Exporting Anti-Semitism

...Our enemies today encourage their repetition...

...And also by the great reluctance of Americans to face the fact that this was happening...

...To be a Zionist is to be a criminal under international law according to the declaration of almost two-thirds of the nations of the world, a declaration wholly supported by the Soviet bloc...

...It seems not to be an "issue," as they say...

...The following February, the United Nations Commission of Human Rights found Israel guilty of 'war crimes' in the occupied Arab territories...

...It would be tempting to see in this propaganda nothing more than bigotry of a quite traditional sort that can, sooner or later, be overcome...

...1 wrote of this history in Commentary in August 1977: "A long-established propaganda technique of the Soviet government has been to identify those it would destroy with Nazism, especially with the racial doctrines of the Nazis...

...Americans among them...

...The counts read as if they could have come from the Nuremberg verdicts: "'Annexation of parts of the occupied territories.' '"Destruction and demolition.' "'Confiscation and expropriation...

...Neither the meeting in Havana, nor its precursors, have drawn any special response from our political institutions or culture...

...I had been sent there to represent an American government interested in working with the new nations, advancing what we thought might be mutual interests...

...The same month, in a General Assembly committee, a PLO document likened Israeli measures to Nazi atrocities during World War II...

...It would never have been proposed by the Department of State...

...These governments have come near to declaring that it is a crime to be a Jew...

...Last May 30, in a lecture at the Weizman Institute in London, I offered the view that anti-Semitism has become a unifying global ideology of the totalitarian Left...

...I was startled by it, by both its audacity and its untruth...

...If I have described anything these past years, it is the twin phenomena of an ignorance of past history and an avoidance of present reality...

...Yet, the campaign has drawn response not merely from places one might expect-those states which, for instance, Daniel Patrick Moyndlan, whose article here is adapted from a recent address, is the junior Senator from New York and a longtime contributor to The New Leader...

...And when the notorious UN resolution equating Zionism and racism was introduced in 1975, one could find African states among its most vocal backers...

...The first articles in Pravda launching it, for example, charged that the mass murder at Babi Yar was a collaboration of Zionists and Nazis...

...There is a history to this avoidance, too, which I first stumbled upon when I assumed my duties as Permanent Representative at the United Nations in 1975...

...Our Government remains silent...

...The Zionism resolution was adopted by the General Assembly in November 1975...

...It is an important as well as difficult point that I shall attempt to make, for it must inevitably engage long-standing sensitivities and, accordingly, is more likely to be misunderstood than otherwise...

...It was designed to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel, I contended, and the Soviets had grounded it in a perverted variant of Marxist analysis: They argued that "imperialism," the supposed enemy of the new states of the world, was a creature of an international Zionist conspiracy, so to speak, with the clear implication that Jews played a special role in perpetuating the alleged injustices of international capitalism...

...I am pleased that on September 25, President Carter denounced the Zionism charge at a town meeting in Queens College...

...It was necessary to learn the history of something that seemed to come from nowhere, to discover the "somewhere" from whence it had come...

...This phrase, drawn from the Nuremberg indictment of the Nazi war criminals, derives from the worst in the anti-Israeli international propaganda effort, for it seeks the equation of Israel with Nazi Germany...

...Steadily and predictably, these charges moved into international forums...

...The event, however, aroused the Soviet Union to evoke the by now almost bureaucratic response...

...I shall deal simply and plainly with ideology, in the full knowledge that this is not necessarily congenial to the American temperament...

...And I shall have to report on troubles of the kind that many people would understandably prefer not to consider...

...On September 17, I spoke on the floor of the United States Senate and said: "I would ask Americans to try to understand what has happened...

...I think that Bernard Lewis of Princeton University has located the historic origin of this identification, and it is not perhaps as diabolically, fiendishly clever as it might seem...

...In truth, I anticipated none of this...

...They were promptly accused of Nazi connections and branded as racist...

...The Final Declaration of that meeting went further than any of its textual predecessors, labeling Zionism as one of several "crimes against humanity": "The Heads of State or Government reaffirmed that racism, including Zionism, racial discrimination, and especially apartheid constituted crimes against humanity and represented violations of the United Nations Charter and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

...But it is necessary to repeat again that to those proceedings of September there has been neither public nor private reaction of any scale...

...In June 1975 it appeared at the Mexico City Conference of the International Women's Year...

...It is not merely that our adversaries have commenced an effort to destroy the legitimacy of a kindred democracy through the incessant repetition of the Zionist-racist lie...

...Given the history of such propaganda, and given our own instinctive reponse to it as palpably absurd?no person of education could possibly believe such a charge," that sort of thing-we were inclined to dismiss this Soviet-sponsored effort as mere boorishness, hopelessly unsophisticated...

...Zionism has been declared a crime against humanity...

...Thus, i am driven to return to a theme I have stressed for some years now, and to couple it with an ad-tional observation...

...They require our attention and our energy, and above all our intelligence...

...In May, in the same body, the Soviet Union accused Israel of 'racial genocide' in putting down unrest on the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River...

...Nonetheless, the charge was so outrageous that many could not-would not-believe it was being made...

...On September 7, this campaign reached a grotesque culmination when the so-called nonaligned states met in Havana...

...Bernard Lewis writes: 'The results were immediately visible in a vehement campaign of abuse, particularly in the attempt to equate the Israelis with the Nazis as aggressors, invaders, occupiers, racists, oppressors, and murderers.' "Within the short period of time, and coincidentally with the introduction of 'racist' into currency as a general term of abuse, Soviet propagandists began to equate Zionism per se with racism...

...It was a result, rather, of the random workings of the political process and the happy coincidence that the President was our guest in New York City...

...But the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist campaign is not uninformed bigotry, it is conscious politics...

...Our century has dealt very harshly with such lapses...

...But, out of nowhere, or so it seemed, there appeared that resolution equating Zionism with racism...

...The sensitivity I mentioned has to do with the fact that from the outset the campaign explicitly compared Zionism with Nazism...

...In 1974 the International Labor Conference adopted a' Resolution Concerning the Policy of Discrimination, Racism, and Violation of Trade Union Freedoms and Rights Practiced by the Israeli Authorities in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories.' The charge of racism was now pressed...

...An intense propaganda campaign, begun in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s and embraced and echoed by radical regimes the world around, had long been discernible...

...This is of course precisely the charge leveled against Nazism at the Nuremberg trials...

...Yet I must note that such a denunciation was not the result, would not have been the result, of any "decision-making process" of our government...

...The idea has traveled through world politics since then, arriving in Havana and reaching its culmination there...

...Jews escaped this treatment until the Six-day War of 1967...

...It is that others can come to believe it also...

...The events I have described can no longer be dismissed as other than they are...

...have an ongoing battle with Israel-but from cultures as diverse as the Sinitic and the African, which have no experience either of Jews or of traditional European anti-Semitism...

...Evacuation, deportation, expulsion, displacement and transfer of inhabitants.' "'Mass arrests, administrative detention, and ill-treatment.' '"Pillaging of archaeological and cultural property.' " 'Interference with religious freedoms and affront to humanity.' "In April 1976, in the Security Council, a representive of the Palestine Liberation Organization spoke of the 'Pretoria-Tel Aviv Axis,' making an explicit refernce to the 'axis' between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the 1930s...

...Not one state represented dissented from this obscenity...

...Following World War II, for example, pan-Turkish, Iranian and Islamic movements appeared in the southern regions of the Soviet Union...

...In 1973 Israel was excluded from the regional bodies of unesco...

...In a statement released to the press on March 4, 1970, a 'group of Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality' -making use of the facilities of the Soviet Foreign Ministry -attacked 'the aggression of the Israeli ruling circles,' and said that 'Zionism has always expressed the chauvinistic views and racist (my emphasis] ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie.' This may well be the first official Soviet reference to Zionism as racism in the fashionable connotation of the term...

...A long propaganda campaign emanating from the Soviet Union has now culminated...

...Thus Chinese Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping could speak to the UN General Assembly in April 1974 and include "Zionism" in his list of the world's evils...

...Eighty-nine governments endorsed this formulation...

...We are dealing here not with the primitive but with the sophisticated, with the world's most powerful propaganda apparatus-that of the Soviet Union and the dozens of governments which echo it...

...Further, this fact of world politics creates altogether new problems for those interested in the fate of democracies in the world, and of Israel in the Middle East...