Abstract

Clearing the Air

On November 10,1975, in what the journal "The Nation," a few days later called "an odious expression of racism," the U.N. General Assembly voted to link Zionism with South African apartheid and condemn it as a form of racism. Now, after sixteen years, the United Nations has finally purged itself of this poison, perhaps it can begin to function in the Middle East as it should have all these years. But much worse was the conflation of nation with race, a conflation to which, again, only Jews were subjected. For if those Jews who have thought and acted as though they are a nation were not to be allowed to call themselves a nation and to behave like a nation but were instead to be considered a race, of which Zionism is the philosophy, then the U.N. was repeating the doctrine that lies at the root of the most hideous crime of this century.