AntizionismLibelTrope1950s–present⊙ View in graph

The Zionism–Nazism Equation and the 'Zionist–Nazi Collaboration' Myth

The claim

“Zionism is equivalent to Nazism, and Zionist leaders secretly collaborated with the Nazis in perpetrating the Holocaust — a Soviet-manufactured inversion that turns the Jews' national movement into the heir of their murderers.”

A defamatory accusation against Jews as a group, historically used to incite violence.

Historical context

After the Six-Day War, Soviet propaganda systematically equated Israel with Nazi Germany — cartoons of Israeli leaders with swastikas, 'Israeli stormtroopers', claims that Zionists had financed Hitler and collaborated in the Holocaust to manufacture a Jewish state. Zionological authors (Ivanov, Yevseyev, Korneyev) elaborated the 'collaboration' canard from cherry-picked episodes (the 1933 Haavara transfer agreement, the Kastner affair). Its most consequential codification: Mahmoud Abbas's 1982 dissertation, *The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism*, defended at the Institute of Oriental Studies — the linchpin of Soviet Zionology, run by KGB-linked Arabist Yevgeny Primakov — which also minimized the Holocaust's death toll. The equation is the direct precursor of contemporary Holocaust inversion ('Gaza = Warsaw Ghetto', 'Zionazis'). It also circulated beyond the USSR: Lebourg traces the nazification of Israel through the Eichmann-trial press (1960–61) and Kichko's 1963 book, and shows the French far right recycling the same Soviet theme through Bardèche's journal Défense de l'Occident.

The debunking

Historians of the Holocaust uniformly reject the 'Zionist–Nazi collaboration' thesis as pseudo-history. The Haavara agreement was a coerced rescue mechanism enabling German Jews to flee with a fraction of their assets, not ideological partnership; Yad Vashem-affiliated scholarship and historians such as Yehuda Bauer have shown that wartime Jewish leaders' desperate negotiations were rescue attempts under genocide, not complicity. Izabella Tabarovsky's Tablet investigation of Abbas's dissertation documents that it 'is shot through with factual errors, decontextualizations, distortions, and outright falsifications of sources' and was produced at a KGB-supervised institute tasked with manufacturing 'scholarly' foundations for anti-Zionist propaganda. Jeffrey Herf's *Undeclared Wars with Israel* (Cambridge, 2016) traces from East German archives how the bloc's 'Zionism = fascism' line was a state propaganda construct deployed while the same regimes armed Israel's enemies and sheltered actual antisemites. The equation inverts perpetrator and victim: Zionism predates Nazism, was its principal victim's response, and Nazi policy aimed at the annihilation — not the statehood — of Jews. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism lists 'drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis' among its examples, reflecting the scholarly consensus that the equation functions as Holocaust distortion and incitement rather than historical analysis.

Descends from

Lives on as

  • Holocaust Inversion: Jews as 'the New Nazis'Antizionism1967–present

    Contemporary 'Israelis are Nazis' rhetoric directly continues the Soviet propaganda meme of a Zionist–Nazi alliance and equivalence, mass-produced after 1967 and codified in AKSO's 1985 'Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism.'

Full lineage

  1. Deicide Charge ("Christ-Killers")
  2. →Blood Libel (Ritual Murder Accusation)
  3. →Well-Poisoning Accusation
  4. →The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy
  5. →The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  6. →The 'Jews Control the Media' Myth
  7. →Soviet 'Zionology': The Anti-Zionist Propaganda Industry
  8. →The Zionism–Nazism Equation and the 'Zionist–Nazi Collaboration' Myth

Sources