The Anti-Zionist Resolution

Bernard Lewis

From Foreign Affairs, October 1976

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Summary:  On November 10, 1976, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a Resolution declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." Seventy-two votes were recorded in favor of the Resolution, and 35 against. There were 32 abstentions, and three countries-Romania, South Africa and Spain-for different reasons, were recorded as absent.

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, and a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is the author of The Middle East and the West and other works.

On November 10, 1976, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a Resolution declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." Seventy-two votes were recorded in favor of the Resolution, and 35 against. There were 32 abstentions, and three countries-Romania, South Africa and Spain-for different reasons, were recorded as absent.

The Resolution attracted a great deal of attention, and has been much used to attack both Zionism and the United Nations. In the Soviet and Arab camps the Resolution was regarded as constituting formal condemnation, before the tribunal of mankind, of Zionism and of the state which it established. In other quarters it was regarded as evidence of the decline and fall of the United Nations.

The Resolution was not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a continuing process. The campaign to secure a U.N. condemnation of Zionism1 was launched at the World Conference of the International Women's Year held in Mexico City in late June and early July 1975; the "Declaration on the Equality of Women" issued on that occasion repeatedly stresses the share of women in the struggle against neocolonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, racism, racial discrimination and apartheid.2 On October 17 the Third Committee of the General Assembly-concerned with social, humanitarian and cultural affairs-agreed by a substantial majority that Zionism was a form of racism and called upon the General Assembly to do likewise. This was duly done, and the Resolution made the basis for a series of further condemnations in different agencies and at various meetings of the United Nations, most recently at the Habitat conference in Canada.

II

An inquiry into the Resolution, its genesis and its consequences, might begin with the double question: How much truth is there in the charge that Zionism is a form of racism? How much truth is there in the countercharge leveled by some Zionists and some of their friends that the Resolution is a thinly disguised form of anti-Semitism and is itself a return to the racial politics of Nazi Germany and its allies in the 1930s?

Zionism is basically not a racial movement but a form of nationalism or, to use the current nomenclature, a national liberation movement. Like other such movements, it combines various currents, some springing from tradition and necessity, others carried on the winds of international change and fashion. Most important among the former is the Jewish religion itself, with its recurring stress on Zion, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and with the interwoven and recurring themes of bondage and liberation, of exile and return. The messianism and movements of religious revival which arose among Jews from the seventeenth century also made an important contribution to the genesis of this movement. The persecutions to which Jews were subject, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, gave an enormous impetus to its development.

In its political form, Zionism is quite clearly a nationalist movement of the type which was common in parts of Europe in the nineteenth century and which spread to ...

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