Operation SIG
The Soviet Union’s Propaganda War Against Israel –
Operation SIG (1967 – 1988)
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” – This statement is attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis lived by that standard, and so too, did the USSR. The Soviets employed numerous mistruths to wrangle their populace, and used similar tactics to turn their venom against Israel in 1967.
As mentioned in “The True Palestinians” section, Jews living in Israel for 1,812 years of occupation, from 136 AD to when Jews liberated 22% of Palestine in 1948, were called Palestinians. The name was a colonizer term for Jews, just as Palestine was a colonizer term for Israel during the same time period.
However, in 1967, the KGB through the antisemitic Operation SIG (1967 – 1988) erased Jewish history in the land of Israel and created a new ethnicity, made up of six different Arab groups, including a group of genetic Jews in Judea & Samaria who were forcibly converted to Islam in the 11th century. Suddenly, these Arabs were part of a ‘national liberation movement’ whose ‘homeland’ needed to be reclaimed from the Zionist ‘regime.’
What made the Soviet Union turn their backs on Israel? After all, the USSR was the first to recognize the sovereignty of Israel in 1949 at the UN (the UN did not allow Israel to apply for membership in 1948). It was a culmination of the following:
- Israel did not become a Communist vassal state, despite a large number of Kibbutzniks being Socialist. Jews in Israel were beginning to find out about the antisemitism of the USSR government, and were also turned off about the gulags.
- Israel sided with the UK and France in the 1956 Suez Canal War
- Israel dared to win the 1967 Six Day War against the Soviet-funded Arab armies
The Soviet Union was mining for Arab support prior to the 1967 war; it needed allies in their Communist sphere against the West.
In 1964, the Soviets supported the creation of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), created in Cairo at the Arab League Summit. But before that, the KGB was keeping tabs on Yasser Arafat, a Cairo-born bourgeois terrorist who founded Al-Fatah (a terrorist organization hell-bent on the destruction of Israel) in 1958. Today, Fatah is incorrectly and antisemitically seen as the more ‘moderate’ version of Hamas. Both are one in the same.
The KGB recruited Arafat to be an agent, destroyed his birth records, and falsified new birth records to make it seem like he was born in Jerusalem. In 1967, the Soviets appointed Arafat to be Chairman of the PLO. Abbas was also a KGB agent and was working out of Lebanon for years.
After Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Soviet Union reacted by launching an antisemitic hissy-fit with the goal of positioning Israel to both the Arab world and any Western ‘useful idiot’ as a ‘Nazi state’ and a ‘colonizer.’
Operation SIG lasted from 1967 – 1988 and in those decades was successful in achieving its objective, to vilify the only Jewish nation and erase Jewish ties to the land. The KGB also actively trained PLO and other radical Arab members in Russia, helped direct terrorist attacks against Israel through Fatah, and had its tentacles in other Arab terrorist organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who also benefited from arms and training from the Soviets to carry out attacks.
It was effortless to convince the Arab world of the lies that ‘Jews are from Europe’ who came to Israel ‘as settlers,’ that Israel ‘kicked out all the Arabs in 1948’ and of course, that Israel is an ‘apartheid state.’ All those phrases we hear at the pro-Hamas marches today, and of course across liberal college campuses, and not just limited to the Ivies.
However, convincing the West of those lies proved to be a more difficult feat as Israel was still seen as an underdog and even many Soviet citizens were impressed with Israel’s military win; it showed the Soviet citizens that Jews are not weak – another antisemitic lie, that Jews are weak and need others fighting for them, had been swirling around the Soviet populace since WWII, never mind the fact that many Soviet Jews served bravely in the Soviet Army in both World Wars.
The KGB then, just as Islamists now, saw Western liberals as more gullible and called them ‘useful idiots’ and it was through the liberal academia that Operation SIG successfully infiltrated. All it took was simple propaganda images and the invention of the ‘Palestinian people’ when historically, no such people exist.
Suddenly, Arabs who came to Israel from 25 different Muslim countries became ‘Palestinians.’ Interestingly, it took two years for Arabs in Israel to start calling themselves the false moniker, as the term ‘Palestinians’ was so closely related to Jews that Arabs prior to 1948 had no desire to even be called ‘Palestinian-Arabs.’
The Arab settler occupiers in Gaza do not even come from the same countries as the Arab settler occupiers in Judea & Samaria.
4,000 Arab agents were hired by the KGB to spread antisemitic lies throughout the Muslim world.
Some use excuses such as ‘the UN uses that term’ – as if the UN is some barometer of truth on anything related to Israel or the just as comical excuse, ‘well it’s what ‘they’ identify themselves as.’ There is no one ‘they’ – it is six different Arab groups plus genetic Jews in parts of Judea & Samaria who were forcibly converted to Islam in the 11th century.
Just as Qatar these days is a major funder of numerous liberal universities in the U.S; so too was the Soviet Union over a two decade period. That funding ushered in anti-Israel materials, hired anti-Israel professors, and spread the antisemitic lies to student groups well before the emergence of CAIR, JStreet, JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), and SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine).
