We are currently experiencing the worst surge of antisemitism in living memory. But that realization shouldn’t lull us into thinking that the world prior to October 2023 was a relative bed of roses for the Jewish people. From the end of the Second World War until the Hamas massacre in Israel, there were myriad episodes and events which underlined that hatred and suspicion of Jews as a collective did not die out with the Nazis.
Later this year, we’ll mark the 50th anniversary of one of the most heinous of those outbursts, whose fallout we are still living with: the passage by the U.N. General Assembly of Resolution 3379 of Nov. 10, 1975, which determined that Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jews, was a form of racism.
Israel and its allies have eight months to decide whether that anniversary will be marked as a posthumous victory or as a day of mourning.
Sure, one could argue that victory already came in 1991 when, in the wake of Iraq’s expulsion from occupied Kuwait and the consequent U.S. attempt to convene regional peace negotiations, American diplomacy—which, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, was without a serious rival—secured the General Assembly’s repeal of its 1975 resolution. But that, sadly, was a fleeting victory for two reasons.
Firstly, the anti-Zionist ideology underpinning the resolution persists. Orchestrated by the Soviet Union, Resolution 3379 denounced Zionism as a “threat to world peace and security.” It drew an explicit linkage between Israel and the former white minority regimes in South Africa and Zimbabwe to demonstrate its charges of “racism” and “apartheid.” Those charges will sound eerily familiar to Jewish college students now weathering the pro-Hamas onslaught, all born long after 1975.
Secondly, while the General Assembly annulled Resolution 3379, the pro-Palestinian bureaucracy created within the United Nations at exactly the same time also persists. As a result, the world body still behaves as though “Zionism is racism” remains on the books. If the November anniversary is to carry any message of hope for Israelis and Jews, then it’s imperative to tackle and dismantle that bureaucracy, and its associated propaganda operation.
In the 18 months that have lapsed since the Hamas pogrom in Israel, we have seen that bureaucracy in action. UNRWA—the agency originally created in 1949 to deal with the first generation of Arab refugees from Israel’s War of Independence—has been a mainstay of anti-Israel messaging, unphased by the unmasking of dozens of its employees as Hamas operatives. The U.N. Human Rights Council, which dedicates an entire agenda item to Israel alone at its thrice-yearly deliberations while ignoring serial violators like Russia, Iran and North Korea, last week released a litany of fabricated accusations in the guise of a “report” that amounted to what Israel called a “blood libel.” One of the more noxious Israel-haters on the scene, Francesca Albanese, continues to serve as the U.N. special rapporteur on the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
It’s now time to focus on those elements of the Palestine bureaucracy that are comparatively hidden. The U.N.’s Department of Political Affairs operates a subsidiary Division for Palestinian Rights, whose job is to carry out the agenda of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, consisting of 25 members and 24 observers drawn from the member states. Abolishing that committee, and therefore the division along with it, should become an explicit aim of the State of Israel, the various Jewish non-governmental organizations with observer status at the United Nations, and the broader community of research and advocacy organizations pushing for Israel’s sovereign equality within the U.N. system.
The committee was created on the very same day as the passage of the “Zionism-is-racism” resolution to give concrete expression to the anti-Zionist manifesto the resolution embodied. The “inalienable rights” that this committee represents include the “exercise by Palestinians of their inalienable right to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted.” Note the terminology used here—not “Palestinian refugees of the 1948-49 war,” but all Palestinians, including those born after 1948 in the Arab world, Europe, North America and Latin America. It doesn’t take tremendous insight to realize that it is a formula for the elimination of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel—the very same formula that drives the present pro-Hamas solidarity movement and gives it the undeserved gloss of human rights.
The costs of running this committee are estimated at $6 million annually. As I wrote a few months after Donald Trump’s first-term presidential inauguration, “In international organizational terms, that’s unremarkable, but when you consider how the money is spent, it’s little short of obscene. One would like to imagine that fact is one that President Trump will grasp instinctively, and act upon accordingly.” Trump’s dislike of bloated, politically charged bureaucracies hasn’t wavered in the interim. For that reason and assorted others, it is reasonable to expect that when former New York Rep. Elise Stefanik is finally confirmed as the administration’s choice as ambassador to the United Nations, she will make dismantling the committee a priority.
Last September, when the General Assembly passed a resolution demanding Israel’s immediate withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, warning that the Jewish state “must bear the legal consequences of all its internationally wrongful acts,” Stefanik issued a scathing response. “The United Nations overwhelmingly passed a disgraceful antisemitic resolution to demand that Israel surrender to barbaric terrorists who seek the destruction of both Israel and America,” she stated. “Once again the U.N.’s antisemitic rot is on full display as it punishes Israel for defending itself and rewards Iranian-backed terrorists.”
The “rot” Stefanik was referring to is (as she no doubt realizes) institutionalized and structural, embedded within the organization’s heart for 50 years, if not longer. In 1965—two years before the Six-Day War brought Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem—the Soviets insisted at the drafting sessions for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that a condemnation of “Zionism” be included alongside “Nazism” and “antisemitism.” As the Israeli scholar Yohanan Manor observed, the convention debates “showed the Arabs and the Soviet Union that it was possible to have Zionism condemned if they could just find a way to secure the support of the Afro-Asian bloc.”
Ten years later, they achieved just that with the passage of Resolution 3379. How would the abolition of the committee be achieved? Many years ago, the late American diplomat Richard Schifter told me that “a significant number of ambassadors in New York vote against Israel without instructions from their governments. Because these resolutions involve budgetary questions, they require a two-thirds majority vote under the provisions of the U.N. Charter. So the answer to the problem is that you reach out to heads of government. You get them to give instructions to the ambassadors on how to vote.”
There is now a precedent for that: In August 2020, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy withdrew his country from the committee just a few months after his election. Given its commitment to protecting Israel within the United Nations, and its associated agencies and departments, the United States must pursue the same outcome with as many states as possible—between now and November and, if necessary, beyond.
