Israel Land Rights Trainer Mark Vandermaas

In 1971, the UN General Assembly danced in the aisles celebrating an American defeat. This was a turning point for the UN. On October 25, the Assembly expelled the Republic of China (Taiwan) and seated Mao’s communist regime. Ambassador George H.W. Bush watched the floor turn into a celebration. Years later, he wrote: Taiwan was not the issue. “Kicking Uncle Sam was.” That night, the UN stopped being a club the West could steer toward its values. “Decolonization” filled the hall with new votes that created a new super majority. The Non-Aligned bloc, much of it Soviet- or Chinese-aligned, now owned the General Assembly. The Security Council still had vetoes. Everywhere else, the new majority could outvote the West at will. They used the majority on Israel next. On October 14, 1974, the Assembly invited Yasser Arafat to address it by a vote of 105–4. The PLO he ran was a non-state terrorist organization whose charter called for Israel’s destruction. Two years earlier, its men had murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In fact, Arafat arrived to the UN with the mastermind of that massacre, Ali Hassan Salameh. Arafat wore a holster onto the floor of the “house of peace.” Whether the pistol was still in it on the rostrum was argued the next morning. What was inarguable is that Arafat left the holster visible to make a point. He never said the word Israel. He called Zionism a form of racism and imperialism that must “ineluctably perish.” He extended a supposed “olive branch,” but only to Jews willing to live under Arab rule after the Jewish state was gone. The chamber gave him a standing ovation. Israel sat out the speech while much of the West simply stayed quiet. The same coalition then tried to throw Israel out of the UN. Syria and Algeria ran the charge to demand Israel’s expulsion. The Islamic conference at Jeddah endorsed it. It failed only thanks to American pressure, Sadat’s refusal to blow up Sinai peace talks, and African states that refused to copy the South Africa script. So they passed what they could pass. On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” With the automatic anti-Israel majority, the vote was 72–35 with 32 abstentions. Daniel Patrick Moynihan stood up and said the United States “does not acknowledge, will not abide by, will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” The resolution was repealed in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed. The UN was sold as the answer to Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust. By 1975, it was the hall that applauded a man in a gun belt and then declared the Jewish national movement a form of racism because it could not expel the Jewish state. That is a captured majority doing what captured majorities do.