Who said zionism is racism

Global Voice. Sign Up to Stay Informed. Email address. And while the resisters use legal tactics the Soviet government, does not. It uses threats, deceit and hate, what is worse, numerous non-governmental organizations and movements also trumpet the hate legitimized by the U. At stake is not merely verbiage, words have consequences. The sage Abraham Joshua Heschel has cautioned post-Holocaust society that the Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers; it began with defamation.

Too often silence has greeted the bigotry, whether at the U. Permit me to remind you of the wisdom of Edmund Burke; "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent. To launch a determined effort to end the abomination and obscenity of "Zionism equals racism," to nail the "terrible lie. Our symposium, which will run until 4 p.

Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, First, I would like to thank all those who were instrumental in planning this Study Day. It is, I believe, a most suitable topic for Human Rights Day. Actually this study day, like the inscription on Liberty Bell, "Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof," also began in Israel.

This is the second in a series of four seminars dealing with the malicious "Zionism Equals Racism" equation. The first, under auspices of Mr. Chaim Herzog, the President of Israel, was held at the presidential residence in Jerusalem.

Exactly 66 years before the Jerusalem conference on combatting anti-Zionism was convened, the First World War came to an end when the western democracies defeated totalitarian regimes. It took another 26 years and another world war for the forces of democracy, humanitarianism and the dignity of man to establish the United Nations. That organization was meant to pave the road to a horizon of ever expanding brotherhood and to place an immovable barrier before totalitarianism and repression, cynicism and war.

It was too soon after Hitler decimated Jewry in his gas chambers to be openly anti-Semitic -- too soon even for the USSR and for the Arab sponsors of the resolution. So in blatant double-think they decided to proffer another scapegoat for all the world's ills.

Zionism, Israel and the Jewish People were all lumped into the venomous equation that Zionism ostensibly equals Racism. They had discovered that Israel was the exposed bastion of democracy in the Middle East and that Zionism, its ideological parent could be attacked with impunity.

What a windfall this discovery was for the anti-democratic forces at the U. For with one well-aimed stone they could down two birds. By attacking Israel -- which is a progressive society, a true parliamentary democracy, universalist in outlook, having a culture with a fiercely held belief in the moral principles of the biblical prophets -- they would also defame its sister democracies.

The truths they would dearly like to undermine are the truths that your forefathers held to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and that they are endowed with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To the totalitarian communists and to repressive regimes of those Arab countries who were among the sponsors of the cynicn] Zionism-Racism resolution, these are not self-evident truths. The misguided acquiescence of all the nations at the U. From that ill-starred day at the General Assembly in other agencies of the U.

Rather than deal with the mandate implicit in its name: the U. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization which was supposed to further world peace by removing social, religious and racial tensions, it has opted for increasing those very tensions. It has perverted the intent of its founders through the introduction of exclusively political denunciations of the State of Israel.

They have brought to the U. In the face of the sorry state of the United Nations and of its implications for the free world I am glad, that we opened our campaign in Jerusalem, continuing here today in Washington; in March in Paris, in May in London; and in July in Buenos Aires. If we shall succeed in convincing the enlightened nations of the world -- leading moral personalities, indeed world public -- opinion it shall be a double achievement. First, we will forestall further damage to the Jewish people and to Zionism, its movement of national liberation.

They didn't really believe their own wicked equation of Zionism with Racism any more than did the cartoonists of Der Sturmer who affixed grotesque noses on the faces of "their" Jews. It merely served as a symbol, a negative feeling. Second, the benefit of a successful campaign shall not be reaped by Israel alone. Paradoxically it will also help save the U. This campaign might rid the U. Let this campaign free the United Nations to once again take up the enlightened agenda its founders intended: proclaim liberty, pursue justice, support, democracy, underwrite peace.

The Resolution and its Consequences Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams I am honored and delighted to be with you here today to discuss the impact of the infamous United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. I can think of no better occasion on which to hold a conference on this issue than on Human Rights Day. This Declaration, Americans believed, would embody the consensus of the international community on behalf of human rights and individual liberty. And the U.

If these early dreams and expectations seem seriously compromised today, if the prestige of the U. When the U. Indeed, it seemed to many Jews at the time that the creation of the United Nations, like the creation of the State of Israel, was a kind of "answer" to the Holocaust, a guarantee that such horrors would never be repeated -- not to Jews, not to Christians, not to anyone.

What actually happened, of course, is that the United Nations, far from preventing the re-emergence of anti-Semitism, has actually helped to legitimize it. It's easy to understand how this all came about. The U. This is the famous -- or rather the infamous -- "Automatic Majority" one hears so much about. The P. Since the NAM dominates the U. This obscene event actually came to pass on November 10, , when the General Assembly adopted a resolution defining Zionism as a "Form of racism and racial discrimination.

On the one hand, there were observers like the great human rights activist and Nobel Peace prize laureate, Andrei Sakharov, who warned that the U.

On the other hand, there were those who felt that the Jewish community should not "overreact" to the anti-Zionism resolution. After all, they argued, the U. How can such things matter in the real world? Today, however, we know that words do matter, that ideas do count. And we also know that the anti-Zionist resolution was a watershed event in modern Jewish history. As the British historian Paul Johnson recently put it: "It was true that the [anti-Zionist] vote was merely on paper.

But the real danger of the U. Koh Singapore Ambassador to U. Although nine years have passed since the adoption by the U. General Assembly of a resolution equating Zionism with Racism, I still remember the circumstances surrounding its adoption vividly. The issue first surfaced in Mexico at the Incernational Conference on Women in the summer of It was then raised at the U. General Assembly in the fall of the same year. I must confess that at that point I knew very little about Zionism.

I therefore, decided to read some of the literature on Zionism. I read the writings of Theodor Herzl and other Zionist leaders. It was therefore factually incorrect to describe Zionism as a form of racial Discrimination. What were the proponents of the resolution seeking to achieve? They were seeking to de-legitimize the very moral basis on which the State of Israel was founded. Since Signapore recognized the State of Israel we therefore felt that it would be wrong for us to support the resolution.

Has the resolution achieved its objective in the Third World? I do not think that the passage of the Resolution by the U. Some of the supporters of the resolution later regretted their decision. I recall, for example, that President Echevaria of Mexico actually went to Israel to apologize for his delegation's vote for the resolution at the U. What approaches might best be followed to counter the effects of the resolution in the Third World?

I would suggest three approaches. First, the government of Israel should attempt to disseminate information in the Third World about Zionism. In , I found that most of my friends at the U. Second, the government of Israel and its allies in the West, should continue to persuade its friends in the Third World to refrain from supporting resolutions, declarations and other documents at various international forums in which the proposition Zionism is a form of Racism can be found.

Third, the best thing Israel can do to counter the effect of the resolution is to scrupulously practice racial equality at home.

If the Arab minority within Israel were treated on terns of absolute equality with other Israeli citizens, this would be the best refutation of the charge that Zionism is racist. Precisely because the impact of the anti-Zionist resolution has been gradual and imperceptible, its evil effects are often difficult to trace with any degree of certainty.

Yet there are also cases where it is less difficult to demonstrate how the Zionism-as-Racism resolution has affected public opinion. I would like briefly to discuss one such example this afternoon. I'm sure that all of you were as appalled as I was by the distorted manner in which much of the American media reported the war in Lebanon.

Yet is seems to me that perhaps the most extraordinary episode of this entire affair was the way in which much of the German press covered the war.

As a German observer, Frank Offenbach, put it in a recent issue of Encounter magazine April, '83 , the kind of vocabulary used to describe Israeli actions in Lebanon, "Has not been seen in the German press since the end of World War II -- and indeed the terminology was intended to suggest the comparison with the Nazi destruction of the Jews.

Their reports were full of 'The Final Solution' Endlosung Endlosung, Volkermord, Vernichtungskrieg: These words have a terrible history attached to them. That they should be used by German journalists to describe Israeli policies is a staggering development. I am not saying that coverage of the Lebanon War was worse in Germany than anywhere else; I don't think it was, it probably was not.

What I am saying is that the German press -- the liberal, progressive German press -- would never have dared to equate Israel with the Nazis had the ground for such a comparison not been carefully prepared years ago by the United Nations when it equated Zionism with Racism. The corrupt arithmetic of the General Assembly had indeed become the "conventional wisdom" of international society -- or at least of that part of international society which likes to think of itself as "enlightened" and "progressive.

Yet precisely because it is so vulgar, so obscene, such a perversion of language itself, the equation of Zionism with racism may also have an unintended, salutary effect. Its very perversity reminds us that we have real enemies in the world, that their enmity is not the result of some peculiar misunderstanding which can easily be rectified, but is an unyielding fact of life, to be faced and dealt with accordingly.

For the United States, for Israel, for the other democracies, and for the Jewish people, the world is indeed a dangerous place. I am delighted that you are holding this conference here today. For in doing so, you have demonstrated that you understand that in addition to military threats, in addition to economic threats, in addition to strategic threats, we must also learn to cope with ideological threats. Indeed, marshalling the intellectual and political resources to cope with all these challenges is the great moral imperative of our time.

What has been the effect of the resolution on the United Nations? I think the most damaging effect of the resolution has been on the United Nations. One of the utilities of the U. Its resolutions and decisions can have an impact on world public opinion so long as the U. For these reasons, the U. But, when the Third World or a part of it abuses its power in the General Assembly and rams through resolutions which are untrue or unprincipled or inflammatory, they do tremendous damage to the credibility of the institution.

General Assembly as its common jury and starts to view it as a forum which distorts the truth, then the small and militarily weak countries would have lost the principal forum through which their voices can be heard.

Since I am a believer I don't think there are any accidents. I am very delighted to be following Ambassador Koh, because the things I am going to be saying this morning are very much in the spirit, Mr. Ambassador, of what you have said. I deeply regret, by the way, that my old friend and sparring partner, Secretary Abrams is not in the room because we've been playing "Two For the Seesaw", for quite a while and we are going to play it again this morning.

Secretary Abrams spoke in the spirit of that side of our democratic policy, both American and world Jewish -- and we American Jews live at the intersection of the two -- which views the world outside the democratic camp in all of its nastiness and cries out in Manichean fashion that this is headed by an empire of evil.

There is another side to our American perception as we know from the very White House to which the Secretary has repaired. That other side of the American perception and -- as I shall soon develop -- of our Jewish perception, follows after the feeling of Ambassador Koh, which is that with that empire of evil, no matter how evil it may be, one has to live on the same planet. With those characters in the Arab world who delight in calling Zionism racism, we will ultimately have to find some ways of making peace, which means building the bridge.

With the Third World in particular, that automatic majority in that tragic talking shop of the U. General Assembly, we are going to have to find some way, as Ambassador Koh said, so very eloquently and very elegantly, we are going to have to find some way of making them understand that they are off on the wrong track.

And therefore I am not going to preach to the converted, to the Democratic camp, American, Jewish, worldwide Jewish community here assembled, I am going to preach a bit to the unconverted. Our motivations in Zionism, our internal Jewish motivations in Zionism come from deep in our religion, they come from the deepest wellsprings of our being. But when you talk with an Arab who was born in Jaffa and who is now living in Beirut or Paris, the only thing that you can say to him that makes any sense is the notion that Zionism is essentially a form of affirmative action.

Zionism in the world is a claim of a displaced and homeless people after twenty centuries of exile for the right to some little bit of normalcy and therefore for some unequal redress in the 20th Century, for the wrongs of many centuries before. This is our moral claim upon the world order. That is -- as you said so well, so beautifully, Mr. Ambassador -- that is precisely what the moral claim of the Third World upon us, upon the rest of the world is today.

It is why these many billions upon billions with which the banking structure is overlaid, with which the third world is being supported and without even a thank you. Because the Third World comes to the world order and says for all of the generations of colonialism and exploitation, I use the famous code words, 'You owe us something, you owe us something. Therefore those in the Third World who would denounce Zionism undercall their own moral claim upon the world for any special consideration.

Those in the Third World who would call us colonialists and say, 'What right have they to one-time redress,' must ask the question, 'By what right does the Third World behave, or parts of it, as it does. First, an observation about the Soviet Union. The World Jewish Congress is supremely aware that there are Jews not only within the western democracies, there are Jews in Hungary and Rumania and a handful in Poland, and a very large community in the Soviet Union, all of whom are part of the world Jewish polity.

And what we want for them is not an overturn of the regime, we don't dream of that, we don't imagine it. We know that that isn't going to be, we know it as Americans, we certainly know it as Jews. What we are looking for is the day when unlike what has been going on on Soviet television in the last month, my colleagues at Columbia and the Harriman Institute tell me that for the last month on the evening news there have been bitter attacks on Zionism.

The only thing that they haven't used is the phrase, "racism. Now let us remind the Soviet Union, let me remind it, if I may, from this platform, on behalf of at least some very serious opinion in the world Jewish community, that we remember that in World War II the Soviet Union saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, who were refugees within it. We remember very well Mr. We remember very well that part of Soviet legality in theory is the right of nationalities and the right to national identities and national cultures within the Soviet Union.

We call upon the Soviet Union, that opinion for which I speak here, to remember its better nature, and to remember that in the long run if we must live in the same world with "it," it must live in the same world with us. It is particularly -- and I am going to use a very undiplomatic word -- it is particularly swinish, for Zionism is racism is to be hurled by forces which know very well, that in the forefront in the battle against apartheid there has been the world Jewish community.

When the Decade Against Racism was announced, the World Jewish Congress in its' 75 plenum in Jerusalem passed a very strong resolution against all forms of discrimination, based upon race, creed and any other kind of separatist identity. Sitting here in Washington back in February of '83 we repeated that resolution. We repeated that resolution only more strongly. And it is of course true that the United Nations exists or was created, as Secretary Abrams said, to make an end of Nazism, to turn an historic corner.

It needs to be recalled to its truest purpose. Now, from the point of view of these reflections our outcry on this Human Rights Day, is an outcry to those who would abuse human rights, by choosing up sides, and by trying to create a world in which there are no bridges of moderation and of civility. We cannot survive -- whoever the "we" may be, not great powers, not small powers, not great powers on our side, not great powers on the other side, not small powers on either side -- we cannot survive if we divide the world into two enemy camps bristling with bombs and bristling with the nastiest possible kinds of slogans.

The only thing that can possibly end this canard of Zionism is racism, is the patience which will bring understanding into the other side, to make it understand that by hurling this charge it is undercalling its own civility, its own decency, its own right of existence.

And so, let the Third World take heed, its claim upon the world is no less or no more good than that of Zionism, let the Russians take heed, d'entente whatever name you may call it -- by, d'entente includes the end of rhetoric and the beginning again of decency, within their borders and in their relationship to the rest of the world.

Let the racists the true racists in the world, those who really detest human rights -- take heed that the Jewish community, world Jewry, is united in one feeling.

We are not deflected or deterred by calumnies hurled at us from our irrevocable commitment to human equality, everywhere in the world.

His focus was on external considerations -- the delegitimization of the State of Israel. But what was undoubtedly of equal and perhaps greater importance in Soviet motivations were internal considerations.

Close analysis of Soviet propaganda in newspapers, journals and books during and afterwards illuminates these considerations. Probably nowhere else has the U. While not generally known, the fall of marked a new stage in the Soviet anti-Semitic propaganda drive, masquerading as anti-Zionism.

What was missing from the new campaign was the kind of moral sanction that could provide an ideological legitimacy to the campaign which had clear anti-Semitic overtones. There was discouragingly little on the subject of Zionism in the sacred writings of Bolshevism's founding fathers, including V.

Lenin, to offer a justification for the media drive. Indeed, the inherent bigotry, as some sensitive foreign Communists noted, did violence to classical Marxism and especially to Lenin. It was for this reason that the Kremlin could and did seize upon the U. That resolution could offer a rationalization for virulent anti-Zionism that was international in character and that sprung from the single most prominent global institution.

As a result of the secret Central Committee directive, saw an outpouring of vicious anti-Semitism, almost unparalleled in the Soviet Union. Their articles, ready by millions, echoed the themes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, particularly that the Zionists, prompted by the Judaic "Chosen People" concept, seek to dominate world society.

It was precisely at the moment when the Soviet mass media campaign against Zionism was mounting that the United Nations adopted on November 10, the resolution equating Zionism with racism. The reaction in the U.

What the U. Indeed, Soviet delegates at the U. As if by signal, the Soviet press launched a monumental effort both to land the U. The new and clearly orchestrated anti-Zionist campaign now exceeded in scope and magnitude even previous efforts. Pravda hailed the U. The principal ideological journal of the Party, Kommunist closed the year with an elaborate commentary on the U.

From until the present, the U. Several score of such volumes have been published. Most significant was the volume written by a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Lydia Modzhorian, a specialist on international jurisprudence. Her book was appropriately entitled Zionism as a Form of Racial Discrimination, the precise language of the U. The Modzhorian book became a standard Soviet work on the subject of Zionism. It was exactly fifty years ago, that a presiding judge in a historic Swiss trial'dealing with the authenticity of Protocols of the Elders of Zion offered some pertinent comments.

As we enter into the tenth year of a resolution which has sustained and reinforced anti-Semitism, no more so than in the USSR, it is appropriate to raise the question of how much longer will civilization be burdened by such bigotry. Significantly, some progress has been recorded. A previous U. As a consequence, the United States and various West European countries refused to participate in the "Decade's" activities.

And African countries have become increasingly concerned that the "Zionism equals racism" resolution acts as an obstacle to the struggle against apartheid and racial discrimination. General Assembly Third Committee, several weeks ago, adopted by consensus an Ethiopian draft resolution on a Second U. Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination which carries no reference to "Zionism equals racism.

The Kremlin, clearly, regards the resolution as critical to its current ideological interests and concerns. A rebuff to its determination is to some extent encouraging. But a decisive step can come only with the rollback of the malicious and incendiary resolution itself. That must remain the goal of those committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Lewis Chairman, World Jewish Congress, American Section It is my distinct honor, on behalf of the World Jewish Congress, to chair this session and introduce its two distinguished speakers.

In joining the sponsorship of today's symposium, the World Jewish Congress, representing the Jewish communities of sixty-eight countries, is underlining the central proposition that the equation of Zionism with racism was a slander against the Jewish people as a whole. The World Jewish Congress has more than just a passing interest about what happens at the United Nations. As a longstanding non-governmental organi- zation with consultative status at the U.

Nevertheless, the founding president of the World Jewish Congress, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, summed up our feelings in his formal response nearly ten years ago to the adoption of the infamous resolution. He said, "This resolution is a travesty of historical facts and a defamation of the national liberation movement of a people which, for two millennia, was deprived of a national existence and the right of self-determination and was subjected to most cruel persecution.

It also distorts the meaning of racism and racial dis- crimination; by simply equating it with anything that some nations disapprove of, the concept of racism is debased and the fight against the evil of racial discrimination, in which Jews and Zionists traditionally played an important role, will inevitably be weakened.

It clearly would have been impossible to have held this symposium without hearing from then Ambassador, now Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hot Opinion. Most Read. Reporters' Tweets. About Us. Contact us. Advertise with Us. Terms Of Service. Privacy Policy. Subscriber Agreement. JPost Jobs. Cancel Subscription. Customer Service.

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Angry American Jewish groups, for example, retaliated against Mexico with a boycott campaign that cost the Mexicans millions of dollars in lost tourist income. Some strategists have warned in the past that a campaign for repeal might have some snares of its own. Arab governments, for example, might oppose outright repeal unless the General Assembly passed a resolution stating that the Palestinian people have as much right as the Jewish people to the land. But Yoram Aridor, the Israeli U.

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