During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Israeli cities came under missile attack from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In hospitals across Tel Aviv and Haifa, Jewish and Arab doctors, nurses and patients took shelter together in sealed rooms as sirens wailed. The same scenes played out in the Knesset, where Arab and Jewish members of parliament continued their work under the same threat. These moments reflected the complex coexistence that has characterized Israel since its founding—a reality that contrasted sharply with the demonizing accusation, repeatedly amplified at the United Nations, that Israel is a racist regime.
In December of that year, the U.N. General Assembly repealed Resolution 3379, which it had adopted on Nov. 10, 1975, and which had declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The repeal deleted a clause, but not the narrative. The story the United Nations had helped write, Zionism as a moral crime, kept running. The equation echoes today louder than ever, from U.N. bodies to national parliaments, from media and social networks to university campuses, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre and the ensuing war between Israel and Palestinian terrorist groups.
Zionism is racism was not born in a seminar room; it was forged in a particular global configuration. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the Soviet Union needed an explanation for why its clients in Egypt, Syria and Jordan, armed with Soviet tanks and doctrine, were routed in six days by Israel. Moscow’s answer was an export product: anti-Zionism repackaged as anti-racism, pushed through state media, “peace” congresses and the pseudo-discipline of “Zionology” tailored to the sensibilities of newly decolonized states. The message was brutally simple: Israel was not a small democracy defending itself, but a colonial outpost of Western, and later American, imperialism.
The politics of the 1970s did the rest. “Third-Worldism” sanctified revolutionary and often terrorist movements such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, while the keffiyeh and the Kalashnikov became chic emblems of “resistance.” Across Europe, far-left terrorist organizations like West Germany’s Red Army Faction and Italy’s Red Brigades helped recast airline hijackings, assassinations and embassy sieges as “justice” and “anti-imperialism.”
In 1974, Yasser Arafat addressed the U.N. General Assembly wearing a pistol holster; soon after, the PLO was granted permanent observer status despite a charter that enshrined “armed struggle” to eliminate Israel. Then-U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who was later revealed to have concealed his wartime service as a Wehrmacht intelligence officer in Nazi-occupied Balkans, presided over this era.
Then, on Nov. 10, 1975, came the sentence that would echo for decades: General Assembly Resolution 3379 “determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” No brief, no reasoning; just a rubber stamp.
The resolution passed 72–35, with 32 abstentions. The coalition behind it—the Soviet bloc, the Arab League and a broad swath of African, Asian and Latin American states from the Non-Aligned Movement—reflected political arithmetic, not moral consensus. Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog marked the grim coincidence of the vote with the anniversary of Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass” in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9-10, 1938), condemned the “hatred and ignorance” behind it, and tore the text in two at the rostrum. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan vowed that the United States would “not acknowledge, not abide by, [and] never acquiesce” in it.
The language was deliberately spare; the effect was maximal. A national liberation movement was recast as bigotry, and the world’s only Jewish state was told that its very reason for being was a crime. In effect, antisemitism was smuggled into international law.
The “yes”-voting delegations entrenched the verdict through a bespoke U.N. architecture that exists for no other people, only the Palestinians: The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) and a dedicated Division for Palestinian Rights within the secretariat, overseeing initiatives such as the International Day of Solidarity and the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL) portal. They functioned as the primary political and intellectual nucleus for efforts to oppose Israel and support the PLO within the United Nations. Rather than foster an environment for peaceful negotiations, the purpose of these organs was the destruction of Israel.
Campaigns to repeal U.N. Resolution 3379 surfaced intermittently, led mainly by the World Jewish Congress, the World Zionist Organization and other Jewish NGOs. But the decisive opening came only with the geopolitical earthquake of the early 1990s: The Soviet Union collapsed; its former satellites embarked on political transformation; a U.S.-led coalition expelled Iraq from Kuwait; and Washington and a reforming Moscow briefly aligned. The 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union, aimed to launch direct talks between Israel and its neighbors. Israel pressed hard to lift the 1975 stain as a condition for its participation.
The repeal text, Resolution 46/86, was famously terse: “The General Assembly decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975.” It passed 111 to 25 with 13 abstentions, reflecting the post-Cold War realignment, with many former Warsaw Pact and Non-Aligned states reversing their 1975 positions.
But the revocation did not confront the premise it erased. The United Nations never declared that Zionism is not racism; it never debated why the original equation was a libel. It simply removed a diplomatic obstacle. The narrative it had legitimized, that Israel belongs in the moral dock, remained available to anyone who wished to invoke it. For years, organizations and activists, often unaware or indifferent to the repeal, continued to cite Resolution 3379 as proof that Israel was officially branded a racist state.
Even as Resolution 3379 disappeared from the record, the institutional scaffolding around the “Question of Palestine” stayed firmly in place. U.N. bodies such as CEIRPP, the Division for Palestinian Rights, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) continued to frame Israel as a uniquely suspect state. In the 1990s and 2000s, new instruments joined them: the U.N. Human Rights Council’s permanent Agenda Item 7, which singles out Israel at every regular session, and the mandate of the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, explicitly confined to scrutinizing Israel and not Palestinian authorities or terrorist groups. The current mandate-holder of that post, Francesca Albanese, has been sanctioned by the United States for her antisemitic and pro-terror rhetoric and for campaigning against United States and Israeli officials.
The delegitimization drive never really stopped. It re-emerged in full force in late summer 2001, when the United Nations convened the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, a government summit accompanied by a vast NGO Forum. Ten years after the repeal of Resolution 3379, “Zionism is racism” resurfaced implicitly in the government conference debates, and explicitly in the NGO Forum’s declaration, which called for the “reinstitution” of 3379 and branded Israel a “racist apartheid state” guilty of “war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
The architecture and the script snapped back into place.
The method is consistent: Isolate Israel conceptually, exceptionalize it procedurally and then cite that exceptionalism as proof of exceptional guilt.
Vicious ideas outlive the conferences that gave rise to them because they are useful. “Zionism is racism” compresses a complex national conflict into a morality play with reliable casting: Jews as white colonizers and Palestinians as eternal victims. It turns every Israeli act of self-defense into a crime scene. It offers activists who insist they do not hate Jews a convenient mask, “Zionists,” under which the same old hatred can circulate in polite society. And it hands authoritarians and terror movements an easy absolution: If Israel is the paradigmatic racist state, then their violence becomes “resistance,” not murder.
The irony is visible in everyday Israel: Arabic on court rulings; Arab doctors running Israeli hospitals; a Muslim justice on the Israeli Supreme Court; Druze officers commanding Jewish soldiers. None of this makes Israel flawless, but it does make the charge of inherent, programmatic racism absurd.
When Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, tore up the 1975 resolution at the rostrum, he chose the right symbol; paper is easy to rip. What is harder to tear is institutional muscle memory and a narrative that flatters its believers. Fifty years on, open a newspaper or a social media feed and you can still find the sentence the U.N. erased.
The task now is to undo the lie by stating plainly what the United Nations never said: Zionism is the Jewish people’s right to their own homeland and state. To call that racism is not a defense of human rights. It is antisemitism.
