ABSTRACT
The optimism of the 1960s was seriously deflated by a crackdown on mounting student unrest and on the radical-liberal intelligentsia in Poland in March 1968 and by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. These acts of repression were accompanied by a barrage of virulent ‘anti-Zionist’ propaganda orchestrated by the Soviet Union. In the wake of the defeat of the Soviet Union’s Arab allies during the sixday Arab-Israeli War of June 1967, it was alleged that ‘Zionist’ Jews in Israel, the United States and the Soviet bloc were acting as agents of American imperialism in a threepronged international conspiracy to subvert communist rule in Eastern Europe, to deny the Palestinians an independent homeland and to provide pretexts for the US presence and US intervention in the Middle East. Accordingly the Soviet media and other ‘antiZionist’ publications highlighted and wilfully exaggerated the important (but far from hegemonic) role played by a few Jewish intellectuals, dissidents and ‘refuseniks’ (Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate) in the Soviet and East European dissident and reform movements. There was a very thin line separating Soviet ‘anti-Zionism’ from more traditional forms of antisemitism and anti-intellectualism. Official ‘anti-Zionism’ stirred the embers of a residual popular antisemitism and anti-intellectualism within the Soviet bloc (especially in Poland), thereby helping to alienate the radical-liberal intelligentsia from potential proletarian and peasant support. Indeed, ‘anti-Zionism’ was not just a diversionary tactic that damagingly isolated and vilified Jews, but also a means of isolating and discrediting the radical-liberal intelligentsia and dissidents in general, although Jews obviously bore the brunt of this latter-day ‘counter-reformation’. This inevitably fuelled Jewish fears and anxieties, with the result that many Jews who had hitherto been ‘loyal’ Soviet or East European citizens (often as doctors, scientists, lawyers, academics and journalists) or even members of the ruling communist parties were harassed, blocked in their careers, demoralized, disillusioned and driven to seek permission to emigrate either to the West or to Israel.
