In a resolution adopted on September 18, 2024 the United Nations General Assembly repeated its infamous 1975 lie that the Jewish state is a racist state. Most telling for Americans and Israelis, however, was not the rot at the core of today’s UN, but the disturbing contrast between the response of the Biden-Harris administration’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and the moral clarity of UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1975.
The Racism Canard
The racism canard, namely, that Jewish self-determination is criminal, has been at the heart of the battle to delegitimize a Jewish state for the majority of Israel’s history. In 1965 – before any post-1967 so-called “occupation” – the Soviet bloc and their Arab allies sought to insert denunciation of Zionism into the UN treaty on racial and related discrimination. The reference was only removed as part of a deal to excise a commitment to combat antisemitism.
When U.S. Ambassador Moynihan confronted the General Assembly over its 1975 resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism, he stood up unapologetically and said:
“The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act….[A] great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of antisemitism…has been given the appearance of international sanction…What we have here is a lie…The lie is that zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that it is not…It [is] a Jewish form of what today is called a national liberation movement…The terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences….[T]erms like ‘national self-determination’ and ‘national honor’ will be perverted in the same way to serve the purposes of conquest and exploitation.”
It was deeply moving, honorable, and prophetic.
From 1975 to 1991, the UN held myriad meetings, conferences and follow-up resolutions repeating the “Zionism is racism” slander on a global scale. These activities were accompanied by decades of false accusations in UN bodies and General Assembly resolutions that alleged an “unholy alliance between South African racism and zionism.”
In 1991, the Zionism-is-racism resolution was revoked, but the lie was revived in the UN Durban Declaration. The product of a UN global antisemitic hatefest held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, the Declaration singled out Israel and claimed that Palestinians were “victims” of Israeli racism. The Durban model of a UN-sponsored racist “anti-racism” confab was repeated in 2009, 2011 and 2021. Another UN resolution “reaffirming” Durban is scheduled for this coming October.
The Palestinian Plan Takes Shape
The lead-up to the September resolution included another move.
In 2022, the General Assembly asked the UN’s World Court (ICJ) for an “Advisory Opinion” to spell out the “consequences” for what the Assembly had already decided were “ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” and “discriminatory legislation and measures.”
In July of this year, heavily relying on biased UN sources, the UN Court opined that Israel was guilty of apartheid. The presiding judge was a Lebanese politician and former UN ambassador representing a country that denies Israel’s right to exist. Legal farce is how the American justice system would describe the affair.
So when the UN-labeled “State of Palestine” was given the right by the General Assembly to introduce resolutions starting on September 10, 2024, the very first move it made was to accuse Israel of apartheid. And then demand all the concomitant consequences for this crime and others, ranging from boycotts to arms embargoes and criminal prosecution. Israel is to be stripped of the ability to defend itself, according to the representative of Israel’s attackers.
The setting for the adoption of the resolution was the “Tenth Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly.” Of the total of eleven emergency special sessions in UN history, five have been on Israel alone. There was never an emergency special session on the hundreds of thousands killed in Rwanda or Sudan or Syria. But the “tenth” emergency special session dedicated to the condemnation of Israel has been reconvened 56 times since 1997.
Trashing a Negotiated Settlement
Ireland, who co-sponsored the resolution along with like-minded international “law” and “human rights” buffs North Korea and Yemen, spelled out exactly what the resolution means for the Oslo Accords, for decades of agreements between Palestinians and Israelis, and all the UN resolutions calling for negotiations. The trash heap. In the words of the Irish Ambassador: “for those who have spoken today in favor of a negotiated settlement, the message is clear. We need action, not words.” Meaning an immoral majority handing Palestinians an end run around the recognition of a Jewish state.
The Endgame: Turning Back the Clock to 1947
In a stylistic subterfuge, the resolution first says Israel has violated a provision of the 1965 racial discrimination treaty and second that this provision condemns apartheid. The resolution’s supporters had no problem making the agenda perfectly plain: the destruction of the state of Israel and the reversal of the original partition resolution of November 29, 1947. On that date, the General Assembly agreed to a Jewish and another Arab state. The Jews accepted it. The Arabs did not, choosing instead to launch a war to annihilate the Jewish state.
The Pakistani Ambassadors in 1947 and 2024 laid it all out.
Speaking on November 28, 1947, the then Pakistani Ambassador demanded the General Assembly deny the creation of a Jewish state. He openly threatened violence should the Assembly not heed his call. The Jews involved, he claimed, had no indigenous ties to the land of Israel but were merely “refugees and displaced persons” from World War II who should be sent back to wherever they came from. Claiming to rely on the “self-determination” of “the people of Palestine,” he said:
“If the Arabs will not co-operate, as they will not, even the Jewish State will not be viable. It will be under a great and continual strain…You take the gravest risk…by thus forcibly driving what in effect amounts to a Western wedge into the heart of the Middle East.”
Speaking on September 17, 2024, the current Pakistani Ambassador gave virtually the same speech. He claimed “Palestine” had been subjected to “decisions imposed by colonial and imperial powers” such as “the Anglo-American decision to allow Jews persecuted by the Nazis to emigrate to Israel.” He called the partition resolution “ignominious,” repeated that it was adopted “by this Assembly despite the just Arab and Islamic opposition,” referred to Israel as “the illegal state” that had been “foisted on the land of the Palestinians,” and claimed “Palestinian self-determination” was the way back.
Pakistani Ambassador Munir Akram and his associates felt unencumbered by Moynihan’s clear truth that terms like “self-determination” would be perverted in the service of violence, and human rights protection would be the casualty of the lies told about Jews. Currently at the helm of both the General Assembly and the group of Islamic states at the UN, is Cameroon – a country ranked at the bottom of the Freedom House scale of political rights and civil liberties.
Antisemitism at the UN General Assembly
The General Assembly Hall rang out yesterday and today with moral abominations, blood libels, antisemitic tropes, and incitement to murder Jews.
Iran voiced its delight that so “many…nations have found Palestinian resistance as an outstanding and admirable effort.” Libya announced that “it won’t define resistance against occupation as terrorism;” Belize said that Palestinians “have a right to armed struggle” against Israel.
Egypt and Algeria referred to the rapists, torturers and baby-killers of October 7 as “martyrs.” No Palestinian terrorists have been killed in this war, only “41,000 innocent civilians,” said Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.
Nicaragua and Libya portrayed Israelis as Nazis; to the former Israel was guilty of “extermination”; the latter claimed there was a “21st century Holocaust, the Holocaust of Gaza.”
Turning history on its head, Guyana said the General Assembly partition vote of 1947 was immediately followed by Israel “commencing a decades-long campaign of violence meant to subjugate and annihilate the Palestinian people,” resulting from “a deep-rooted ideology” in the form of “the concept of superiority of race, religion, or people.”
Countries celebrating the ICJ opinion about the requirements of “international law,” included such law-abiding world citizens as: China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria and Yemen.
The Posture of the Biden-Harris Administration
In the face of this grotesque corruption of international institutions and human dignity, Ambassador Moynihan’s leadership and moral fortitude was sorely missing. Instead, Biden-Haris UN ambassador Thomas-Greenfield greatly diminished the U.S.A.
Thomas-Greenfield began with what she evidently hoped would appeal to her audience: a denunciation of Israel. Israel was the one and only party whose actions she called “inconsistent with international law.”
She supported the goal to “end Israeli settlements” – which violates the explicit terms of Oslo, includes Judaism’s holiest sites, and according to the resolution itself means the ethnic-cleansing of Jews living wherever Arabs say they can’t.
Astonishingly, in this situation she praised the ICJ. In her words: “The United States also respects the important role of the International Court of Justice in advising the UN General Assembly and in helping peacefully settle disputes.”
She described “the last few months” as “devastating for the Palestinian people. Families have endured hell in Gaza and the West Bank.” Apparently, she couldn’t think of anything that was devastating or hellish for the Israeli people or families in Israel, and in America.
As she lamented various reasons why the resolution did “little or nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” here’s what she didn’t do.
She never condemned the despicable antisemitism in the resolution, or in the statements of UN members, exploding all around her.
She never spoke the clear truth that the resolution was an assault on human dignity and a deplorable denial of the fundamental right of Jewish self-determination.
She refused to admit and inform the global community that this assault was initiated by what needs to be unambiguously identified as Hamas’s UN diplomatic entourage – the Palestinian Authority.
The vote was 124 in favor, 14 against, and 43 abstentions. The United States voted against, with an attitude that left potential allies uninspired to stand up, join forces and say together: a great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of antisemitism.
