The Rock Island Argus · 1 December 1988

CP-1988-047

U.N. should rescind the Zionism-as-racism rule

By George Will

Transcribed from the clipping

“The U.N.’s moral authority evaporated in the 1970s when it became dominated by radical Third World regimes… The U.N. should be called the U.R. — United Regimes. The United Nations has little to do with representing nations, properly understood as peoples united by political and cultural affinities. One reason U.N. hostility toward Israel is so unremitting is that Israel is a real nation with a representative regime. To most U.N. members, whose national cohesion is based on coercion, Israel is either unintelligible or a reproach. The PLO, an organization formally dedicated to the destruction of a U.N. member, was granted U.N. ‘observer’ status in 1975, the year the United Nations passed the resolution equating Zionism and racism. Actually, Zionism is an especially defensible nationalism… On the principle that the best defense is a good offense, President-elect Bush and his nominee for secretary of state, James Baker, should say to the United Nations: Go to Geneva — and do not return until you have rescinded the Zionism-as-racism resolution. That resolution is integral to the U.N.’s principal enterprise: the delegitimization of Israel.… The Republican Party platform of 1988 says: ‘The Republican Party reaffirms its support for recision of U.N. Resolution 3379, which equates Zionism with racism. Failure to repeal that resolution will justify attenuation of our support for the U.N.’ If the United Nations wants to squander more millions on a Geneva homage to Arafat, let the sum be deducted from U.S. obligations… Now, exactly who favors cutting Medicare to subsidize Arafat?”

Context added by this archive

The repeal campaign, three years before it succeeded, written as an ultimatum and carrying the Republican platform language that made it policy. It runs beside a Jeff MacNelly cartoon in which men labeled THE EXPERTS study a wall sprayed WE RECOGNIZE ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO EXIT and reassure each other that it must be a typo.

Cite this item

"U.N. should rescind the Zionism-as-racism rule," The Rock Island Argus, 1 December 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-047. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-047

Elsewhere in the archive

• Israel accuses Hamas of diverting aidThe Rock Island Argus · 20 September 2016 · the same newspaper
• Gaza Strip: the forgotten stepchildNorthwest Herald · 4 January 1988 · the same year
• Israeli soldiers fire on protestersCarroll County Times · 6 January 1988 · the same year
• Israel condemns U.N. vote on deportationsThe Birmingham News · 6 January 1988 · the same year