In less than a month, we’ll be marking 50 years since the U.N. General Assembly gave its blessing to the worst antisemitic canard of the postwar era: that Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, is a form of racism.
On Nov. 10, 1975, the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, setting in motion a half-century of demonization targeting the State of Israel that has only intensified over time, especially in the two years that have elapsed since the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The text of the resolution incorporated many of the themes promoted these days by the pro-Hamas movement internationally, not least the claim—made while white minority regimes were still in power in South Africa and what was then Rhodesia—that “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin.”
This assertion was extracted from the anti-Zionist playbook designed by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. At the time, the Soviets ran a thriving industry of anti-Zionist publications and conferences that provided the ideological justification for the wretched persecution of Soviet Jews and the denial of their right to immigrate to Israel. Critically, Soviet antizionism was rooted in classical antisemitism. In perhaps the most notorious example of this genre, a Soviet hack named Trofim Kichko published a book titled Judaism Without Embellishment, portraying Zionism as the natural outgrowth of a religion whose primary purpose was to cheat and swindle non-Jews. This same trope was reproduced in books and pamphlets with titles like “Beware! Zionism” and “Zionism in the Service of Anti-Communism.”
The insult leveled by the passage of Resolution 3379 did not lie simply in its wording. In adopting it, the General Assembly turned the United Nations into the world’s main vehicle for the promotion of Jew-hatred, creating a bureaucratic apparatus designed to amplify the Arab and Palestinian campaign to eliminate Israel as a sovereign state. Examine the world body’s various agencies and committees, and you will see this apparatus in action. To give an example, the U.N. Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item dedicated to the alleged violations of the State of Israel—and no other country. To give another, the United Nations appoints a Special Rapporteur for the “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” whose current incumbent, Francesca Albanese, has been sanctioned by the U.S. for pushing antisemitic, pro-Hamas propaganda.
Exhibit “A,” however, is the committee created by a separate resolution on the same day that Resolution 3379 was passed, and which continues to reflect the core theme of “Zionism is racism” in its work and activities. That body is the “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” (CEIRPP), whose very existence is a violation, when it comes to Israel, of the commitment in the U.N. Charter to the “sovereign equality” of all its member states.
At its various seminars in different parts of the globe, as well as its annual “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” CEIRPP pushes all the messages associated with those organizations and states that reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic polity—false claims of “apartheid,” insistence that the Palestinians displaced by the Arab war on the nascent State of Israel in 1948-49 have a “right of return” and refusal to characterize systemic Palestinian violence against Israelis as terrorism. Although Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 with what may well be the shortest resolution ever passed by the General Assembly (something that was only possible in the brief period that the United States was the unrivaled world power following the Soviet Union’s collapse), CEIRPP behaves as though it is still on the books.
As David May, my colleague at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and I argue in a research paper published last week, “As the ‘Zionism Is Racism’ resolution approaches its 50th anniversary, it is time for the United States to work for the abolition of the committee that continues to promote that twisted worldview.” The United States has always been Israel’s most reliable ally at the United Nations, fearlessly calling out the antisemitism at the heart of the world organization. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations when Resolution 3379 was passed, emphasized from the podium of the General Assembly, the declaration that Zionism is a form of racial discrimination “is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth—and so the actual truth must be restated.”
Those words are perhaps even more important today than they were at the time. The current U.S. administration has made no secret of its distaste for antizionist ravings, whether expressed on college campuses or in the halls of the United Nations. Securing the dismantlement of CEIRPP—the heart of the propaganda apparatus targeting Israel—is therefore a logical next step.
As our research paper points out, there are two ways of doing this, with the added benefit that both methods could be engaged at the same time and would complement each other.
First, the United States can lobby those countries that sit on CEIRPP to resign. This was already achieved with Hungary in 2004, Romania in 2005 and Ukraine in 2020—three states previously in the orbit of the Soviet Union whose departures were a clear indication that, in their new identities as democracies, they were determined to dispense with any legacy of Soviet foreign policy. We identify several states that are presently CEIRPP members or observers, among them Cyprus, India, Bulgaria and Ecuador, which could be similarly persuaded to resign on the grounds that their bilateral relations with Israel and their support for a peace settlement in the Middle East that enshrines Israel’s independence and security are not compatible with continuing involvement in CEIRPP’s work.
The United States can also act within the U.N.’s Fifth Committee, which deals with budgetary and administrative issues, to block funding for CEIRPP. As we note, “By insisting on a ‘zero tolerance’ policy for one-sided and unique anti-Israel institutions, Washington can absolutely refuse to grant consensus for any budget that includes funding for these bodies, which could prevent the entire budget from progressing to approval.” We also observe that there is a role for Congress as well, “which could require the State Department to certify each year that the U.S. mission to the U.N. is actively opposing funding for CEIRPP and other one-sided anti-Israel bodies.”
If the current ceasefire reached in Gaza is to have a real chance of mushrooming into a genuine peace settlement, then it is imperative to bury this remnant of the past. Thanks to the United Nations, myriad groups and individuals have felt licensed in the past 50 years to press the “Zionism equals racism” lie as a respectable truth. The Trump White House offers the best chance yet of ending CEIRPP’s existence as the first and most important step towards purging antizionism from the United Nations once and for all—because as long as it entertains the idea that eliminating the world’s only Jewish state is a justifiable proposition, real peace will remain elusive.
Source: JNS