Nearly 35 years have passed since the United Nations voted, in 1991, to revoke its 1975 resolution declaring Zionism to be racism. But that statement 50 years ago set the stage for the attacks on the Jewish state today, several speakers said during an event hosted this week by the U.S. and Israeli missions to the global body in Geneva.
“U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379, which wrongly declared that Zionism is a form of racism, was a symbolic assault on the Jewish people and the legitimacy of the State of Israel,” Mireille Zieseniss, acting U.S. deputy chief of mission, said at the event, which the Forum for Cultural Diplomacy also hosted.
“The adoption of this antisemitic resolution marked an unfortunate chapter in the U.N.’s history, undermining the organization’s founding principles,” she said. “Then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned in his remarks opposing the resolution that ‘a great evil has been loosed upon the world.’”
Though revoked, the “resolution’s impact, including the establishment of anti-Israel bodies within the U.N. system, reverberates to this day, emboldening those who seek to delegitimize Israel and marginalize Jewish communities worldwide,” Zieseniss said.
She added that “in the U.N. context, antisemitism, which is among the world’s oldest hatreds, hides behind the veneer of commissions, rapporteurs, ‘expert’ reports, and biased agenda items and resolutions that disproportionately single out Israel year after year.”
“Ancient prejudices are perpetuated, masquerading as criticism of Israel,” she said.
She spoke as part of a discussion that ran for about an hour and 45 minutes on “1975-2025: Confronting antisemitism and racism at the U.N.,” which the two missions hosted.
‘It planted seeds of hostility’
Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, delivered recorded remarks at the event, a half-century after his father, Chaim Herzog, then the Israeli envoy to the United Nations, tore a copy of the resolution and delivered a stinging rebuke in the General Assembly’s hall after it passed.
Chaim Herzog’s granddaughter, Ariel, attended the event on Nov. 12, as did representatives of 37 countries, according to the Israeli mission.
Daniel Meron, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, told JNS that the 50th anniversary of the resolution offered a chance to highlight its current impact on the global body.
“There are forces which are continuing to try to use the United Nations as a platform to portray Israel as the mother of all evils, and where the anti-Zionism and antisemitic notion is very prevalent,” he said. “We thought it was very good to have this event.”
Meron told JNS that the U.S. mission is to be applauded for seeking and obtaining a waiver so that its members could participate during the government shutdown.
The resolution fueled racism rather than fought it, Meron told the audience.
“It emboldened extremists, legitimized hatred and provided ideological cover for the oldest hatred known to humanity,” he said in his remarks. “It planted seeds of hostility that continue to bear poisonous fruit today, in the streets, on university campuses and across the digital world.”
‘It created the playbook’
Gil Troy, an author, historian and senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, told attendees that “one of the key words that’s often missing from definitions of antisemitism is the word ‘obsession.’”
He stated that “anti-Zionism has become a modern obsession. What do we know from obsession? We put the Jew, as we did in the Middle Ages, and now the Jewish state, at the center of all the world’s troubles.”
Troy denounced the United Nations for “betraying its founding ideals” by adopting the resolution.
“The United Nations created the Rosetta Stone for antisemitism and anti-Zionism, because the two merged. It created the playbook,” he said. “It created the precedent for institutions to single out Israel. It created the playbook for uniting on campus, uniting in the media, uniting in the art world against Israel and the Jewish people.”
David Harris, former CEO of the American Jewish Committee, told attendees that many Israelis thought of the 1975 resolution as “a mosquito bite.”
“‘We’ve had them before.’ ‘We’ll have them again.’ ‘It’ll go away.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’” he said. “But it mattered.”
Meron told JNS that the U.N. plan to combat Jew-hatred, which it debuted in April, has had little if any practical impact.
“I’ve seen a lot of talk,” he said. “I put together a report, which I delivered here in Geneva and in Washington, of how the United Nations needs to reform and get rid of all this singling out of one country, and nobody’s taking it seriously except the American administration.”
“The United Nations is not taking it seriously,” he said. “If they were really serious about antisemitism, they would stop singling out one country: the Jewish state.”
