"A great evil has been loosed upon the world...whatever else Zionism may be, it is not, and cannot be, a form of racism" - US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1975
November 10 marked 50 years since UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, the infamous and pivotal moment when the world declared “Zionism is a form of racism.” It simultaneously marks 87 years since the night of broken glass, Kristallnacht, a night that culminated in the genocide of the Jewish people.
That the resolution was revoked in 1991 is meaningless. As Jewish history remembers and reminds, blood libel always sticks. The damage was done. Thirty years after its founding, the international body that rose out of the ashes of the Holocaust took a sharp turn with the adoption of Resolution 3379. At the lethal intersection of Nazi ideology, which falsely described the Jewish people as a race, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” inspired Soviet propaganda that equated Zionism with racism. Together with the Arab bloc’s rejection of a Jewish state, this convergence created a genocidal alliance, united by an ancient, ever-mutating hatred.
As so clearly articulated by Moynihan, the resolution released “a great evil… upon the world. The abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty – and more – to the murderers of the six million European Jews.” The fact that the resolution used the word “Zionism” and not “Jew” was part of the deliberate campaign by the former Soviet Union, ensuring antisemitism lived on in a post-Nazi era.
Indeed, as Ambassador Moynihan argued in his famed speech, Zionism can be a lot of things, but it cannot be racism. It cannot, as the UN Resolution implied, only to come full circle in a 2025 Orwellian inverted reality, be Nazism. Zionism is the progressive self-determination movement of the Jewish people, anchored in thousands of years of prayer, yearning, and longing to return to Zion and Jerusalem.
It is a liberation movement that enabled the return of a prototypical indigenous people – speaking the same language (Hebrew), reading the same Book (the Bible), traversing the same land (Israel), practicing the same customs and rituals, hearkening to the same God and prophets for thousands of years – to their ancestral homeland, in which there remained Jewish presence over millennia of exile and persecution.
In the words of Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Chaim Herzog, on that same fateful day, Zionism is historically “based on a unique and unbroken connection, extending some 4,000 years, between the People of the Book and the Land of the Bible.” Equating Zionism with racism was the opening shot of an unconventional war to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to the Jew among nations, with the intent to destroy it. Echoing through time and space, the erasure and denial of Jewish indigeneity thus became a feature of the systematic revision of facts and law, enabling the absurd labeling of Jews as European colonialists, Israel as a reparation prize for the Holocaust, and Israel as an apartheid state that perpetrates genocide.
As the antisemitism playbook always goes, the Jew, whether the individual or collective, is accused, seated on the docket, forced to explain and respond to the libelous accusation of each era. As the late Rabbi Sacks wrote: “Antisemitism is a virus that survives by mutating. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were hated because of their race. Today, they are hated because of their nation-state, Israel. Anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism.”
In his speech on Resolution 3379, Herzog notes that there are two evils, “hatred and ignorance.” We see those evils at play today. Anti-Zionism, the modern strain of a shape-shifting hate, is not criticism of the State of Israel or protest against Israel’s prime minister or other ministers with whom one may not agree. It is not a criticism of its military operations.
Anti-Zionism is normalized, legitimized racism
Anti-Zionism, as clearly articulated in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism after a long democratic process, is denying Israel’s right to exist as a state and denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination. It is discriminating against Israelis and turning the Jew among nations into all that is evil, a pariah responsible for all that is bad in the world.
Fifty years later, and as the past two years since the October 7 Kristallnacht-moment of our times have made abundantly clear, it is anti-Zionism – denying Jewish identity, memory, heritage, peoplehood, and ancestry – that is racism.
It is racism that has again been normalized and legitimized in the name of “liberation,” “justice,” and “progress,” this time by hijacking, redefining, inverting, and weaponizing foundational principles upon which the UN was founded, betraying all it was entrusted to uphold, promote, and protect. It is racism that not only endangers Israel, but all who believe in its right to exist, and the rights of Jews around the world. To paraphrase the late Rabbi Sacks, what begins with the Jews never ends with us.
“There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations.” Fifty years later, Moynihan’s words have become a devastating reality. The institution entrusted to ensure that “Never Again,” by anyone to anyone, seats the most egregious violators of human rights around the Human Rights Council table. It hosts tyrannical regime leaders who invoke the language of rights, even as they torture, execute, and trample the rights of their people. In what has become a modern-day Tower of Babel, it collapses every foundational principle upon which it was constructed.
In a social-media age guided by a polarizing, fragmentizing business model, in which history has little resonance, what happens at the UN and the human rights industry created to support it does not remain there. Academic institutions, no longer pursuing truth in what has been dubbed a post-truth era, have seemingly replaced the mission of teaching how to think with agendas that indoctrinate generations on what to think. Bot-generated hashtags and buzzwords make their way around the world in TikTok videos, in Instagram reels, and in X/Twitter posts, before the (post)truth “straps its boots on.” Fifty years after the UN declared that Zionism is racism, leaders across spaces and places openly declare that they are not antisemitic, only anti–Zionist, generating popular support and little challenge.
Fifty years later, if we are to learn anything from history that repeats in rhyme, it is not enough to teach what happened. It is vital to understand how it happened, and can happen again, with the same mechanism of demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. It is imperative to insist that the law be applied equally and consistently by the institutions mandated to protect foundational principles. For “Never Again” to mean anything, it is vital to not only remember the past but also recognize present iterations of evil to prevent future recurrence of atrocities.
We must remember, reclaim, and renew the Jewish story, universal principles of human rights, and the commitment to uphold and protect foundational principles. In a raging war of barbarism openly declaring the intent to destroy our shared civilization, it is also a vital step toward protecting humanity and freedom.
The writer is chief executive of the International Legal Forum (ILF). She formerly served as Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism.