Tearing into UN racism

1. Forty years have passed since the United Nations decreed in Resolution 3379 that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination."

Disgracefully, we see the same thing today, even in the pages of Israeli newspapers. Even though the U.N. canceled the resolution in 1991, it persists in its absurdist theater, and most of the organization's resolutions until now have related to condemning Israel. "A people who live apart" will be condemned. Europe now puts its security and social problems to the side to label Israeli products produced in Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights.

I went back over the stunning 1975 speech by Chaim Herzog, then Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and later president of Israel, and got chills. It was as if he was speaking today. Herzog chose a tactic that is not common among us: attacking, rather than going on the defensive.

About a month ago, I spoke with Professor Ruth Weiss of Harvard University, a prominent U.S. intellectual, and told her that people in Israel were cowed by the U.N. Security Council, and that was used as a way of pressuring us. Weiss said that it was necessary to change the picture.

According to the professor, "Jews just don't want to go on the offensive." For thousands of years, she said, we lived under superior rule and adapted ourselves to survive.

"If you agree to be the target, if you agree to be on trial, if you agree to be the defendant, then you will be eradicated," Weiss said. It doesn't matter that Israel claims to be innocent, or that there are extenuating circumstances.

"But Israel is not the defendant. It is the plaintiff. It's the prosecutor. It's the one who brings others to trial," she said.

In 1947, it was decided to divide the Land of Israel and later to declare the state, under the U.N. declaration that guarantees the right of every nation, large and small, to live in peace. As a result, the Arabs decided to launch a war against Israel. From the day the Arabs went to war against Israel, Israel should have called daily for the Arabs to be thrown out of the United Nations, says Weiss. Israel should have said, "If you don't live by the charter of the United Nations, you don't belong in the United Nations." Weiss concludes by saying: "We had to prosecute. Prosecute. Prosecute. Never defend."

2. That's how Chaim Herzog worked. In his historic speech, he said it was not Israel that was being debated, it was the U.N. itself, and that the debate over Zionism "may well be a turning point in the fortunes of the United Nations and a decisive factor as to the possible continued existence of [the] organization." He said it was even symbolic that the debate was being held on Nov. 10, the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938, when the Nazis started a premeditated pogrom against synagogues and Jewish institutions in Germany. He declared severely, "It is indeed fitting that the United Nations, which began its life as an anti-Nazi alliance, should, 30 years later, find itself on its way to becoming the world center of anti-Semitism. Hitler would have felt at home." He made it clear: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Don't believe those who roll their eyes and differentiate between the two.

He also said: "I do not come to this rostrum to defend the moral and historical values of the Jewish people. They do not need to be defended. They speak for themselves. They have given to mankind much of what is great and eternal. They have done for the spirit of man more than can readily be appreciated in a forum such as this one." He laid out what stood behind the resolution: questioning the Jewish people's right to freedom and to exist as a nation.

What is Zionism? According to Herzog, "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." The Arabs, he said, had sovereignty is 20 countries, then comprising 150 million people in four and a half million square miles, with "vast" natural resources.

"The issue … is not whether the world will come to terms with Arab nationalism," he said. "The question is, at what point Arab nationalism, with its prodigious glut of advantage, wealth and opportunity, will come to terms with the modest but equal rights of another Middle Eastern nation to pursue its life in security and peace."

The question Herzog hurled at the U.N. is alive and kicking today. The issue is not the question of our negotiations with the Palestinians, but the extent to which the Arab and Islamic peoples recognize the Jewish people's right to sovereignty over any part of our land. Take note: recognizing the right itself, not an obscure recognition of a de facto situation. No such recognition has ever been given by any Arab leader.

3. Herzog also said that the treatment of Jews historically -- and we can add, the treatment of the State of Israel today -- was the measure of human fairness, civilization, and values, by which a nation's humanity was measured: "It always began with the Jews but never ended with them."

That's a key sentence that sheds light on what is happening in the world today. Europe thought it would sacrifice the Jews and their state on the altar of its desire for quiet, assuming that Islam was only interested in defeating the Jews and would leave it alone.

But Herzog was right: It never ends with us. Then, like today, we are civilization's forward operations base in the war for a free, meaningful life.

Herzog neither asked for pity nor apologized; he announced what was really behind the debate: "I stand here not as a supplicant. Vote as your moral conscience dictates to you. For the issue is not Israel or Zionism. The issue is the continued existence of the organization which has been dragged to its lowest point of discredit by a coalition of despotisms and racists."

4. Finally, in the tradition of the great biblical calls, he said: "The vote of each delegation will record in history its country's stand on anti-Semitic racism and anti-Judaism. You yourselves bear the responsibility for your stand before history, for as such will you be viewed in history." And then he said that for us, the Jewish people, the resolution was nothing more than a piece of paper, and ripped it up with the eyes of the world upon him.

Herzog later said that he had been following in the footsteps of his father, former Chief Rabbi of Israel Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog, who in 1939 tore up the White Paper (the British policy restricting the number of Jews making aliyah) in front of thousands of people at the Yeshurun Synagogue in Jerusalem. In the sound of that paper tearing, I heard the sound of clothes being torn in mourning over the premature death of the U.N., and also an educational attempt to shake any shred of integrity in the hearts of the nations of the world, as Moses did when he broke the tablets.

In historic moments like these, when a representative of Israel feels the weight of history on his shoulders, he needs the spiritual strength of our people's eternal sources. Herzog's daughter Michal talked about what her father had been thinking when he walked from his place in the plenum to the podium. He said he had been thinking about the cantor's prayer on Yom Kippur, "Our God and the God of our forefathers, be with the mouths of the agents of Your people, the family of Israel, who stand to plead before You with prayer and supplication for Your people, the family of Israel." Those times live today.