In four months, a sobering anniversary risks being overlooked: the 50th anniversary of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as racism. Unless they start planning now, America, Israel, and the Jewish people seem doomed to blow the educational and ideological opportunity.
Jewish organizations and educational institutions, along with the Israeli government, should use November 10, 2025, to convey three important messages:
1. Fifty years ago, the Western world united, Left and Right, black and white, to condemn this anti-Zionist resolution as antisemitic, not “just” anti-Israel. Most understood Israel’s centrality to modern Jewish identity. They recognized the Jew-hatred singling out only one form of nationalism, Jewish nationalism, in that forum of nationalisms.
2. Although the UN rescinded this resolution in 1991, this libel nevertheless entered the international bloodstream. Today, too many people believe “Zionism is racism,” that “Israel is apartheid, settler-colonialist, and an oppressor” and now, that Israel is committing a genocide in its justified war of self-defense against Hamas. Resolution 3376, creating a Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, also passed in 1975, keeps doing damage. Establishing a permanent institutional infrastructure for anti-Israel hatred made Israel the most hated nation.
3. Mainstreaming this green-and-red, Islamist-progressive lie, it’s now fashionable to attack not only what Israel does but that Israel is. What Israel’s UN ambassador Chaim Herzog told America’s UN ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan then remains true: “The real core of the conflict is the denial by the Arabs of Israel’s sovereignty and Israel’s right to exist.” Fortunately, it’s now “most” Arabs, not all. What Moynihan feared would happen then, is also true now: Whenever violence erupted in the Middle East, “whether Israel was responsible, Israel surely would be blamed: openly by some, privately by most.” Eventually, “Israel would be regretted.”
The forces shaping anti-Zionism
Another framing for the anniversary examines the origins of the Zionism-is-racism resolution to expose the forces still shaping anti-Zionism. Moynihan didn’t focus on “the accused… but the accusers.” The “obscene” anti-Israel resolutions, he observed, “reeked of the totalitarian mind, stank of the totalitarian state.”
It’s extraordinary that so-called “progressives” toast sexist, racist, homophobic dictators, terrorists, and rapists – in Iran, in Hezbollah, among Palestinians – as long as they oppose Israel. Moynihan denounced this “politics of resentment” and “economics of envy.” Understanding anti-Zionism as an attack on America, democracy, and decency, he proclaimed: “If you define the world as rich and poor –we are guilty; if you define the world as liberal and illiberal – they are guilty.”
Additionally, mastering the arguments then will sharpen our pro-Israel arguments now. There’s much latitude to debate Israel’s Gaza strategy, like every country’s actions. But Moynihan and Herzog delivered magnificent speeches refuting the broad assaults denying the Jews’ indigenous ties to the Promised Land, questioning Israel’s right to exist, and accusing Israel of major Western crimes including colonialism, and racism. Both explain what Israel is and isn’t – and what those libels really mean.
Also, seeing the many friends who supported Israel then might help revive important alliances today. It’s an opportunity to celebrate America’s ongoing bipartisan pro-Israelism – noting that in 1975, a Republican president, Gerald Ford, and his Democratic UN ambassador, Daniel Moynihan, led Americans in repudiating this lie – and the UN, whose States-side reputation never recovered. Western democracies opposed the resolution – and, as my recent Zio-tourism column noted, because Mexico voted “aye,” tourists voted “nay” and canceled Christmas visits there.
American blacks particularly resented the hijacking of their movement. Misapplying the word “racism” to the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians undermined the consensus rejecting biologically based hatred as particularly heinous. The civil rights leader Vernon Jordan wrote that “Black people, who recognize code words since we’ve been victimized by code words… can easily smell out the fact that ‘Zionism’ in this context is a code word for antisemitism.” Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, quoted his late friend Dr. Martin Luther King’s warning that “when people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews – you are talking antisemitism.”
The “damage we now do to the idea of human rights and the language of human rights could well be irreversible,” Moynihan feared. When “we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries, we will not have words to replace them, for philosophy today has no such words.”
How to mark this anniversary
Finally, go positive. Use this sad anniversary to celebrate what Zionism is – and has done – as a model movement of liberal-democratic nationalism, fostering identity, community, and meaning. As Chaim Herzog – the father of Israel’s current President Isaac Herzog – explained: “Zionism is nothing more – and nothing less – than the Jewish people’s sense of origin and destination in the land, linked eternally with its name. It is also the instrument whereby the Jewish nation seeks an authentic fulfillment of itself.”
This summer, educators, Israeli diplomats, and pro-Israel activists should study the two speeches, the many arguments, and (with due modesty) my book Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism. Start producing internet-savvy videos, educational kits, curricula, booklets, and fact sheets building up to November 10.
Plan commemorations, at the Israeli President’s Residence, at the UN, and worldwide. Let’s explain what Zionism is – and isn’t – while challenging the UN to return to its former self, its best self, and stop leading the bash-Israel-firsters. Those haters have made Jew-hating anti-Zionism and anti-Zionist Jew-hatred two popular political pastimes in the West today, perverting the truth and corrupting ideologies, Left and Right.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath, were just published.