Joel Fishman
Joel Fishman is a historian and a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He recently served as the Chairman of the Foundation for the Research of Dutch Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Fishman is coauthor (with Efraim Karsh) of La Guerre d’Oslo and is carrying out research on political warfare, particularly media warfare and propaganda.
The ongoing war of delegitimization against Israel has produced two major setbacks for the Jewish State: the passage of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 on November 10, 1975 (Zionism is racism) and the UN World Conference against Racism, which took place in Durban from August 31 to September 7, 2001. Viewing these events from a historical perspective, it becomes clear that each represents a different phase of the same war. Although the General Assembly revoked this resolution on December 16, 1991, the players at Durban succeeded in reviving the libel that “Zionism is racism” and converting it into a political program. In fact, Article 418 of the NGO resolution of Durban of September 3, 2001 called for the “reinstitution” of UNGA resolution 3379.1 In this context, the lineage of the current campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) goes back to the 1960s when, under the auspices of the UN, the earliest discussions that labeled apartheid as a form of racism took place. Indeed, the stated purpose of Durban and today’s BDS movement is to assure that Zionism is equated with apartheid and racism and, following the South African model, to bring about Israel’s destruction.2 Both in 1975 and in 2001, the Palestinians, in cooperation with external sponsors and with the support of a group of African and Islamic countries, launched such initiatives. major mover and, in the second, Iran.
The meaning of the term “a disaster of another kind,” is rooted in the fact that the Soviet Union, the Palestinians, and their allies, “framed” Israel’s reality in ideological terms in a form that possessed a quasi-legal standing, which defamed it and singled it out for opprobrium.3 At the same time, they prevented the adoption of form of racism” and a legally recognized human rights violation.4 With few exceptions, Israeli and Western leaders and the intellectuals of the time failed to appreciate the danger of this development. Since then, the Palestinians have persevered in their campaign of delegitimization
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and incitement against Israel, making use of this resolution and drawing on the support of their allies and sympathizers, and receiving support from NGO front groups.5 Despite the mindless and opportunistic pronouncements of those who would have us believe that there could be a new beginning for the politics of the region and that the past is irrelevant, history does matter. Ignorance is not an asset. Without knowing the record, one cannot hope to grasp and confront the problems of the present, or imagine the future.
Many assume that UN Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism, originated in 1975. In March 1964, however, this analogy appeared in discussions that took place at the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities (a part of the Third Committee that dealt with social, humanitarian, and cultural matters).6 During these deliberations, Israel was outmaneuvered and never recovered the ground it lost. Yohanan Manor, former director-general of the Jewish Agency’s Information Department, capably recounted how this happened in his pioneering monograph, To Right a Wrong.7 Nonetheless, the subject needs to be revisited. What happened in 1964 and 1965 represents an essential piece of the story and therefore merits a careful second look.
Contemporary Testimony
In March 1964, the US, which was motivated by the needs of domestic politics, namely the presidential election campaign between Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater, proposed that the Third Committee of the UN recognize antisemitism as a form of racism, along with apartheid and Nazism.8 For its part, the Soviet Union was determined to prevent any discussion of the subject, not the least because the Soviets were Soviet Union used antisemitism to discriminate against, intimidate, and persecute Soviet Jewry. Seeking to remove the subject from the agenda, the representatives of the USSR at the UN warned the US that if the Americans did not drop the matter, they would submit their own amendment condemning Zionism and Nazism. In prepared by the Commission on Human Rights again came under discussion in the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, the US and Brazil introduced an amendment to condemn antisemitism. In turn, the Soviet Union called for the condemnation of “antisemitism, Zionism, Nazism, neo- Nazism, and all forms of the policy and ideology of colonialism, national and race-hatred, and exclusiveness and shall take action as appropriate for the speedy eradication of those misanthropic ideas and practices in the territories subject to their jurisdiction.”9 At this point, the delegates of Greece and Hungary proposed an amendment that broke the impasse by moving to drop all reference to any
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proposal was accepted, and effectively the matter was dropped, despite an unsuccessful effort in 1967 to revive the issue.10
Dr. Meir Rosenne, who served as consul of Israel in New York from 1961 to 1967, delivered an important address in 1984 at a World Zionist Organization Information Department seminar held at the US State Department. Later, in 1987, Judge Hadassa Ben Itto went on record with a solid interview. These -person sources are valuable not only because of the facts they contain but also because the individuals who gave them possessed a broad perspective and understood the importance of this episode. Each of these accounts conveys a sense of the contemporary mood. In view of are cited at length. Ambassador Rosenne explained:
Among my duties at the time was to serve as Israel’s observer in New York at various United Nations deliberations on human rights. In the context of human rights, our chief concern then was the plight of Soviet Jewry— which, I must insist, remains a high priority for us.
One of the UN organs—the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities—after weeks of bitter debate and negotiation drafted a “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.”
That forgotten episode ironically has a serious impact on the subsequent evolution of world opinion and international law regarding Israel and Zionism.
This is how it happened.
Early in the discussions [c. March 1965], the Sub-Comission quickly agreed to adopt a special Article condemning apartheid as a form of racism as [were] Nazism and neo-Nazism.
Because the Holocaust was still fresh in the minds of human rights advocates—and also because of an appalling worldwide epidemic of antisemitic incidents in the early 1960s—the American representative [Marietta Peabody Tree] during the debate in the Human Rights Commission proposed the explicit condemnation of antisemitism in this draft UN Convention.
Joel Fishman
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The Soviet representative, staunchly supported by the other East European experts, countered this move by submitting an amendment that would have added the word “Zionism” to the list of forms of racism to be condemned.
This gave rise to a bitter discussion that culminated in a compromise, to wit: References to all be dropped from the draft.
The very same exercise was repeated later that year [October 1965] in the Third Committee (the Social Committee) of the UN General Assembly.
With this clever tactic and propaganda on Zionism and Judaism onto a world stage. In this, Moscow won a double victory:
(1) It prevented the and thus succeeded in downgrading the moral, political, and symbolic weight that a condemnation of Jew-hatred would have carried throughout the world.
(2) It established the precedent for linking Zionism with Nazism, which led to the overwhelming adoption by the UN General Assembly, eleven years later, of the resolution that equated Zionism with racism [UNGA Resolution 3379 of November 10, 1975].
It is essential to remember this history and to keep the record straight: In 1975 it was certainly the Arab states that took the initiative with this resolution. But it is the Soviet Union that is the source of this evil doctrine.11
Judge Ben Itto also witnessed this episode. She had been a judge in the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court since 1960. In 1965 she received a special appointment with diplomatic status and joined the members of Israel’s permanent delegation to the UN. During the Assembly, Ben Itto was “on loan” to the Foreign Ministry (then under Foreign Minister Golda Meir) with the special permission of the minister of justice and the president of the Supreme Court.
In a 1987 interview, Ben Itto recounted the facts and was outspoken in her prediction of the consequences of Palestinian and Soviet incitement. Her clear moral clarity of a judge. She said:
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Something very similar to the ‘30s is beginning to happen. It doesn’t have to be another Holocaust; it can be a disaster of another kind.
.... The world is now being prepared to hate the Jews, to delegitimize and dehumanize the Jews. We are being set up as the enemies of the world, so that Jews will deserve what’s coming to them. It will be open season on the Jews in the name of the United Nations.12
The interviewer probed Ben Itto on the 1965 episode, and his description of the judge’s response complements Dr. Rosenne’s analysis:
Judge Ben Itto insists that there is an international conspiracy against the Jews at work here. It involves the Arabs, but it was begun—and is continued—by the Soviets. She makes no bones about declaring that it is a conspiracy by people who wish upon the Jews another genocidal fate such as they suffered in the Holocaust.
She dates it all back to the use of a technical argument by the Russians during the drafting of the Forms of Racial Discrimination at the United Nations in 1965, when she spent three months in the UN building. The Russians, she said, were kinds of racism. But they strongly objected to the American delegation’s insistence that it was inconceivable that antisemitism was adequately covered by the mention of Nazism.
“But Nazism is just one form of anti-Semitism,” she points out. “We forgot all the pogroms. The killing of Jews did not start with the Nazis. They just did it on a bigger scale—but there were many atrocities practiced before the Nazis. Antisemitism,” she emphasizes, “should have been mentioned as a form of racism because it is, in fact, practiced against a race. We thought that self-evident.”
Instead, Russians would have none of it. In her view, the reason is simple. The Russians know that they are anti-Semites, and emphatically didn’t want antisemitism because they too would have to join that club of racists before the world.”
The Russians wanted not even the merest mention of antisemitism, but they wanted to accomplish this goal without having to vote on the issue.
Joel Fishman
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So they latched onto the idea as a technical maneuver of insisting that if antisemitism was named as a form of racism, then Zionism must also be listed as a form of racism.
.... Behind the scenes the Russians did not at all seriously argue the proposition that Zionism is racism—“it was almost a joke. They said that they were only suggesting the idea to get the Americans off their knew full well that the idea that Zionism is racism is an indefensible proposition.13
Toward the end of the interview, Judge Ben Itto remarked that “the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution of 1975 started in 1965, which was before the Six-Day War, before the West Bank, back when Israel still had relations with all the Eastern European countries, including the Soviet Union .... Today [1987] it [the resolution] is being pushed with Russian minds and Arab money.”14 Except for the demise of the Soviet Union, the situation at present is very similar.
The Political Context
Until the mid-1970s, the matter remained dormant, but during the decade that followed, a new geopolitical reality emerged. Israel won the Six-Day War, which damaged Russian prestige at home and abroad. Consequently, Moscow launched against Israel and Jews in the USSR and in its satellite states, from which great numbers of Jews wished to emigrate. Later, as a result of the Yom Kippur War (October 1973), the Arab oil states quadrupled the cost of oil, which increased their international leverage. It is also possible that Palestinian acts of terror, such as the hijackings of TWA, Pan Am, and BOAC airplanes (September 6, 1970); the Munich Olympics massacre (September 5, 1972); and the murders in Khartoum (March 1, 1973) intimidated Western countries. For its part, Egypt gradually began to reduce the presence of Soviet advisers,15 left the Soviet camp, and in 1979 signed a separate peace treaty with Israel under American auspices. By default, Soviet diplomacy endeavored to isolate Egypt and made a large investment in the PLO.16
An internal research paper of the Information Department of the World Zionist Organization described the circumstances that immediately preceded the adoption of UNGA Resolution 3379:
...the stages and escalation of the process leading to the resolution were well planned and executed by the opponents of Zionism .... Although they had originally hoped to cause Israel’s suspension from the UN during
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this assembly [the thirtieth], along the lines of South Africa’s suspension in 1974, the Arabs met with more opposition than they anticipated, even among the Third World countries who feared that the US would leave the UN in protest if Israel were suspended, taking with it its contribution to the UN budgets, which amounts to 25 percent of the total. Therefore, the Arab states chose to concentrate on passing a resolution against Zionism, assuming that this would succeed...17
Accordingly, in September 1975 Somalia introduced an amendment to the charter of the Program of the Decade against Racism and Racial Discrimination that would recognize Zionism as a form of racism.18
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