By: Michael Belling

N10 marks a double anniversary of the consequences of two different expressions of “the oldest hatred” in the world—the hatred of the Jews—50 years since the lowest point in the history of the United Nations with the passage of the “Zionism is racism” resolution and 87 years after the horrors of Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9-10, which marked the beginning of the Nazi industry developed to kill all Jews.

The events typify two aspects of the eliminationist ideology that has dogged and often dominated Jewish history for millennia. Christian and Muslim anti-Judaism sought the conversion of the Jews, while the Nazis were bent on their physical destruction. The U.N. canard was a move toward destroying the Jewish homeland and depriving Jews of their identity as a people using secular terminology, while the Holocaust was an attempt to wipe Jews out physically.

Both have deep roots—going back to biblical times—but they still flourish today. Much of what has emerged since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, reflects the harsh reality of their continued presence virtually throughout the world.

Part of the reason is that hostility toward the Jews takes on many forms at in different times, largely expressed in terms of what different societies regarded as their supreme values and ideas, what they identified as the greatest threats to them, and what is defined as the major evils and challenges facing them.

Former Commonwealth Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, in an address to the European Parliament in September 2016, referred to “the mutating virus: understanding antisemitism.”

He said: “Throughout history, when people have sought to justify antisemitism, they have done so by recourse to the highest source of authority available within the culture. In the Middle Ages, it was religion. So we had religious anti-Judaism. In post-Enlightenment Europe, it was science. So we had the twin foundations of Nazi ideology, Social Darwinism and the so-called Scientific Study of Race. Today, the highest source of authority worldwide is human rights. That is why Israel—the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and independent judiciary—is regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide.”

Since World War II, human rights have become virtually a secular religion in the West and serve to promote the latest incarnation of the mutating virus: accusing Israel of the five cardinal sins against human rights mentioned by Sacks, plus the addition of declaring Israel and Zionism the new Nazism.

This led directly to the 1975 U.N. resolution and served to justify the worldwide anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and frequently, openly anti-Jewish demonstrations in many countries.

Most people involved in this campaign seem to be unaware that, in doing so, they are echoing and reinforcing the old Soviet antisemitic and anti-Zionist propaganda campaigns. Those vile campaigns date back to at least 1967, when the Arab clients of the Soviet Union suffered an ignominious defeat following their aggression against the State of Israel.

Russian rulers feared a revival in the godless Communist country of Jewish consciousness and identification, which they felt could threaten their doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist totalitarian and atheist philosophy—the reason for the existence of the Soviet state.

The Soviet leaders referred it to the KGB propaganda and disinformation department, hoping to discredit the unwelcome Jewish renaissance and put a stop to it. They clearly felt that they had to undermine Israel and Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement.

The KGB probably felt it could not use religious anti-Jewish accusations, as the Soviet Union had no religion other than communism. Racist antisemitism had been discredited after Hitler. So they hit on the modern, post-World War II themes of human rights, inverting Hitler’s real race hatred and coming up with the totally baseless claim that Zionism is racism.

This Big Lie was accepted with alacrity and promoted by Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies who, along with the Soviet Union, were the leading proponents of Jew-hatred after 1945. With the Soviet bloc, these countries had an automatic majority in the major international organizations, which they used to advance this claim. In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly passed its resolution.

Calls for the end of the Jewish state are part of the new antisemitism. The old antisemitism denied Jews rights as individuals. In its newest incarnation, Jew-hatred denies the right of the Jewish state to exist among the family of nations and of Jews to have a state like any other people.

Sixteen years later in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the General Assembly came to its senses on the issue and repealed the resolution, something never done before or since.

Unfortunately, the saga of this Big Lie did not end there. It was resuscitated with additions and refinements a mere 10 years later in all its poisonous hatred at the notorious, so-called Durban anti-racism conference in 2001, officially the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, under the auspices of the United Nations.

The conference was hijacked by vile Jew-hatred and anti-Israel rhetoric, including antisemitic pamphlets and the distribution of the worst false accusation of the previous century—a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Durban became a launching pad for fresh and vicious acts—from the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign to open campus antisemitism and hateful genocide accusations brought by South Africa to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. They reared their head again soon after the Oct. 7 genocidal attack on Israel on by Hamas, aimed at killing as many civilians as possible bringing Israel’s other enemies in the region, particularly Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon, into a war finally to destroy the Jewish state.

Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and even the Palestinian Authority, which governs much of Judea and Samaria, show no signs of accepting a Jewish state in any borders whatsoever and have remained consistent in their objective to destroy Israel totally.

The letter, spirit and hatred of the two Nov. 10 events live on today. Repetition of falsehoods may get them believed, but the truth is that Zionism is not a dirty word. It is no more than the Jewish national liberation movement for the right of self-determination, like other peoples, in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.

In spite of their persistence, it is important for Jews to remember that ultimately, neither antisemitic effort has succeeded. The Jews are still here, while their persecutors have disappeared one by one, including the most powerful empires of their times.

The sheer clamor of Jew-hatred might at times appear overwhelming, yet it is important to state at least three positives that speak louder than the antisemitic shrieks and threats:

Israel is today stronger than ever;

The solid wall of Arab opposition to Israel that stood so firm for many years now has several large holes in it: peace with Egypt since 1978 and with Jordan since 1994, and, most encouragingly, the 2020 Abraham Accords that brought peace between Israel and Bahrain, the United Aram Emirates, Morocco and Sudan—accords that survived the recent Gaza war and show signs of expanding to include Kazakhstan and perhaps Saudi Arabia;

Jews not allowing others to determine who and what they are. In the words of Chaim Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, in response to the Zionism is racism resolution: “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 by a forum such as this one.”

          (JNS.org)

Michael Belling is a freelance journalist who has written widely on the Middle East. He was formerly an advocate and foreign correspondent for a South African media group in Israel