Zionism as racism: the 1975 UN vote, the repeal, and the reversalThe inversion, stated at the UN in 1978 · 1968 to 2023
1968 to 2023
Zionism as racism: the 1975 UN vote, the repeal, and the reversal
On 10 November 1975 the United Nations General Assembly voted 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. Sixteen years later it voted 111 to 25 to take it back. What happened in between, and what happened before it, is in these clippings.
Two columns in this archive, one from 2015 and one from 2022, explain where the formula came from. Both say the same thing: it was a Soviet campaign. That is checkable, because American papers were printing the words long before the vote, and the first time they appear here is in the last paragraph of a story about an arms deal.
The whole of what this paper printed
Yahya Hammouda, a month into the job of leading the PLO, tells a Beirut paper there is nothing to stop Arabs sharing a future with Jews who have given up Zionism and racism
. The dispatch ends there.
CP-1968-002The same wire story, five paragraphs longer
It is stupid for us to ask the Israelis to return to their countries of origin.
And what he was asking for instead: Then git rid of zionism as a political and racist ideology and agree to live with the Arabs in an Arab-Jewish Palestinian state where each can have his share
.
CP-1968-003One paper kept the accusation. The other kept the offer it was attached to. The phrase entered the American press already carrying a proposal, and the first thing that happened to it was that an editor cut the proposal off.
After that it travels fast, and none of it runs through Moscow. In June 1969 a wire reporter counts the placards in a lecture hall at Hamburg University, and one of them reads Zionism is racism
. In August an American paper can print the phrase in quotation marks without explaining it. In September Nasser sends a message to the first Islamic Summit calling on Muslim states to stand against zionism and racism backed by imperialism
. In May 1970 a Jewish news agency reports that the Black Panther Party has declared Jewishness, Zionism and racism are identical
. By 1974 it is in the letters columns of Santa Barbara and Worcester.
The vote
The Blade in Toledo ran the count, the losing argument and the winning one on the same front page. Moynihan: A great evil has been loosed upon the world.
Herzog, who tore up a copy of the resolution at the lectern, said the body was on its way to becoming the world center of anti-Semitism
, and that it was fitting the vote fell on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The paper sets the word as Krystal Night. And the case for it, in the paper’s own summary: Supporters of the resolution equating Zionism with racism said it was anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic. They argued that Zionism — the movement for a Jewish national homeland in Palestine — is exclusive and thus racist.
Three weeks later the Boston Globe filled a page with letters about it, under a photograph of a demonstration in New York. Three placards are legible. One reads NEVER AGAIN. One reads 20 COUNTRIES FOR ARABS ONE FOR JEWS. The third reads ANTI-ZIONISM CODE WORD FOR ANTI-SEMITISM.
What Americans actually thought. Louis Harris put it to 1,475 adults between 22 and 29 November 1975. Disapproval ran 49 to 9. But no more than 9 per cent of the American people believe that ‘Zionism is racism’
, and 42 per cent had no view at all — 63 per cent among people who had left school at eighth grade. The column ran in at least two papers here, under two headlines.
What the delegates thought they were voting for
In January 1980 a New York Times correspondent went and asked them. The delegate of Sri Lanka, the country that introduced the resolution, said: There are problems in my mind. Racism is an ethnic thing. Zionism is a political thing, political security
, and then I’m sorry to say I haven’t taken the trouble to analyze and come to a conclusion.
Nigeria’s delegate was blunter: Whether it is accurate or not, it might produce the desired results. That’s politics, isn’t it?
Brazil’s explained that Brazil is so vulnerable and dependent on Arab oil.
Tunisia’s wanted it kept because Many Arabs want to retain it as a negotiating asset.
Eleven years later the Des Moines Register printed the whole roll call of the repeal, and three of those four names had moved. Sri Lanka, which wrote it, voted against repealing it. Nigeria voted for repeal. Tunisia did not vote.
The turn
On 17 December 1978 the Associated Press moved a story out of the General Assembly. Two papers here ran it. One of them kept a sentence the other did not.
Ilana Ben Ami, Israeli delegate, to the United Nations General Assembly · Duluth News-Tribune, 17 December 1978
Thirteen years before the resolution was repealed. Thirty-seven years before a Florida paper ran those words as a headline. The Kansas City Star carried the same dispatch that morning with all three vote counts and without that line.
After the repeal the argument does not stop, it inverts. One month on, a cartoonist in Michigan draws two panels: the left one boxed and labeled Repealed, a figure holding a placard reading ZIONISM IS RACISM; the right one labeled Pending, a figure at a bank of microphones holding one that reads ARABISM IS TERRORISM. In 1998 the same General Assembly names antisemitism a form of racism for the first time in its history. In 2001 a parallel forum at Durban votes to put the old resolution back. In 2015 the headline is Anti-Zionism is racism
.
Where it kept turning up. The formula was never one vote. It attached itself to UNESCO in Paris in December 1975, to a conference on housing in Vancouver in 1976, to a conference on racism in Geneva in 1978, to the women’s conferences in Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985, and to Durban in 2001. Each time it arrived at a meeting convened about something else, and each time the something else is what ran past midnight. At Nairobi the delegates had agreed 94 of the 372 paragraphs of a document on women’s advancement to the year 2000 when the argument broke out.
Three weeks before that, this archive holds a wire story reporting that Israel had refused travel permits to five Palestinian women invited to the same conference, for security reasons. Neither story mentions the other.
In February 1988 the United States government published its own finding that the occupied territories ran on a dual system
under which Palestinians were usually treated less favorably
than settlers in due process, freedom of movement, land use and social services. In December 1988 an American columnist wrote that the resolution calling Zionism racism was integral to the United Nations’ enterprise of delegitimizing Israel, and his party’s platform promised to cut American funding until it was repealed. Same year, same government. The two documents never meet.