50 years ago the UN also said “Zionism Is Racism”
JVL Introduction
The furore over the Green Party’s vote in favour of a motion that, among many other things, said that Zionism is Racism. Middle East Eye helpfully remind us that in 1975, the UN voted for a motion calling Zionism racism.
Times changed and there was huge pressure – ultimately successful – for this resolution to be revoked. But the UK government lobbied the US at the time not for this not to happen. “In December 1989, US Vice President Dan Quayle started a campaign to revoke the resolution (and) according to declassified documents from the time, British diplomats at the UN privately described Quayle’s campaign as “naked political opportunism”, saying he was appealing “to Zionist feeling” and that the cause was “irresistible to right-wing Republican sentiment”. This was happening with a Tory Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd in post at the time who told “his staff to convey to the US the UK’s “firm wish that no action will be taken in the near future”.”
Agree or not with the resolution, the (over) reaction to it smacks of the campaign against Corbyn, to seek to delegitimise any political party that puts the needs and rights of Palestinians on their central agenda. The ongoing attempts to conflate Jews and Israel, antisemitism with anti-Zionism are inevitable, almost knee jerk but the tide is changing as people see the reality of what Zionism is – and has been – doing. This is what is turning people away from supporting Zionism.
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Wed 7 Oct 2026. Read the original here.
How the UN declared Zionism a form of racism - Britain then lobbied against revoking the resolution
In the 1970s, it was the UN which defined Zionism as racism. Today it’s the Green Party of England and Wales
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Hebrews in ancient times did not go around (or at least there is no evidence) stating that ‘collective jewish identity and self determination’ were zionism.
What is self determination collectively but an imagined ideological idea of nationalistic community/
The UN were forced to reverse the decision regarding Zionism because of the US and other European countries forceful pursuit.
‘National right to existence”. A national right to existence is based simply on the ideological belief of Nationalism and imagined communities.
We have many colonial countries that have ethnically cleansed the land for their national existence and self determination – US, Israel, Australia etc..
I do not believe or found any evidence in ancient texts that Zionism is what Judaism should be associated with. Zionism is an indoctrination into a fear and ideology of a nationalistic state of one group of people using ancient text for their own strategies to achieve that, without sound evidence.
It is used as another word instead of racism and fascism but its practice are still the same.
Bear mind Zionism by its founding Fathers did not view the Jewish state as a religious strategy but a nationalistic one. Herzl dod not beleive in Judaism or a higher entity.
In a speech to the Menorah Society Dinner in New York City in December 1917, Chief Judge of the New York State Supreme Court Irving Lehman, brother of Governor Herbert Lehman of New York, stated: “I cannot recognize that the Jews as such constitute a nation in any sense in which the word is recognized in political science, or that a national basis is a possible concept for modern Judaism. We Jews in America, bound to the Jews of other lands by our common faith, constituting our common inheritance, cannot as American citizens feel any bond to them as members of a nation, for nationally we are Americans and Americans only, and in political and civic matters we cannot recognize any other ties. We must therefore look for the maintenance of Judaism to those spiritual concepts which constitute Judaism.”