Members of Congress mark 50 years of ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution

Members of Congress gathered at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday to mark the 50th anniversary of the United Nations resolution determining that Zionism is a form of racism and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s denunciation of that “infamous act.”

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said that for the past 50 years, Israel has proven that Resolution 3379 “was not true.”

“This should be a time not to run and hide but to indeed prove that Zionism is not racism, and you can see it in modern-day Israel,” Wilson said. “How many resolutions of any organization could be proven wrong for 50 years?”

Led by a bloc of Arab states and communist countries, 72 countries passed the “Zionism is a form of racism” resolution in 1975 with the support of many non-aligned countries. 

The resolution was repealed in 1991 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to date, it is the only resolution ever repealed in the General Assembly.

Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, which hosted the Dec. 9 event, told JNS that despite the repeal of 3379, the United Nations and its agencies remain a hotbed of anti-Israel discrimination.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Mariaschin said. “All we have to do is take a look at the record. Israel has never served on the Security Council of the United Nations. It’s been a member of the U.N. since 1949.”

“Wherever you look in the system, you have this inherent bias, and yes, these various agencies, and there are many agencies and many organizations inside the U.N. system that practice this kind of bias, and frankly, this kind of hatred,” he added.

The American ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, reacted to the passage of the resolution with fury in a speech that is widely celebrated as one of the greatest pieces of rhetoric ever delivered at the General Assembly.

“A great evil has been loosed upon the world,” the envoy said. “The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty—and more—to the murderers of the six million European Jews.”

Gil Troy, a distinguished scholar in North American history at McGill University and author of “Moynihan’s Moment,” a history of the speech, said that the future New York senator used blunter words to convey his support to Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Chaim Herzog.

“He stands up, straightens his tie, walks across the room, hugs Herzog and yells really loudly, ‘f**k ’em,’” Troy said. “He later said, ‘I uttered an Anglo-Saxonism not found in the Talmud.’”

Moynihan’s condemnation of the resolution was almost immediately undercut by the Ford administration, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in the days following the speech that “we have to keep the American reaction in some balance” and that the United States should “pay no attention” to the vote.

Troy told JNS that the contrast between the two reactions was “mind-blowing.”

“There’s this tremendous ego clash between Moynihan and Kissinger, Harvard professors who are used to being the smartest guy in the room,” Troy said. “On the day of Nov. 10, 1975, before Moynihan gives the speech, Kissinger turns to one of his WASPy State Department aides and says, ‘Moynihan doesn’t get it. We’re running American foreign policy. This isn’t a synagogue.’”

“Here you have the Holocaust-survivor Jew making fun of the Irish-Catholic liberal Democrat,” Troy told JNS.

Troy said that Moynihan’s legacy is having stood for both America’s values as well as its interests.

“The flow-through of a Moynihan is so important, because if the United States doesn’t stand for core values, and it doesn’t stand for democracy, it doesn’t stand for principles, then what are we?” Troy said.

All of the congressional speakers at the B’nai B’rith event on Tuesday were Republicans, including Reps. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Randy Fine (R-Fla.). Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) shared a letter of support, saying he was unable attend in-person.

Mariaschin told JNS that his organization is committed to ensuring that support for Israel remains bipartisan but that he is concerned about “some erosion” in Congress of support for the Jewish State.

“I’m concerned about some of the language which is being used about Israel when you start talking about ‘It’s all about the Benjamins,” he said, referring to a 2019 comment from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). 

“When you talk about an apartheid state, when you start voting to embargo delivery of weapons to Israel in the middle of a war, there are serious issues here,” he said. “We need to address them.”

Some on the right have also begun to use “Zionist” as an apparent slur, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) writing on Sunday that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is a “Canadian-born Zionist Texas senator.”

“It’s moving in from both sides,” Mariaschin said. “At the time when this resolution was adopted, there was universal opprobrium, pretty much from all sides of the spectrum. That’s not the case today, and the erosion is visible.”

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