Fifty years after the United Nations passed its infamous 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, the consequences of that act continue to echo across the Middle East and across the world.
The resurgence of antisemitism following Hamas’s massacre of Israelis and foreign nationals on October 7, 2023, and the war that followed, has exposed just how deeply that toxin seeped into global political culture.
Over the past year, we have witnessed a ferocious wave of anti-Israel and openly antisemitic activity: in Western capitals and campuses, in international institutions, and on social media platforms where extremist incitement spreads unchecked. The genie that had long remained just beneath the surface has been released – and its origins trace back, in no small part, to a single, catastrophic moment in UN history.
The resolution
In November 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” With that vote, an absolute majority of UN member states bestowed international legitimacy on an antisemitic slur, one that conflated the Jewish national liberation movement with one of humanity’s gravest moral crimes.
The resolution did more than express an opinion. It transformed the UN into an institutional engine of discrimination against Israel, violating its own foundational principle of “sovereign equality of all its members.” As US ambassador Daniel Moynihan warned at the time: “A great evil has been loosed upon the world.”
Although the resolution was formally revoked in 1991 with US president George H. W. Bush insisting the UN could not claim to seek peace while denying Israel’s right to exist, the damage had already been done. Even former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan would later acknowledge the stain the resolution left on the organization.
Revocation not a solution
The revocation of Resolution 3379 did not dismantle the extensive infrastructure that it had helped justify. Within the UN system, a permanent bureaucratic apparatus – committees, agencies, programs – grew around a mission that has long outlived the resolution itself: delegitimizing Israel in every possible forum.
Perhaps the clearest example is the unique and legally anomalous “non-member observer state” status granted to the Palestinians. While presented as a diplomatic gesture, this designation has been used as a platform to pressure international courts, UN bodies, and individual governments into recognizing a Palestinian state that does not in fact exist as a sovereign entity and has never been acknowledged as such by any binding international instrument.
This maneuvering directly undermines the Oslo Accords, agreed to, witnessed, and internationally recognized, which explicitly require that the permanent status of the territories be resolved only through negotiations. Instead, the Palestinian leadership has used the UN’s political machinery to evade that commitment.
Core message continues
The legacies of the Zionism-racism resolution have proved remarkably resilient. Even revoked, its core message continues to animate campaigns that seek to erode Israel’s legitimacy, fuel antisemitism, and distort the Middle East peace process.
The events of the past year should serve as a stark reminder: antisemitic narratives, once unleashed and institutionalized, do not simply disappear: they metastasize. For Jews worldwide and for the State of Israel, the consequences of that 1975 vote are still being felt.
Fifty years later, the genie has not returned to the bottle. And unless the international community confronts the enduring fallout of that moment now, it may never do so.
The writer is an Israeli expert in international law and former ambassador of the State of Israel to Canada. He directs the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA).