The article below was first published on November 24, 1975, by Intercontinental Press (IP) — an international magazine based in New York that specialized “in political analysis and interpretation of events of particular interest to the labor, socialist, colonial independence, Black, and women’s liberation movements.”

The IP article reported on the passage of a resolution by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on November 10 of that year. Approved with a vote of 72 for, 35 against, and 32 abstentions, the resolution answered yes on the question of whether Zionism is a form of racism. With the United States spearheading the effort, the resolution was overturned in 1991, making it one of only two resolutions ever revoked by the UN.

Tel Aviv and Washington had made the revocation of the resolution a precondition for Israel’s participation in the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, which occurred from October 30 to November 1, just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26 of that year.

The Madrid Peace Conference led to the Oslo Accords — a series of agreements signed in 1993 and 1995 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Oslo agreements initiated a peace process but ultimately deepened the Israeli Palestinian conflict by favoring Israeli colonization.

Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine, took part in the negotiations between the PLO, Washington, and Tel Aviv that led to the Oslo Accords. He offered this assessment of that process in the 2024 interview ‘Israel’s Nightmare Scenario’.

“In Washington [1991-1994], we said to the Americans that we were negotiating about a pie while the Israelis are eating the pie through ongoing settlement,” Khalidi explained. “‘You promised that the status quo would be maintained, and they are stealing.’ And the Americans did nothing. At that point it should have been clear that if we didn’t take a stand, colonization would continue, Israeli security control and occupation would continue in a different form. That’s what Oslo did.

“Part of the problem is that the Palestinians took the awful things that were offered to us in Washington. They gave 60 percent of the West Bank to Israel… No Palestinian leadership should have accepted any such agreements.”

Fifty years have passed since the original UN document’s approval in 1975. However, the arguments for and against it, described in the article below — and the controversy it generated at the time — are quite relevant today.

As the article below reported, “In New York City, tens of thousands of persons attended a rally November 11 [1975] organized by pro-Zionist groups. They carried signs saying, ‘Those Who Condemn Zionism Condone Hitler,’ and ‘Anti-Zionism Code Word for Anti-Semitism.’”

In Why Opposition to Zionism is Not Antisemitism, World-Outlook answered similar arguments last year in “an important and increasingly sharp debate… taking place today on what is antisemitism, or to use a more accurate term — Jew hatred.”

More than 500 pro-Zionist Jewish students at Columbia University in New York issued a statement in May 2024 arguing that Jews have a right to live in Israel, and that criticism of Zionism or the state of Israel amounts to antisemitism. “Judaism cannot be separated from Israel,” they proclaimed. “Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.”

“If these students are genuinely concerned about antisemitism, they have chosen the wrong target,” World-Outlook pointed out at the time. “The issue is not whether Jews in Israel today have a right to live there. The issue is whether Israeli Jews have a right to a state based on Jewish supremacy over all others who live in Israel proper, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and in the Gaza Strip — besieged for months by the barbaric aggression of the Israel Defense Forces.

“Such a state — far from being a ‘safe haven’ for the Jewish people — has proven to be quite the opposite.

“Jew hatred is a deadly danger. It is based on one of the oldest and most reactionary conspiracy theories — that Jews control world politics and the banking system. It has been a fundamental tenet of fascist and rightist regimes and groups, most notably Hitler’s Naziism. It should be opposed unconditionally. But conflating Judaism with the state of Israel undermines the fight against Jew hatred, it does not strengthen it.”

World-Outlook had also taken up these issues in an earlier article, published in February 2024, In Defense of Free Speech – Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism.

The IP article that follows shows the extent of the historical roots of this debate.

The article below was designated as a news analysis in the original but it appeared unsigned. According to IP’s editorial policy, stated in the magazine’s inside cover, “Insofar as it reflects editorial opinion, unsigned material expresses the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism.”

World-Outlook is publishing the article that follows for the information of our readers. The text below is from the original. Breakers (or subheadings) and photos are by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

*

Is Zionism a form of racism?

On November 10 the United Nations General Assembly answered yes, voting 72 to 35 in favor of a resolution to that effect. Two other resolutions, calling for the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in all Mideast peace negotiations, and setting up a UN committee concerned with the right of the Palestinians to self-determination, were also passed overwhelmingly.

The imperialist response was swift and unequivocal. Washington’s position, U.S. chief delegate Daniel P. Moynihan said, is “that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”

Prime Minister Gaston Thorn of Luxembourg, the president of the General Assembly, issued a statement warning of the “adverse consequences” of the vote, which he termed the “unhappy product of pressure by those who wanted to impose a point of view, which is historically and philosophically false.”

NEWS ANALYSIS

The resolution on Zionism and racism was “an appalling thing,” one British delegate told New York Times reporter Kathleen Teltsch. In her November 12 article Teltsch also quoted a diplomat from the Netherlands, who called the resolution an attack “on the existence of a people….”

“Folly at the UN,” the lead editorial in the November 12 Christian Science Monitor declared. The following day the New York Times ran an editorial on the “Shame of the UN.”

In Washington, both houses of Congress passed unanimous resolutions condemning the U.N. vote, and the Senate called for hearings to begin “immediately to reassess the United States’ further participation in the United Nations General Assembly.”

Senator James B. Allen of Alabama, one of the best-known segregationists and head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Congress should “give consideration to withdrawal from the General Assembly.”

Congressman Benjamin S. Rosenthal declared, “Hitler would have been proud of those 72 delegates to the General Assembly who voted last night to condemn Zionism.”

In New York City, tens of thousands of persons attended a rally November 11 organized by pro-Zionist groups. They carried signs saying, “Those Who Condemn Zionism Condone Hitler,” and “Anti-Zionism Code Word for Anti-Semitism.”

Was the UN vote really a sign that a new anti-Semitic wave is sweeping the world?

Reply to claim that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism

The two basic arguments put forth by the defenders of Zionism are the claim that anti-Zionism is simply a new word for anti-Semitism, and that Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Both were answered in the General Assembly debate by Dr. Abdallah al-Sayegh of Kuwait.

He pointed out that the first and most vocal opponents of Zionism were Jews. “Long before Zionism had become a world phenomenon, it was within the Jewish community that the claim of Zionism to be coextensive with and identical to Judaism (was challenged) …. We reject the claim of Zionism to be coextensive with the Jewish people. And, therefore, we reject the claim of Zionism that to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic.”

Addressing the argument that Zionism is a national liberation movement, Sayegh explained: “No movement that views its salvation through the enslavement of others can be a true liberation movement. No movement that seeks its ingathering through the dispersal of others can be a true national liberation movement.”

The essence of the Zionist program was the establishment of a Jewish state on the land of another people. This was accomplished through the colonization of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the eventual expulsion of the majority of the Arab population. Thus, the very foundation of the Israeli state is laid on discrimination and injustice practiced against the Palestinian people.

In defending their “right” to the land of the Palestinians, the Israeli settlers have developed a typically racist, colonialist mentality. Time magazine published a Harris poll in its April12, 1971, issue that showed the depth of the racism fostered by Zionism. Seventy-four percent of those asked said they thought “Arabs are less intelligent than Israelis.” Two-thirds believed “Arabs are more dishonest than Israelis,” and the same percentage felt “Arabs are inferior to Israelis.” Eighty percent thought Arabs were not as brave as Israelis.

The racist attitudes of the Zionist settlers, reinforced continually by the need to maintain and justify the dispossession of the Palestinians, are reflected on every level of daily life in Israel. Public funds for schools, health, and social services are allocated in a discriminatory way to favor the Jewish areas.

Unmistakable record of oppression of Palestinians

Employment discrimination against Arabs is rife, often under the pretext of demanding that job applicants have completed their military service. This automatically eliminates Arabs because they are banned from the armed forces.

In the field of politics, Arabs are categorically denied the right to form nationalist parties or associations. Furthermore, police repression in the form of threats, beatings, nighttime searches, and other formally illegal procedures is used regularly against Arab activists.

Discrimination in housing is not only, legal, it is actively encouraged by the government under the guise of “demographic” considerations — i.e., encouraging Jewish settlement and the formation of a Jewish majority in various areas. Property owned by the Jewish National Fund, which represents a substantial amount of Israeli land, cannot be leased to non-Jews.

In the area of citizenship, the Law of Return guarantees entry to Jews from anywhere in the world. At the same time, Israel denies the right of 1.5 million Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

If this record of oppression does not mean that Zionism is a form of racism, the word has no meaning. The objective result of Zionist policies, measured over a period of decades, has been the denial of democratic rights to, and the systematic dispossession of, a whole people because of their national origin.

The hypocritical indignation feigned by the capitalist politicians in the United States in response to the UN vote was partly motivated by vote-getting considerations. Henry Kissinger [the U.S. Secretary of State in 1975], who does not have to worry about getting elected, took a cooler view of the whole affair.

He warned November 12 that “…we must not now swing to the extreme of not realizing some of the benefits that the United Nations with all its failings still has for the United States.”

UN action was a setback for the imperialists

But the UN action was a setback for the imperialists. Although they are not about to withdraw from the United Nations, they are doing their best to discredit the vote on Zionism.

They know that if the fact that Israel is a colonial-settler state with a racist ideology begins to be understood by the American people, the result will be a growing wave of protest against the billions of dollars of U.S. aid pumped into that imperialist outpost. And they fear that it would threaten their ability to back up the Zionist state with U.S. forces in future Mideast wars.

Ironically, in the name of Jewish survival, Zionism has led its followers into an alliance with precisely those racist, imperialist forces out of whose ranks will come the real candidates for a new Hitler.

It is not the Palestinian people, with their demand to live together with the Israeli Jews in a unitary state, who pose a threat to Jewish survival. It is the rulers in Washington who will prove just as willing to use anti-Semitism in the future as they have been in the past to use anti-Black, anti-Arab, and anti-Asian racism.

“The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now he seen for what it is: a tragic mockery of the Jewish people…,” [Russian revolutionary leader] Leon Trotsky wrote in July 1940 in a passage that could as easily have been written with the present situation in mind.

“The future development of military events,” he continued, “may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

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