The Truth About The Lie

...In one of the papers prepared for the Jerusalem Conference on November 11, Dr...

...There is a readiness to believe anything about Israel, no matter how outrageous...

...Agursky suggests: "Attempts of the Soviet Anti-Zionism literature to cast doubts on the Soviet recognition of Israel in 1947-48...

...It was an honor to be invited, and each of us accepted with a sense that at long last this issue would be paid the attention it requires...

...Having failed to destroy Israel because (and this is important) Israel could now rely on the aid of the United States, the Soviet Union took another course, and set out to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli | state...

...Yet at no time-until the study day ii Jerusalem in November-has sustained, informed attention been devoted to the subject by persons j with command of the various fields in | volved...

...If there had been a wider appreciation of this at the time, then perhaps less damage would have been done...

...Who will follow us...

...It happens all the time-accusations against Israel of genocide, contempt for the notion that there is a rule of law in Israel, or that there is honor in Israel or that there is any kind of legitimacy about Israel...

...generated enormous enthusiasm among Soviet Jews.' Zionism had proven itself in battle...

...We must tell it loudly and clearly and often, and insist upon it, abroad and at home...

...Second, the United States for the first time came to the aid of Israel in a military crisis...

...There had been scattered writings on the subject previously and as the years passed we seemed bit by bit to learn more of the genesis of that 1975 Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the senior Democratic senator from the state of New York...

...There will be new forces, some of them arising now, new prophets and new despots, who will justify their actions with the help of just such distortions of words as we have sanctioned here today...

...He delivered this speech at the State Department on December 11, at a seminar entitled "Zionism Equals Racism-An Assault on Human Rights," sponsored jointly by B'nai B'rith International, the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization...

...A final thought: Would there have been a Jerusalem Conference in November and a Washington Conference today on refuting the Zionism-Racism equation, if Chaim Herzog had not been elected President of Israel last spring...

...For from the question of origins flow answers about consequences...

...Ehud Sprinzak sums things up about right, to my mind: "Anti-Zionism is here to stay...

...If but seven had switched, the Resolution would have been blocked...

...The operational conclusion from the deterministic nature of anti-Zionism is that its future development depends to a great extent on what we do or do not do...

...It is a measure of how far we-and the world-have come in nine years...

...Zionist agents, aCtive during the last war in Western and Eastern Europe and in the occupied part of the Soviet Union, collaborated with the Nazis...

...Inevitably, however, President , Herzog, and myself, and the handful of others who have been so absorbed in this subject, are not...

...Moscow presumably calcu-j lated that Western governments wouli find it difficult to marshal popular | support in the future for a country widely perceived as illegitimate...

...a kind of Pan-Judaism, with a focus in Israel-is a development of its use against Pan-Turkism and Pan-Arabism...

...that "the final solution of the problem of the Middle East" would be to replace Israel with a Palestinian State...

...Many cases are known where Gestapo men tecruited overseers in death camps and special "police" from among Zionists who "kept order" in Jewish ghettos...

...j Mikhail Agursky, a fellow of the So-i viet and East European Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offered one thought-that part of the story may be no more and no less complicated than an effort by the chief Soviet ideologue, Mikhail Suslov (who died in 1982), to discredit Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, the senior official most closely linked to early Soviet overtures to Israel...

...The resolution has had consequences...

...was that paper majorities tended to grow into real policies: the corrupt arithmetic of the assembly .. . tended to become imperceptibly the conventional wisdom of international society...

...Certainly, the campaign had the kind of formal beginning that we associate with Suslov...

...To my knowledge it was the first such formal gathering convened in nine years to discuss an epochal event in the history of the State of Israel and in the history of the United Nations-histories which, not coinci-dentally, are approximately coterminous...

...Said Rajaie-Khorassani, said at the U.N...

...It is too important an event to be left uninvestigated...

...Tomorrow, terms like 'national self-determination' and 'national, honor' will be perverted in the same way to serve the purposes of conquest and exploitation...

...I described this in Loyalties: "On February 18-19, 1971, a two-part article appeared in Pravda, and was promptly published as an English language pamphlet, by Novosti Press Agency of Moscow, titled ' Anti-Sovietism-Profession of Zionjjts' . . . the thirty-four-year-old author of the article was Vladimir Viktorovich Bolshakov, then (or shortly thereafter) Deputy Secretary of pravda's editorial board in charge of jj,e newspaper's International Department...

...event...

...III...

...Consider another measure: On the key vote in the General Assembly on November 10, 1975 (it came on a Belgian motion to adjourn before voting on Resolution 3379), the vote for our side was 55, to 67 on the other...

...President Herzog, of course, had been Israel's permanent representative to the United Nations at the time of the Zionism resolution, and had spoken with great force on the occasion of its passage...

...The event was sponsored jointly by the World Zionist Organization and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was scheduled to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of Resolution 3379 (XXX...

...Another thought: part of the effectiveness of the Soviet campaign is the unease the charge has created among those against whom it is directed...

...is an indirect attack against Gromyko as the person who was involved in this decision...

...And when these claims begin to be made-as they have already begun to be made-it is the small nations of the world whose integrity will suffer...

...TILLING THE TRUTH ABOUT 1HE LIE DANIQ PATRICK moynihaS i. On November 11, 1984, the President of Israel convened, at his residence in Jerusalem, a study day on "Refuting the Zionism-Racism Equation...

...Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times, his narrative history of the 20th century: "It is true that the vote was merely on paper...

...It is, I think it fair to say, now clear that there have been consequences...

...As Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpat-rick said, in an interview published December 2 in the Washington Post: "The analogies drawn between Nazis and Israelis are practically a daily affair at the United Nations...

...Finally, the Israeli victory...

...In all truth...

...And its extension to Zionism...

...Thus, for example, Dr...

...The disastrous showing of the Soviet Union's clients in the 1967 Six Day War apparently prompted the Soviets to launch the ambitious propaganda campaign that led ultimately to November 10, 1975...

...But that is behind us now...

...What we must do is tell the truth about the lie...

...How often since then have the U.S...

...I have given any number of speeches on the subject, and have devoted portions of three books to it: A Dangerous Place (1978), of which an Israeli edition in Hebrew has been published, Counting Our Blessings (1980) and Loyalties (1984...

...I offer the hope that because of its importance as a political event this will become a respected area of scholarly inquiry, in Israel and the United States and elsewhere in the democratic world...

...In the course of all this we have gotten a pretty good grip on the Soviet origins of the event...

...On what grounds will others be moved to defend and protect them, when the language of human rights, the only language by which the small can be defended, is no longer believed and no longer has a power of its own...

...Africans, Asians, Latin Americans and Europeans alike voted with us...

...But the real danger of the U.N...

...And, as Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu noted, according to the New York Times of the following day, "No one in the hall batted an eyelash...

...Israel overwhelmed its combined Arab neighbors, most of whom were armed by and clients of the Soviet Union...

...First Bernard Lewis published an important article in Foreign Affairs, in 1976, in which he traced the roots of the Zionism-Racism charge to the Soviet practice of seeking to discredit ethnic assertiveness in the vast Russian empire that is the USSR...

...But there again: consequences...

...He invited two of us who had been there with him, myself and Benjamin Nunez of Costa Rica, to come to Jerusalem for this occasion and to present papers...

...But all these unchanging and persistent factors do not add up to inevitable radicalization...

...The tragedy of Babi Yar," wrote a number of Soviet citizens of Jewish origin, who live in the Ukraine, in a letter to Pravda, "will forever be a reminder not only of the monstrous barbarity of the Nazis but also of the indelible disgrace of their accomplices and followers-the Zionists.'"" II...

...Looking back to November 10, 1975, it is fair to say that we were aware how much the nature of international political discourse would be changed by Resolution 3379.1 spoke to the General Assembly immediately following the vote: "The terrible lie that has been told here will have terrible consequences...

...Henceforth, the Middle East was a setting in which Soviet arms would face American arms...

...What is left to us is the future-and the question of how we will choose to enter it...

...He asserted in the official ne\vspaper of the Communist Party 0f the Soviet Union that Jews, far from being victims of the Nazis, had been (jieir collaborators...

...Today we have drained the word racism of its meaning...

...In the technical vocabulary of Soviet vituperation," Lewis wrote, "the term racist is applied to nationalist movements linking the non-Slavic peoples of the Union with their kin elsewhere...

...Charles Fairbanks and others have recorded the introduction into official Soviet anti-Semitism, in the early 1950s of the term "Zionist" as a euphemism for Jew...

...Anti-Zionism is surely here to stay...

...On November 28, the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Mr...

...and Israel been able to muster more than a handful of votes on an issue of comparable importance...

...As I wrote in Loyalties: "Three events occurred...

...It discourages careful examination of the origins and purposes of the assault because it is so obscene, so untrue, too painful to contemplate...