Zionism Vote: Rage & Discord

"The United States," said Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan with controlled fury, "rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations and before the world that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act." The target of Moynihan's scorn --and a chorus of bitter outrage throughout the Western world last week --was a General Assembly resolution declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination."

Adamant Rejection. In the month since the U.N.'s ill-named Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee approved a draft linking Zionism and racism (TIME, Oct. 27), the U.S. and its Western European allies had lobbied furiously to get the impending vote postponed if not quashed. But Arab lobbying won in the end. The resolution passed easily, 72-35, with 32 abstentions. Two other resolutions directed against Israel were approved by much wider margins. One creates a 20-member committee to try to set up in what is now Israel the sort of "democratic secular state" the Palestine Liberation Organization has demanded. The other mandates a seat for the P.L.O. at any Geneva talks on the Middle East, a condition that Israel adamantly rejects.

The votes led even the professionally neutral Kurt Waldheim to express dismay. The U.N.'s Secretary-General deplored the danger that "we may lose the future through discord and confrontation." More predictably, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said the resolution was "highly irresponsible" and had "added to the tensions, to the rifts and to the distrust" in the world. Congress was less restrained. Both houses denounced the action and promised an immediate reappraisal of U.S. involvement in the U.N. Conservative Senator James Buckley of New York charged that "the General Assembly has decided to institutionalize one of the world's most vile and ancient prejudices, anti-Semitism."

Israelis greeted the resolutions with emotions ranging from mockery to deep anxiety. In several cities of Israel, streets that had been named for the U.N. --which had created the Jewish state in its 1947 partition of Palestine--were retitled "Zionism Street" or "Zion Street." Some young Israelis wore T shirts proclaiming U.N. INTERNATIONAL ZIONISM YEAR, but Premier Yitzhak Rabin denounced the U.N. action as an "offensive aimed at establishing an Arafatist state" on the ruins of Israel.

Imperialist Ideology. American Jews were even angrier. At a mass rally in Manhattan, 40,000 people waved Zionist banners, sported buttons proclaiming I AM PROUD TO BE A ZIONIST and hoisted placards charging that the U.N. had succumbed to Nazism. Black Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin cited the Arabs' long involvement in the African slave trade. "Shame on them!" thundered Rustin. "[They] are the same people who enslaved my people."

Jews themselves once argued heatedly about the merits of Zionism, after the old religious yearning for the biblical homeland was translated into a national liberation movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine. For most Jews the argument became moot in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which represented unmistakable threats to the existence of Israel. Arab leaders frequently make a distinction between Judaism, which they claim to respect as a biblical religion that is a spiritual precursor of Islam, and Zionism, which they see as an outdated colonialist and imperialist ideology imported from Europe. The Jewish answer is that today this is a distinction without a difference: attacking Zionism means threatening the very existence of Israel.

As Ambassador Moynihan argued in last week's U.N. debate, "Whatever else Zionism may be, it clearly is not a form of racism." The word racism denotes an ideology, such as Nazism or apartheid, which favors discrimination on the grounds of alleged biological differences. Yet few people are as biologically heterogeneous as the Jews.

The Assembly resolution, however, couples "racism" with "racial discrimination," which by the U.N.'s own canons includes ethnic discrimination as well. Israel's record is more vulnerable on that charge: Arab speakers in the U.N. debate ticked off a number of examples of discrimination against Arabs in the occupied territories, including restrictions on travel and harassment by police. Most galling to the Arabs is Israel's Law of Return, which grants instant citizenship to any Jew who immigrates to Israel from anywhere in the world, while Palestinian Arabs who fled their homeland during the 1948 war are still, in most cases, prevented from returning. In answer, Israelis point out that the 470,000 Palestinians who live within Israel's pre-1967 borders are not subject to any legal discrimination, and indeed, enjoy civil rights that few Jews in Arab countries could dream of.

Some of the nations that voted for the Zionism resolution last week were scarcely qualified to cast the first stone. Idi Amin's Uganda is a notorious example: Asian citizens were summarily expelled and at least 50,000 Ugandans of various tribes have been murdered while Amin has promoted fellow Moslems and his own Kakwa tribesmen.

The blatant cynicism of the vote not only corroded the moral authority of the General Assembly but gravely undermined a very real racism issue important to some nations that voted for the resolution. Apartheid in South Africa was the original target of the U.N.'s Decade for Action to Combat Racism, but that campaign has now been yoked with the bogus condemnation of Zionism. The U.S. and other Western governments are now expected at least to withhold financial support from the program. Apparently realizing that, five African states voted against the Zionism resolution and eleven others abstained --a sign that the week's work may yet backfire against its perpetrators.

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