Fifty years ago this November, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan rose to speak before the General Assembly. That body had just adopted Resolution 3379, which declared that “[Z]ionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Moynihan made the United States’ position clear: “It does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”
To equate Zionism with racism and racial discrimination was to condemn Israel’s legitimacy as a state.
Zionism, of course, is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, which the United Nations General Assembly had endorsed in 1947 when it recommended the partition of Mandatory Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem as an international city. As one of Israel’s Basic Laws puts it, Israel is the “nation state of the Jewish [p]eople in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious[,] and historical right to self-determination.”
To equate Zionism with racism and racial discrimination was to condemn Israel’s legitimacy as a state. Zionism is Israel’s raison d’être and Resolution 3379 denounced not this or that Zionism, but Zionism as a whole.
President George H.W. Bush used his political capital accrued with Arab states after the First Gulf War and the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid to convince the General Assembly to revoke Resolution 3379 in December 1991.
As President Donald Trump looks to expand upon the success of the Abraham Accords from his first term, which saw the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan establish diplomatic relations with Israel, prospective Muslim-majority states undoubtedly will grapple with, to a greater or lesser extent, what peace with Israel might mean for their relationship with Zionism.
A simple answer, to follow the precedent set by the Abraham Accords and Jerusalem’s decades-long peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, is that such states need not become Zionist, but they must oppose anti-Zionism.
When states enter into peace treaties with other states, they recognize the sovereignty of their co-signatories. Sovereignty, a fundamental principle of international law that dates back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, implies respect for states’ territorial integrity and the equal rights and self-determination of peoples.
The Abraham Accords provide a model for cooperation in the Middle East. For Israel, the so-called “start-up nation,” and its neighbors, they allow for collaboration in such fields as tourism, health care, agriculture, and the environment. And where the United Nations Charter prohibits states from resorting to the threat or use of force in their international relations, the Abraham Accords reaffirm this principle and reinforce the peaceful settlement of disputes as the way forward.
Many Arab states and other Abraham Accords candidates must soon make a choice.
It is troubling that some of the states discussed as possible candidates for peace treaties with Israel (and even those that already have such arrangements with the Jewish state) are parties to human rights treaties that expressly call for the elimination of Zionism—namely, the Arab Charter on Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. But while diplomatic efforts certainly should be made to amend these troubling treaty provisions, their existence should not stop progress to expand the Abraham Accords to other states. This is not a zero-sum game.
In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the character Bill asks Mike how he went bankrupt. Mike responds: “Gradually and then suddenly.” So it is with the pace of change in international relations.
Consider that Moynihan denounced Resolution 3379 just two years after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, with Syrian help, launched a surprise attack on Israel on the Jewish high holy day of Yom Kippur. Yet Sadat, who had voted in favor of Resolution 3379, traveled to Jerusalem a mere two years after to address the Knesset and made Egypt the first Arab state to make peace with Israel. Many Arab states and other Abraham Accords candidates must soon make a choice. Hopefully, for the forces of moderation to prevail, the notion that Zionism is racism must forever be relegated to the dustbin of history.
