Ukrainians overwhelmingly support Israel over Palestinians

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Well...this is awkward...

Admittedly this information is a bit out of date. Reddit post is 5 months old.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/1bbt660/ukrainians_overwhelmingly_support_israel_over_the/

As of December 9th: “the vast majority of Ukrainians - 69% - sympathize with Israel. Only 1% sympathize with Palestine. At the same time, 18% of respondents answered that they sympathize with both sides equally. The remaining 12% could not decide on their opinion.”

Anti-Zionism as a theme in Soviet propaganda, 1967-1977:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA066235.pdf

Sorry this is a PDF, to read it you'll have to click the link.

In November 1967, the Indian chapter of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front organization, held the International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples in New Delhi. Gathering in the capital of India were some 150 delegates representing 55 countries and 70 international organizations from across the Third World, the socialist bloc, and the West. India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Algeria’s Houari Boumedienne—the biggest political stars of the Non-Aligned Movement—sent their greetings, as did heads of Sudan, Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Kuwait, and Mongolia. Chairing the proceedings was Krishna Menon, a firebrand leftist Indian intellectual and former Indian defense minister the KGB had actively cultivated in the hopes that he would rise to be the head of state.

Some 1,200 delegates and visitors attended the opening plenary, at which Herbert Aptheker, a senior member of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and influential scholar of Marxism, argued for framing the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms of “imperialism and colonialism versus national liberation and social progress,” as well as through the lens of racial oppression. Contrary to Israeli rulers’ claims, he declared, the greatest threat facing Israel came not from Arabs but from Israel’s own extremist right-wing government, which had turned Israel into the “handmaiden of imperialism and colonialist expansionism.” He equated Israel with Nazi Germany by referring to the recent Six-Day War as a blitzkrieg, a quintessentially Soviet propaganda term meant to evoke Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Today, said Aptheker, it was Jews who were “acting out the roles of occupiers and tormentors” of the oppressed. He called on the audience to work tirelessly to unmask “the horror of the June war and its aftermath.” So closely did Aptheker’s speech follow the anti-Israel logic and idiom of Soviet propaganda that it may well have been written for him in Moscow.

The two documents the conference unanimously adopted—the “Appeal to the Conscience of the World” (reportedly signed by 100 members of the Indian parliament) and a “Declaration”—conveyed similar messages with even more bombast. Evoking classic antisemitic tropes, they accused Israel of having cynically violated all “standards of human decency,” and declared that it had made “a mockery of all human moral values.” They dubbed Palestinian terrorism—aka “resistance”—as “righteous and justified.” In an attempt to make the Middle Eastern conflict more relatable, they equated it with the central cause animating the Western left at the time: the war in Vietnam. They called for all the people on the planet to resist “imperialist-Zionist propaganda” and expressed appreciation for the “progressive and peace-loving” Soviet Union and other socialist states and Non-Aligned countries that “supported the Arab cause.”

The message echoed throughout the global leftist universe. The CPUSA, which was almost wholly subsidized by the Soviet Union, published Aptheker’s speech and both statements in full in its theoretical journal Political Affairs. The African Communist, the Soviet-financed quarterly organ of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which was deeply intertwined with the African National Congress (ANC), ran a piece titled “Zionism and the Future of Israel,” closely reflecting the language of the New Delhi conference, complete with the word blitzkrieg. Its author, who claimed to be a South African living in Tel Aviv, accused Zionist “fanatical zealots” of exploiting the biblical concept of Jewish chosenness to fan the flames of Jewish supremacy (“chauvinism” in the language of the day), while equating Israel with apartheid South Africa.

What’s so interesting about this half-century-old Soviet propaganda is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7. Today’s left, too, speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state; equates it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; disparages Jews for having turned into oppressors; and proclaims Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist their colonial oppression by any means necessary.

That what we are watching is less an upsurge of a new and terrifying phenomenon than the zombielike repetition of the state-sponsored propaganda of a dead empire that was hardly known for truth-telling explains why the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist prattle of today’s college students feels like déjà vu to those of us who grew up in the USSR. We’ve heard it all before: anti-imperialism mixed with anti-Zionist sloganeering; anti-racism interwoven with the demonization of the Jews; incantations about “world peace” and “friendship of the peoples” intertwined with the fomenting and financing of wars in faraway lands. One example in particular stands out as an illustration of profound Soviet cynicism with regard to the Third World: While calling for the boycott of the apartheid regime in every international forum, Moscow didn’t for one second stop trading diamonds with South African companies De Beers and Anglo American. As perestroika got underway and Soviet foreign policy priorities began to shift, some in Moscow started reaching out to the South African regime to convince it not to surrender power to Nelson Mandela.

Those who try to explain the contemporary left’s anti-Israel derangement by pointing to the latest academic fashions, such as critical race theory and intersectionality, or to specific news events of the day often miss the point that the precise language used by the anti-Israel left today to condemn the Jewish State has been a conventional part of left-wing discourse for decades—and that it originated in the USSR. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, wrote Stephen Norwood, the American far left “repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s campaign to eradicate the Jewish state.” Similar trends were on view in the United Kingdom. “By the early 1970s, it was generally accepted across the [British] far left that Zionism was a racist ideology and that Israel was comparable to apartheid South Africa,” wrote Dave Rich in Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present.

The extraordinary fidelity with which progressives reproduce the ancient tropes and warped logic of Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, complete with specific fictions and terms of abuse, raises questions. How is it that such a multitude of groups across the globe—from all manner of Communists and Trotskyists to Non-Aligned political figures, non-Communist New Left, Pan Africanists, and Cuban revolutionaries—adopted this language so completely and simultaneously? The answer is that they followed Moscow, which targeted them all with a colossal anti-Zionist campaign, pushing out masses of printed matter, communicating these ideas in multilingual radio broadcasts, and using media and diplomatic channels to influence opinions within countries.

But the most important channel of transmission for the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign was, undoubtedly, the Third World—more specifically, an ecosystem that formed at the intersection of the postcolonial Non-Aligned Movement; the Western left, which looked toward exotic distant lands and their guerillas as the future of the revolution and a cure for their own alienation; and the USSR, which at the same time, in the 1960s, began to view this part of the world as central to defeating the “main adversary,” the United States, in the Cold War.

Moscow did not control this ecosystem entirely. But it had no shortage of tools with which to shape it, the most important of those being the multitudes of international youth festivals, solidarity forums, women’s assemblies, and nuclear disarmament congresses that Moscow sponsored in support of its foreign policy goals. “It is simply impossible to list all the conferences, campaigns, and other events, organized by various international bodies with the assistance of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries,” wrote Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson in The Hidden Thread. Essop Pahad, a prominent ANC activist and member of the South African Communist Party, recalled, “You could have a conference in Ethiopia, and somebody would come from Laos and Indonesia and Malaysia and Cambodia and Vietnam. … Where would all these people have found the money? The Soviets and the other socialist countries paid for all of this,” including “for the airplanes that were hired.”

A remarkable number of figures who have shaped anti-Israel discourse in recent years came of age politically within the Soviet-sponsored anti-colonialist ecosystem. Angela Davis is only one such figure. A long-term member of CPUSA and a prominent member of the Black Power movement, who owes much of her political and cultural stardom to Soviet investment in her image and career (in 1971 Moscow devoted an estimated 5 percent of its propaganda efforts to Davis), she first met Yasser Arafat at a 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin and credits the “powerful force” of “communist internationalism”—“in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean”—with globalizing the Palestinian cause. Davis remains an icon on today’s anti-Israel left, and in a recent post-Oct. 7 talk, she spoke of the “murderous power of Zionism.”

Another iconic figure of the Black Power movement, Stokely Carmichael, whose virulent anti-Zionist quotes are frequently recalled by admirers today, including last fall at Harvard, was also profoundly influenced by this global ecosystem. He first entered it at a conference in Cuba in 1967. He developed a close personal relationship with Fidel Castro, embarked on a Third World pilgrimage to Vietnam and Africa, and lived for many years in Guinea and Ghana, developing close relationships with their Marxist dictators, Ahmed Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah. (Both played important roles in the Non-Aligned Movement.)

Another influential American who is a product of that ecosystem—meaning, that he literally grew up in it—is President Biden’s former Iran envoy Robert Malley, who is currently under an FBI investigation for potentially mishandling classified information by sharing it with Iran. Malley’s father, Simon, an Egyptian Jew and a communist, served Nasser, built close relationships with Arafat and Castro, and “dedicated his life to the “anti-imperialist and anti-American causes of Third World national liberal movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” writes Hussein Aboubakr Mansour. Malley the father saw Israel as “an evil vestige of colonialism,” and as an editor of the Paris-based magazine Africasia(later renamed Afrique Asie), he took radical positions that were not only “virulently” anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli, but also overtly pro-Soviet. (His support of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—a position that was deeply unpopular in the Non-Aligned world and typically indicative of a deeper Soviet link—is particularly notable in this regard.) Malley senior boasted several Arab and African citizenships, including an honorary Palestinian one, and took his son on “revolutionary tourism trips” across the postcolonial world. As a boy, Robert played with his father’s friend Arafat. As a student at Yale, he wrote articles condemning Israel.

On the opposite side of the Atlantic, some of the most zealous Corbynistas, too, are products of the Soviet ecosystem. They include George Galloway, who first visited Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) camps in Lebanon in the 1970s, has made a career out of his unhinged hatred of Israel, and dubbed the day the USSR fell as the worst day of his life; Ken Livingstone, who took money from Libya’s Non-Aligned dictator Muammar Gaddafi to publish a weekly newspaper that ran several pro-PLO articles per issue and demonized Israel as a racist, genocidal, apartheid reincarnation of Nazi Germany; and Jeremy Corbyn’s former advisers, the “Stalinist” Seumas Milne, who spent his gap year in Lebanon and published a pro-Soviet and pro-PLO newspaper, Straight Left, and Andrew Murray, a 40-year veteran of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who for a time worked for the Soviet foreign propaganda agency Novosti. Corbyn emerged on the British political scene as a young Labour activist in the 1980s, when the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist currents within the party had already been nurtured for a decade, and joined an organization that “rejected Israel’s existence and campaigned to ‘eradicate Zionism’ from the Labour Party,” wrote Dave Rich in The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism

Some of the Latin American leaders who rushed to condemn Israel and equate it with Nazi Germany in the wake of Oct. 7 are also products of that era.

As for the ANC, the plaintiff behind the bogus International Court of Justice suit accusing Israel of genocide, it occupied pride of place in that ecosystem, both as an object of admiration for its fight against apartheid and as a group that enjoyed the closest relationship with Moscow among all other national-liberation movements the latter sponsored.

China’s incorporation of anti-Israel propaganda into its post-Oct. 7 anti-Western agitprop—and its role mediating a unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah just recently—has surprised many observers, but that, too, is consistent with its rich Cold War history of supporting Palestinians and condemning Israel and Zionism as part of its attacks on the West and the United States, which were even more radical than those of the USSR. And we must not, of course, forget Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote his pamphlet-sized dissertation equating Zionism with Nazism at a Soviet think tank run by KGB’s master-Arabist Yevgeny Primakov and charged with developing “scholarly” foundations for anti-Zionist propaganda.

Moscow wasn’t the first party to introduce anti-Israel demonization into Third World revolutionary discourse: Arab states started doing it the moment Israel was established. Nor did the Soviets suddenly become anti-Zionist in 1967; ideological Zionophobia had been part of the Soviet outlook from the Bolsheviks’ early days. But the crushing defeat of the Soviet Union’s Arab allies in the Six-Day War created a massive crisis of confidence in Moscow. As Soviet Jews began to demand the right to emigrate, and Jews around the globe joined in a campaign on their behalf, Moscow turned Zionism into a bogeyman that threatened its interests everywhere at once. In the fevered imagination of KGB’s head, Yuri Andropov, Zionism was a global anti-Soviet and anti-socialist force, and the only way to defeat it was by attacking it globally.

Within a few years, the global anti-Zionist campaign put into motion by the Arab defeat in 1967 seemed to be unstoppable. A continuous flow of international events increasingly entrenched the idea of Zionism as the enemy of all progressive causes across the Third World, leftist universe.

By the time the “Zionism is racism” resolution, introduced by Soviet-dominated Somalia, came up for vote at the United Nations in November 1975, two-thirds of the planet—the Third World and the socialist bloc—had turned against Israel in less than a decade.

It’s reasonable to wonder what moved all these countries, with their disparate agendas and loyalties, to assume such a unified stance on Israel—a country that held zero significance for most. Some undoubtedly did it out of ideological conviction, others out of Third World solidarity with the Arab states. But for many, purely political calculation came into play as well. The anti-Israel position proved to be a cost-free bargaining chip that could be traded for something valuable, such as Arab economic aid or Soviet support.

By the end of the decade, reflexive anti-Zionism had become a litmus test of belonging and unity in the struggle on the global left.

ANC’s example is illustrative. In addition to comprehensive military training, the USSR provided members of the ANC with scholarships to Soviet universities, treated its leaders at exclusive hospitals reserved for Kremlin honchos, and sent their children to the elite Artek summer camp in the Crimea. Ronnie Kasrils, the former leader of the ANC military wing who extolled Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom, admitted that it had never occurred to them that they were treated as “privileged visitors” and that ordinary people might live differently. Years later, ANC’s veterans still fondly recalled their Soviet experience. In their minds, the USSR had “belonged to them as much” as it had “to the Soviets themselves.”

Activists and intellectuals who came of age in the Soviet ecosystem parlayed their internationalist experience into successful academic, journalistic, and political careers, passing on their “anti-imperialism of idiots” to the next generation of students and followers. There was never an imperative for any of them to rethink their ideas—and it isn’t even clear that they could have, given their conditioning.

Somehow, liberal America has slept through all of it. Having won the Cold War, it didn’t even bother to disarm and discredit the ideas it opposed, the way it had after it defeated Nazi Germany. Too many American intellectuals had been leftists or had leftist parents or had been fellow travelers with leftist causes to want to look too closely at the moral and physical rot of the empire that America defeated—a victory that moreover belonged to the arch-enemy of the American left, Ronald Reagan. Why give Reagan and his fellow anti-communists and troglodyte McCarthy-ites credit for having been right?

But consider: throughout modern history, which countries have always been the most staunchly antagonistic to Israel? Answer: Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and so forth. Nowadays there is a holy alliance of states that promote authoritarianism and are the most vocal opponents of any cause the "Democratic West" supports. I will leave China out of this because I see China as caring about their own interests and less concerned about how other nations govern themselves.

That group of governments are squarely on Russia's side in the Ukraine conflict, not necessarily because Ukraine is especially democratic but because it's an ally of the West. It's no surprise they also support Hamas. I think Ukraine and Israel are natural allies, and in fact have been since before 7 October.

Why should I reconsider? Are you suggesting that people who support Palestine should reconsider because they are supported by the likes of China and Russia--even though we both acknowledge they mainly do so out of Realpolitik rather than ideological or moral similarities?