- You may have heard the phrase, "Zionism is racism. " Though a lot of folks think it's just a provocative and controversial way to critique the policies of the Israeli government, the history of this idea that, "Zionism equals racism," is actually a lot darker and more complex. But where exactly does this idea originate?
How did it evolve into a campaign of diplomatic assault to challenge Israel's underlying legitimacy as a sovereign state? And what did the Soviet Union have to do with all this? Let's take a closer look at UN Resolution 3379.
(funky music) On November 10th, 1975, the United Nations voted to declare that, "Zionism was a form of racism "and racial discrimination. " It was exactly 37 years after Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in Nazi Germany, which was one of the first major events of the Holocaust. From the outset, the proposal of Resolution 3379 was embroiled in controversy.
This was made clear in a powerful speech given by then U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a celebrated U.
S. Senator from New York. Speaking at the U.
N. , he said that, "What we have here is a lie - a political lie "of a variety well-known to the 20th Century. " Namely, anti-Semitism.
Still, despite such objections, Resolution 3379 passed with a 2:1 vote margin. In the end, only 35 nations of the 107 voting members stood in opposition to its overt manipulation of language. And yet, like all statistics, the numbers don't tell the whole story, which actually began about a decade before the passage of the resolution.
In 1965, the United States and Brazil introduced a proposal at the U. N. to condemn anti-Semitism, and recognize it as a form of racism, along with Nazism and apartheid.
Yet, the Soviet Union sought to change the language of that proposal, perhaps because it was perceived as a threat to their own domestic, anti-Jewish policies, which might have come under scrutiny. So, the Soviets submitted an amendment to be added to the proposal, that would have tagged Zionism onto the list of condemned ideologies, including anti-Semitism, Nazism, colonialism and racism. And yet, this would seem to have been a shift in thinking on the part of the Soviets.
See, given Israel's early socialist roots in the Kibbutz movement, the young country was initially seen by the Soviets as a potential communist ally. Yet, by the mid-1960s, the strength of Israel's connections to the United States were increasingly established, and so, this initial attack against Zionism by the Soviet Union was seen as one of the many diplomatic proxy battles of the Cold War. Anyway, as Ambassador Moynihan addressed in his speech following the vote on Resolution 3379, this shift by the Soviets brought them all the way to a position where they were effectively saying that Nazism was a kind of racism, and Zionism was a kind of racism, so that Zionism was on equal footing with Nazism.
So, is your head spinning yet? Don't worry, it should be, because this masterful example of Orwell's concept of doublethink, doesn't make any logical sense at all. By this cynical approach of passing off the national pride of Zionism, as a form of national hatred instead, the Soviets turned the shield of Jewish statehood into a perverse weapon of attack against itself.
But their efforts to undermine Israel's legitimacy as an independent state, were as transparent as their feigned support for condemning anti-Semitism in the first place. After all, the Russians had a rich and storied history of oppression and aggression against the Jews that dated back decades, to the programs under the Czar in the late 1800s. All of which is immortalized in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that infamous and epic fabrication of anti-Semitic propaganda that was first published in pre-Soviet Moscow at the start of the 20th Century.
The themes of the Protocols are, by now, pretty well known, some having been inherited from earlier anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and, they include some popular favorites such as Jewish lust for money and power, the enslavement of non-Jews, control and manipulation of the media, and all of it for the obvious purpose of global and total domination. Now, the Soviets had influence over the Eastern European bloc, and the larger communist bloc of nations and, with the lingering anti-Semitism in many of these regions, even in the wake of World War II, they already had a strong base of support for their plan to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli state, by attacking Zionism. But, they also intended to further expand their influence, and that's where a diplomatic alliance formed with the Muslim country bloc and the Arab League, from which many nations had already gone to war with Israel multiple times during the state's brief history, and lost.
Likewise, because the Soviet plan grouped Zionism with colonialism and racism, it successfully fueled pan-African sentiments to gain the support of the African bloc as well. So, the Russians were just stacking up their blocs like a political game of Tetris. Now, after the Arabs defeat in the 1967 and 1973 wars, an opportunity was ripe to find a new approach for crushing the Jewish state, without costly and futile war campaigns.
And, the Soviets have been developing just the solution, Operation SIG. Operation SIG stood for Sioniskeeye Gosudarstva, or Zionist Governments, and was the latest Russian plan of diplomatic propaganda against Jewish sovereignty. It referred to the United States as, ".
. . an arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom, "financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians.
" But, perhaps to consolidate their new alliance with the Arab and Muslim blocs, Operation SIG added a new claim to the mix. That the purpose of Zionist control of the United States, ". .
. was to subordinate the entire Islamic world. " And this is where the international story begins for Yasser Arafat, then terrorist leader of the P.
L. O. , or Palestine Liberation Organization.
Between the two failed wars against Israel and, just a few years before Operation SIG, the KGB decided that Arafat was their man, and would support his position as the leader of the Palestinians. In return, they asked Arafat to declare war on American imperial Zionism, which he had no problem doing. The amazing entry was laid out in a 2003 Wall Street Journal article entitled "The KGB's Man," written by the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc.
The gist of it was that the Kremlin was bankrolling Arafat, transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in laundered money. The article, by this former KGB officer, claims that the Soviets even destroyed Arafat's birth records in Cairo, in order to make a case that he was born in Jerusalem, and strengthen his claim to Palestinian leadership. This relationship culminated in an unforgettable speech that Arafat gave at the United Nations on November 13th 1974, when he proclaimed, "Our resolve to build a new world is fortified - "a world free of colonialism, imperialism, "neo-colonialism and racism in each of its instances, "including Zionism.
" And, less than a year later, during the lead-up to the vote on Resolution 3379, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin called, not just for the people of the United States, "To rid their society of the Zionists," but also, ". . .
for the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations, and the extinction of Israel as a state. " There it was. "The extinction of Israel as a state.
" As only the most celebrated Looney-Tunes of despots can accomplish, it was the most honest and naked expression of the ultimate objectives underlying the "Zionism is racism" campaign. And, it's proponents would succeed, in the words of Ambassador Moynihan, "in finally giving that manipulated language, ". .
. the appearance of international sanction," just six weeks later. Even the most egregious actions of other governments, whether it's the murder of a country's own citizens, as in China and the Soviet Union, or the racist policies of a nation, as was segregation in the United States, and apartheid in South Africa, simply do not translate to the de-legitimization of those countries, or threaten their independent sovereignty and right to exist.
I mean, can you imagine if the Free Tibet movement didn't just call for the liberation of the Tibetan people from Chinese rule, but rather for the end of China as a nation? And yet, that is precisely what's happening when Zionism is turned around as a tool of attack against Israel. Of course, criticism of government is one thing, it's precisely that kind of engagement and disagreement that's essential for any healthy democracy, but a call for the dissolution of a country, and the denial of its majority population to pursue and maintain their own self-determination, especially on grounds that they're so unique and particular, that they can only be applied to that country, well, that's just something else entirely.
Namely, it's an act of international prejudice and discrimination. Sadly, for all the positive peacekeeping and humanitarian work that the U. N.
may do internationally, its track record on Israel just ain't that hot. Consider that, just in the last five years alone, the U. N.
Human Rights Council has somehow justified condemnation of Israel in nearly as many resolutions as every other country in the rest of the world combined. Now, I'm not saying that there's nothing to criticize, I'm just saying that there's been a lot of bad stuff going on all over the world. From Myanmar to North Korea, Syria to Iran and Saudi Arabia, let's not forget about Venezuela, Somalia, and Russia and Crimea.
Sometimes, the list just seems endless. So, we should probably stop and wonder, what's really going on if we can pile all of that on one side of a scale, and then watch as the countries of the U. N.
point to Zionism, and somehow conclude that it matches the questionable moral weight of everything else. Honestly, some of these claims are just plain absurd. I mean, condemning Israel as the leading violator of mental, physical and environmental health?
Or the world's worst violator of women's rights? I mean, Israel had a female Prime Minister before women could drive in some countries. As U.
S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said, "When countries single out Israel "for unfair treatment at the U. N.
, "it isn't just a problem for Israel, "it is a problem for all of us. " "No country is immune from criticism, nor should it be, "but when that criticism takes the form "of singling out just one country, "unfairly, bitterly and relentlessly, over and over and over, "that is just wrong - and we all know it. " In other words, it's not to say that Israel hasn't done anything wrong, it's just that it's more than a little odd to suggest that Israel alone has done everything wrong.
Eventually, 16 years after Resolution 3379 had passed, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union imminent, the U. N. took up the matter again on December 17th, 1991, but this time, to repeal it.
Yet, the damage had already been done. The "Zionism is racism" attack was first introduced as a way to negate the basic idea of Israel as a country. And its use in disproportionately attacking Israel had become well established.
And, it still continues to emerge in new forms, including in the often counter-intuitive demands of the BDS movement. Whatever the varying goals of its individual adherence, the movement struggles with its own strain of anti-Zionism, and has appropriated the "Zionism is racism" attack for a new era, whether with or without a complete appreciation of the origins and original purpose of the phrase. And so, this, ultimately, is the sad legacy of Resolution 3379, and the phrase "Zionism is racism," whose purpose was never to change governing policy, but rather to undermine the basic national sovereignty of Israel's right to exist as a nation among the rest of the world.
