunning--stopping at nothing in the pursuit of their ends. This is today increasingly the mainstream leftist and liberal view, especially in Western Europe. Israel is seen as bloodthirsty, racist State whose dealing with Palestinians are characterized by betrayal, cruelty and double-dealing. Indeed it is not difficult for a partisan observer to portray the Israeli State, with its massive firepower and post-1967 image of cold, calculating, efficient and superior force as a heavily armed "Goliath." The Palestinians on the other side are invariably depicted in equally simplistic terms as poor, "homeless" and downtrodden. In this Manichean schema of the contemporary Left, the Palestinians--as victims of Western or Israeli "colonialism"--are a priori right. For many pro-Palestinian militants in the West they have ever assumed the mantle of a "crucified people." The Jews in this narrative not only killed Christ two thousand years ago, but are repeating their dastardly crime today against the people of Palestine. They are in effect combining the ultimate crimes of deicide and genocide.

The resonance of such historical inversions and lethal myths should not be underestimated. To many of the generation born after 1945, racism and fascism are indeed the ultimate "crimes against humanity." By the same token if Zionism comes to be widely defined as "racist," "fascist" or a "Western colonial sin," it is irredeemably beyond the pale. Thus the more Israel as been depicted as the inheritor of Europe's colonial heritage, the more readily it finds itself saddled with metaphors from this same Western past such as the image of an all-conquering Herrenvolk*. This is exactly what has happened in the past forty-five years...

*Master race. Nice, eh?

Update: In this paragraph, Wistrich defines Leftist anti-Zionism (a.k.a. Zionhass, the manifestation--and infestation--of Jew-hate in our time):

Leftist anti-Zionism is so insidious precisely because it claims to oppose the brutal antisemitism of the Nazis and all those trends which sought to abolish the civil equality of Jews in bourgeois society, to confiscate their property, expel them from the country, or to physically extirpate te foundations of Jewry. The Holocaust did indeed discredit this type of racial antisemitism. But it did so, only to give birth to a new anti-Jewish ideology focused against Israel as the central political expression of collective Jewish identity in the postwar era...