In 1965, the Soviet Union attempted to equate Zionism with racism - and antisemitism and Nazism ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

In 1965, the Soviet Union attempted to equate Zionism with racism - and antisemitism and Nazism

Sixty years ago, in 1965, the United Nations debated the text of what was to become the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD.)

The United States proposed that the Convention include three words:

The States Parties to this Convention undertake to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incitement to, or acts of, such discrimination and to declare and, to this end, to recognize as offences punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, acts of violence or incitement to such acts against any group of persons or individuals of another race or of different colour or ethnic origin, including anti-Semitism, and also any assistance to racist activities, including the financing thereof.

The Soviet Union was very upset at including antisemitism in the text, as were the Arab countries. So it suggested its own language that compared Zionism with antisemitism, Nazism and apartheid:

The States Parties to the Convention condemn anti-Semitism, Zionism, Nazism, neo-Nazism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, and all ideologies and practices based on racial intolerance and hatred.

This upset Israel quite a bit, as well as most of the West, so the UN did what it normally does - it took out all language from both proposals as a compromise, meaning that the Soviet Union won by ICERD not including antisemitism as one of the things it is against.

In fact, the Israeli representative called it out in exactly those terms. The notes of the meeting says that he suggested that the "amendment had been put forward for reasons of political opportunism or in order so to complicate the work of the Committee as to achieve the elimination from the Convention of any reference to anti-Semitism.... it was an affront to Israel and to the Jewish people everywhere."

But the Soviet Union had also planted the weeds of the UN becoming doctrinally anti-Israel with that amendment. They grew quickly. In only ten years the UN associated Zionism with racism It took a little longer to associate it with the others - it linked Israel to racial discrimination 36 years before the Durban conference, and with apartheid some 55 years before major NGOs more or less simultaneously colluded to come up with the conclusion that Israel was practicing apartheid. (So far the only people I've seen try to equate Zionism with antisemitism are the haters at Electronic Intifada, although the number who blame Israel for antisemitism is increasing quickly. and equating Israel with the Nazis is the entire point of the "Gaza genocide" slander.)

The facts haven't changed since 1965 when the world roundly rejected the idea that Zionism was something to be condemned. But propaganda works with the mindless repetition of falsehoods so that the association is burned into the brains of generations who don't even have the ability to think for themselves.