The Red-Brown-Green Axis Against Israel

What do Communists, Nazis, and Islamists have in common?

The answer is all too obvious: a pathological hatred of Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish State.

They agree on almost nothing else. Their creeds of race, religion, and government are mutually exclusive. Yet all three share an aim: Israel’s annihilation.

Their commitment to this evil cause is so clear that it’s accurate to speak of a Red-Brown-Green axis – red for the Radical Left, Brown, as in brownshirts, for the Radical Right, and Green for Radical Islam.

Three Radicals – united by a heritage of hate.

The Communist position dates to the early 1950s; Nazi-Islamist ties, to the 1930s.

The record begins with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Jew-hating Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who sought to prevent the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine by any means. Exiled by the British after the Arab revolt of 1936–39, he surfaced in Baghdad in the autumn of 1939 and then, from 1941 to 1945, found refuge in Berlin as Hitler’s guest. From there, the Mufti broadcast antisemitic propaganda to the Arab world, helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen-SS, and personally intervened to block the rescue of thousands of Jewish children from the death camps.

His wartime speeches combined Quranic references with the European conspiracy theory of a hidden Jewish hand controlling world events. The Mufti became the principal bridge between the Third Reich and the ideology that fuels today’s war against Israel.

By the time he arrived in Baghdad, Iraq was already saturated with Nazi influence. The German embassy had bought a newspaper, circulated an Arabic Mein Kampf, and helped form a youth movement modeled on the Hitler Youth, while Radio Berlin’s new Arabic service pumped Nazi antisemitism into the Arab Street.

In April 1941, a clique of pro-Nazi officers called the Golden Square installed the Arab nationalist politician Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in a coup, betting that a German victory would end British influence for good. The regime collapsed within weeks – and in the vacuum, on June 1 and 2, 1941, the Jews of Baghdad paid dearly for it.

In the pogrom remembered as the Farhud, mobs that included soldiers and policemen murdered some 180 Jews, wounded hundreds more, raped women, and looted roughly 1,500 homes and shops. The Iraqi government’s own commission of inquiry blamed Nazi propaganda and the agitation of the Mufti.

It was the beginning of the end for a community that had lived in Iraq for 25 centuries. Within a decade almost all of its 135,000 Jews were gone. The pattern – organized mob violence against Jews under cover of political crisis – was established seven years before Israel declared independence.

Nazis and Nasser

When the Third Reich collapsed, its mass murdering monsters didn’t all die in Berlin. Adolf Eichmann fled to Argentina and lived under the government’s protection until his capture by the Mossad in 1960. Josef Mengele moved among Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. Klaus Barbie found shelter in Bolivia.

Argentina also bred the Tacuara movement, whose thugs carved a swastika into a Jewish teenager’s arm “in revenge for Eichmann” and marched under the slogan Nasser y Perón, un solo corazón – Nasser and Perón, one heart.

A larger effort played out in the Arab world. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt became both a sanctuary and a workshop for Hitler’s veterans – by some estimates several thousand German experts across the military, intelligence, and propaganda services.

Otto Skorzeny, the SS commando who had run a ratline for fleeing Nazi war criminals, turned military adviser and arms dealer in Cairo, training Egyptian troops and Palestinian fedayeen. Joachim Däumling, once Gestapo chief of Düsseldorf, helped build Nasser’s secret police.

With that expertise the regime dispossessed and expelled Egypt’s own ancient Jewish community, driving out roughly 10,000 after the Suez crisis of 1956.

Consider the case of Johann von Leers. In Nazi Germany he had been one of Goebbels’s senior propagandists, an honorary Waffen-SS officer who produced 27 books with titles like Jewry and Knavery. He fled to Argentina, and from there – at the personal invitation of Haj Amin al-Husseini – he moved to Cairo, converted to Islam, took the name Omar Amin, and directed Nasser’s anti-Israel propaganda until his death in 1965.

The same Grand Mufti who had met Hitler in 1941 thus placed one of Goebbels’s senior propagandists at the center of Nasser’s government a decade later.

Aribert Heim, the “Dr. Death” of Mauthausen, is believed to have died in Cairo, a convert to Islam.

Syria took in its share of Nazis. Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s deputy and the man who deported some 130,000 Jews to their deaths, settled in Damascus and lived for decades under the protection of the Assad regime, reportedly advising its security services. Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, passed through the same city. Walther Rauff, who designed the mobile gas vans, served as an adviser to the Syrian regime.

Men who had operated much of the machinery of the Holocaust spent their final decades aiding the enemies of the Jewish State.

Neo-Nazis and the PFLP

Postwar neo-Nazis were quick to embrace the anti-Israel cause. George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party wrote to Nasser in 1959 offering to help destroy Israel “by cutting off the parasite’s blood,” and a decade later was phoning in threats to bomb Tel Aviv.

No individual better illustrates the financial connection between the old Nazis and the enemies of Israel than François Genoud. A wealthy Swiss financier, publisher, and lifelong admirer of Hitler, Genoud worked for German military intelligence during the war, befriended an array of senior Nazis, including Reich Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht, and developed a close relationship with the Mufti, visiting him frequently in Berlin. After the war, Genoud acquired or controlled rights associated with the writings of Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann and used his money and international connections to support the Nazi escape network.

Genoud then carried his allegiance into the anti-colonial and Palestinian movements. He supported Algeria’s FLN, supplying it with money and weapons, cultivated close ties to the PFLP, and was linked to the leader of the group’s offshoot, Wadie Haddad, and his Venezuelan terrorist ally Carlos the Jackal. In addition to arranging money and legal assistance for terrorists whose targets included Israel and Jews, Genoud financed the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini’s move in October 1978 from Iraq to France and his brief stay in a Paris suburb three months ahead of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Providing Khomeini with unprecedented access to global media, the move facilitated his orchestration of the overthrow of Iran’s pro-Western monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was responsible for the country’s nearly three-decades-long strategic alliance with the United States – and tacit ties with Israel, which Khomeini had been publicly attacking in speeches since 1963.

From Switzerland, an unrepentant Nazi spy became a banker and patron of groups dedicated to bringing about another Holocaust.

William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries popularized “ZOG” – Zionist Occupation Government – the theory that a hidden Jewish hand controls Washington, around which the white supremacist Aryan Nations and the Christian Identity movement built entire theologies. The theory has a body count. The lifelong white supremacist activist who murdered three people at a Jewish community center in Kansas in 2014, and the killers at the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018 and Poway, California in 2019 all spoke the same ZOG vocabulary.

Hatred of Israel wasn’t confined to one organization. Across the American white-supremacist world, it became a basic article of faith. Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke praised anti-Israel

regimes and movements and appeared at Iran’s 2006 Holocaust-denial conference. National Alliance propaganda portrayed American support for Israel as proof of Jewish control. Aryan Nations and Christian Identity preachers cast the struggle against “ZOG” as both a racial war and a religious obligation. For these groups, the destruction of Israel and the overthrow of the supposed Jewish hold over America were two fronts of the same conflict.

The names of the organizations changed as groups splintered, collapsed, and re-formed, but the doctrine endured. It traveled from mimeographed newsletters and shortwave radio to websites, message boards, podcasts, and encrypted channels.

In Europe, neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups have moved from rhetoric to open alliance with Islamist movements. Germany’s NPD likens Gaza to Dresden. Greece’s Golden Dawn branded Israel the “eternal enemy.” Italy’s CasaPound opened formal cooperation with Hezbollah in 2015. The neo-fascist Forza Nuova sent a delegation to Beirut to pledge European support for Hezbollah in its “conflict with Israel,” and after October 7 its cadres marched for the “Palestinian resistance.”

By then the Brown-Green alliance was already well established. The Red alliance developed by a different route – but ultimately served the same cause on a vastly larger scale.

Stalin and the Satellites

The Soviet stance began as a dramatic policy reversal. On May 14, 1947, Andrei Gromyko rose in the UN General Assembly and endorsed formation of a Jewish state, citing Europe’s failure to protect the Jews from their “fascist executioners.” Days after Israel declared its independence, Moscow granted recognition, and Czech arms routed through the bloc helped the country survive 1948.

But Soviet support soon ended. As Israel inspired a surge in Jewish national pride, Stalin accused Jewish citizens of being “rootless cosmopolitans” harboring subversive Zionist loyalties. On August 12, 1952, following years of imprisonment and torture, the regime executed 13 leading Jewish cultural figures in what became known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. That same year, Communist Czechoslovakia staged the Slánský show trial, hanging 11 defendants, most of them, in the indictment’s own words, “of Jewish origin,” for a fabricated “Zionist” conspiracy.

Stalin’s Doctors’ Plot followed; only his death in 1953 stopped the murder machine. What survived it was a permanent doctrine defining Zionism as racism.

Moscow then found its instrument in the Arab world. Nasser’s Egypt, and the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq, called themselves practitioners of “Arab socialism” – a doctrine that borrowed the Marxist vocabulary of anti-imperialism while keeping the Mufti’s Jew-hatred intact. The Kremlin supplied the weapons, the advisers, and the diplomatic cover. Communists who had spent a generation denouncing fascism now armed governments that were sheltering Hitler’s war criminals.

It is worth pausing on that. In Cairo, Soviet military advisers and Nazi military advisers worked for the same regime, on the same project.

Moscow broke relations with Israel after the Six-Day War and spent the following years engineering UN Resolution 3379, which branded Zionism “a form of racism” – the lie that moved America’s UN envoy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to warn the Assembly that “a great evil has been loosed upon the world.”

The KGB flooded Muslim countries with copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a notorious Tsarist secret police fabrication – to inflame the masses against “American Zionism,” while the Kremlin armed and hosted the PLO.

The satellites did the dirty work. East Germany’s foreign intelligence service trained Palestinian cadres, hosted them in training camps on German soil, and gave sanctuary to the terrorists who did the killing. Abu Nidal’s gunmen were trained on East German ground.

When Israeli forces seized PLO files in Lebanon in 1982, they found the paperwork: Palestinian officers dispatched for military training to East Germany, Yugoslavia, North Korea, and beyond.

The same East Germans that armed the Palestinians also ran a West German neo-Nazi, Odfried Hepp, as an agent – a man with his own contacts among Palestinian terrorist groups. Red and Brown were not merely converging on a common enemy. In East Berlin they shared a case officer. Hepp ended up living in Syria with a new identity.

The ugliest chapter unfolded in Poland. In 1967 and 1968, the Communist government launched what it called an “anti-Zionist” campaign, and what everyone understood to be a purge of Jews. Władysław Gomułka warned against a Jewish “fifth column.” Factory workers were assembled to denounce Zionism. Rally banners demanded “Zionists to Zion!” Professors, journalists, doctors, and officials were fired. Students were expelled.

Roughly 13,000 Jews – most of what remained of Polish Jewry after the Holocaust – were driven out of the country. To leave, they had to surrender their citizenship. They were issued a travel document that stated, in the regime’s own words, that the bearer was not a citizen of the Polish People’s Republic. It was a one-way ticket, issued 23 years after Auschwitz, by a government that called itself anti-fascist.

China Joins the Axis

Maoist China joined the axis early and stayed in it. In 1965, China became the first non-Arab state to recognize the PLO, receiving its chairman in Beijing with the honors of a head of state. Mao told the Palestinians that “Israel and Formosa are bases of imperialism in Asia.”

Beijing provided Palestinian terrorist groups with rifles, mines, explosives, and training. Fatah declared that “Mao Zedong Thought is a spiritual atom bomb.” George Habash, head of the Marxist PFLP, put it plainly: “China is our best friend.” In 1975, China voted for Resolution 3379.

Communist Cuba did its part. The Castro regime broke relations with Israel on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, then secretly sent an armored brigade and helicopter crews to Syria. Estimates of the size of the force range from several hundred to several thousand. Moshe Dayan disclosed the deployment on American television in the spring of 1974.

Cuban tank crews fought Israeli troops on the Golan, and Cuban forces remained in Syria until 1975. Castro embraced Arafat, backed Resolution 3379, and, more recently, blamed Israel for the massacre of October 7.

The international New Left and Ultraleft absorbed the party line almost verbatim. The Weather Underground terrorist offshoot of America’s Students for a Democratic Society published a piece titled “Zionism Is Racism.” Three Japanese Red Army gunmen, acting for the PFLP, killed 26 people at Israel’s Lod Airport in 1972. Germany’s Red Army Faction trained in PFLP camps and hailed the Munich Olympic Games massacre of Israeli athletes as “anti-imperialist.” At Entebbe in 1976, in an act that recalled the “selections” at Auschwitz, two left-wing German terrorists helped sort Jewish passengers from the rest.

I saw the left turn myself. In early June 1968, at age 18, on my first visit to Paris, en route to my first summer in Israel, I walked into the occupied Sorbonne. A huge pro-PLO banner hung in the courtyard. The students leading Europe’s most celebrated uprising had chosen a side in what was then known as the Arab-Israeli conflict – against the Jewish State’s right to exist.

They did not stop at banners. In France, the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne set up “Palestine Committees” in 1969 on the model of its Vietnam committees, and sent its leaders to tour Palestinian refugee and terrorist training camps in Jordan. That September, French Maoists attacked the home of Elie de Rothschild and firebombed the Rothschild bank. The road from anti-Zionism to plain old Jew-hatred proved to be a short one.

Then came the most consequential transformation of all. The revolutionary left, having spent two decades as the junior partner of Arab nationalism, watched Arab nationalism collapse – and switched allegiance to the Islamists who replaced it.

From Maoism to Islamism

Khomeini’s revolution of 1979 was the hinge. Palestinian Maoists, disillusioned by Mao’s death and the failure of Third World Marxism, concluded that Islam, not dialectical materialism, was the revolutionary instrument that could move the Arab masses. Their leading theorist, Munir Shafiq, made the journey himself, from Maoism to Islamism, taking cadres with him.

The far left, which had once denounced religion as the opium of the people, discovered that it could live with a theocracy that hated the same people it hated.

The current runs straight into the present, its vocabulary softened into “equality” and “decolonization.” The BDS movement, launched in 2005, pairs its demands with a refugee “right of return” that would dissolve the Jewish State. Students for Justice in Palestine chapters say it outright, calling for “a one-state solution” and treating Israel’s existence as a crime.

The clearest measure of how far the American left has traveled is the Democratic Socialists of America. In August 2025, the organization’s national convention adopted Resolution 22, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA.” It makes expulsion the penalty for opposing BDS, for affiliating with a “Zionist” lobby – meaning not only AIPAC but J Street, which exists to promote a two-state solution – or for the offense of saying that Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution affirms the PLO’s 1977 al-Thawabit principles, which enshrine armed struggle.

The position that Israel has no right to exist, regardless of its size or borders, is a single position with a single history. The slogans change. The uniforms change. The language evolves from “Jewish world conspiracy” to “anti-Zionism,” from racial struggle to anti-imperialism and decolonization.

After taking power in 1979, Iran’s Islamist regime immediately emerged as an implacable enemy of Israel. Khomeini called it the duty of Muslims to “cut off the hand of the usurper.” His successor, Khamenei, called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be “removed and eradicated” in nearly identical words across four decades.

Iran’s proxies mimic their sponsor. Hezbollah’s 1985 Open Letter vows that its struggle ends only when Israel is “obliterated.” Hamas’s 1988 covenant cites the Protocols and quotes a hadith about killing Jews who hide behind stones and trees. The Houthis put the cause on their banner: “Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.”

That is the heritage of hate. It stretches from Hitler’s Berlin to Stalin’s Moscow, from Nasser’s Cairo to Khomeini’s Tehran, from neo-Nazi compounds to elite Western campuses. The flags have changed. The intended victim has not. The Red-Brown-Green Axis isn’t a historical curiosity. It remains one of the central ideological threats of our time – and one that cannot be negotiated with, rationalized away, or wished out of existence.