Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be a form of racism.
It wasn't the only UN resolution passed that day.
The General Assembly also passed Resolution 3376, establishing the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
One resolution declared Jewish national identity illegitimate. The other created the permanent United Nations apparatus that would, from that day forward, operate the framework whose demands the first resolution had articulated.
Resolution 3376 was operationalizing a resolution passed the previous year. In November 1974, the General Assembly had passed Resolution 3236, which defined what it called the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. The 1975 resolution established the permanent committee to advance those rights. The 1974 resolution detailed those rights.
That resolution reaffirms "the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including the right to self-determination without external interference" and "the right to national independence and sovereignty." It reaffirms "the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return." It "emphasizes that full respect for and the realization of these inalienable rights of the Palestinian people are indispensable for the solution of the question of Palestine." It "recognizes that the Palestinian people is a principal party in the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East." It "further recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
Each of these provisions, examined objectively, requires the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
Self-determination "without external interference" applied to a contested territory where two peoples claim sovereignty means Palestinian self-determination without consulting what the existing Jewish inhabitants currently living on the land have to say. National independence and sovereignty, asserted as an inalienable right of the Palestinian people, are articulated without any corresponding mention of Israeli national independence and sovereignty. The right of return, treated as inalienable, requires Israel to absorb the descendants of 1948 refugees in numbers that would end Jewish demographic majority within the state. Recognition of the Palestinians as a principal party in any settlement institutionalizes the Palestinian veto on any agreement that does not satisfy these demands. The right to 'regain rights by all means' — language careful enough to avoid explicit authorization of violence, but ambiguous enough to be read by the PLO as legitimating armed struggle — was articulated by states whose territory was not affected by the means.
Note what isn't in that resolution: any mention of "1967 lines" or "The West Bank and Gaza." It was not a resolution to make a Palestinian state side by side with Israel - it was a resolution to replace Israel. In this resolution, Israeli Jews have no rights - and Israel as a country does not have any rights either, no mater that it is a member of the UN and this goes against everything the UN Charter stands for.
This 1974 resolution is a modern restatement of the Jewish Question. Every demand is on Israel. And its title?
The dual passage of November 10, 1975 was the institutional consolidation of this framework. Resolution 3379 declared Jewish national identity illegitimate. Resolution 3376 established the permanent committee to advance the Palestinian rights that 3236 had defined. Both resolutions were operationalizing the same structural project. The same coalition of Arab, Soviet-bloc, and non-aligned states passed both. The complementarity of the two moves was institutionally explicit. The entire purpose of The Question of Palestine was to operationalize the "Zionism is Racism" resolution.
It was never about Palestinians. It was always about Jews.
The UN's own timeline
There is one piece of confirming evidence you can see for yourself, today.
The United Nations maintains an official website called The Question of Palestine, with a section titled "Historical Timeline." The timeline begins in 1885 with the coining of the word "Zionism" by Nathan Birnbaum. It continues with the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896, the First Zionist Congress in 1897, and Chaim Weizmann's visit to Palestine in 1907.
The UN's own institutional account of how the Question of Palestine came into being begins with the Jewish answer to the Jewish Question.
The Question of Palestine, on the UN's own institutional account, did not begin with Palestinian national consciousness, the British Mandate, the 1947 partition, or the 1948 war. It began with Zionism. The framework names what it is responding to. It is responding to the Jewish structural exit from the European Jewish Question. The Question of Palestine is the international system's institutional response to the Jewish refusal to be absorbed into European modernity on the framework's terms, using the language of "rights" and "principles" to destroy Jewish self determination - which would have saved untold millions had Israel been born ten years earlier.
Read this way, the rest of the UN's institutional architecture around Israel is shown to be something other than what it claims to be. The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Division for Palestinian Rights in the UN Secretariat, the annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (held on November 29, the anniversary of the 1947 partition vote, chosen specifically because it commemorates what the framework treats as the moment of original Palestinian dispossession), UNRWA's institutional perpetuation across generations and creation of a new definition of "refugee" just for Palestinians, the annual cycle of General Assembly resolutions reaffirming the inalienable rights articulated in 3236 — all of this is the institutional architecture of a framework whose load-bearing concern is not the welfare of Palestinians but the existence of the Jewish state that the Jewish exit from Europe produced.
The November 29 commemoration is not the only annual UN ritual tied to the Israeli historical trajectory. The institution also holds an annual event on May 15. The UN does not call it "Nakba Day." It calls it the "Anniversary of the Nakba" — the anniversary of the catastrophe.
What is the specific catastrophic event the UN is marking the anniversary of? It cannot be the date Palestinian Arabs left their homes - some 250,000 had already left beforehand. It doesn't seem to be a commemoration of the attack on the new state of Israel by combined Arab armies that started May 15; perhaps their eventual loss is the catastrophe (and in fact the original use of the word was exactly for that reason) but the date would not be the date of the start of the aggression.
The only anniversary that makes sense is this: even though Israel declared the state on May 14 ahead of the Friday evening Sabbath, the Arabs did not consider that legally significant. What they do consider important is the day that the British Mandate ended — and Jewish sovereignty began on parts of Palestine. That was the stroke of midnight the morning of May 15.
The UN's selection of May 15 as the anniversary of the nakba shows that to the UN, the first day of a UN member state's existence is catastrophic.
The two commemorations are paired. November 29 marks the authorization of Jewish statehood as Palestinian dispossession. May 15 marks the start of operative Jewish sovereignty as Palestinian catastrophe. The UN's institutional rituals around Israel frame its entire existence as wholly negative.
The UN would never admit that directly. But its official commemorations show that the UN — not Palestinians, but the UN itself — considers Israel's existence to be a problem that must be solved.
This is the Jewish Question transposed to the 21st century.
Counterfactual
There is a simple exercise that exposes what the Question of Palestine is actually about. Imagine the 1948 war had gone the other way. The Arab armies that invaded the new state of Israel — Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq — had won. Israel does not exist. What would have happened to the Palestinian cause?
The territory of the British Mandate would have been divided among the victors. Egypt taking Gaza and the Negev. Jordan taking the West Bank and the coastal areas. Syria taking the Galilee. The Arab population of the former mandate would have become citizens of one of these three states, just like Jordan gave citizenship to the West Bank Arabs in the areas it annexed.
Would there be a Question of Palestine? Would there be a permanent UN agenda item on the fate of the formerly-Mandate Arabs? Would there be a Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Egyptian-Jordanian-Syrian Arabs of the former Mandate? Would there be a UN Division for the Rights of those Arabs? Would there be an UNRWA for the people displaced by the war? Would Western university campuses host protests on behalf of the Arabs of Gaza-as-part-of-Egypt and the West Bank-as-part-of-Jordan? Would Palestinians-as-a-distinct-people exist as a category in international discourse at all?
The answer is obviously no. None of this institutional architecture would exist. The Arabs of the former Mandate would have been absorbed into Arab states under the usual conditions, and the international system would have had no reason to construct a distinct category for them. The world would not be talking about Palestinians today.
The Question of Palestine is not generated by Palestinian statelessness. It is not generated by Palestinian national aspirations. It is generated by opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. It is the Jewish Question resurrected.
What the Arab states actually did with Palestinians
Egypt expelled any Palestinians in its territory to Gaza. Lebanon didn't allow any Palestinians to own land or to work in many jobs. Jordan killed thousands of Palestinians in eleven days in 1970. Kuwait expelled 400,000 Palestinians two decades later. Syria killed thousands in Yarmouk during its civil war.
There have been no UN resolutions condemning these events. There have been no campus protests against how badly Palestinians have been treated by their own brethren.
The rejection of statehood
The instrumental character of the Palestinian cause is further demonstrated by what Palestinians themselves have done with offers of statehood. They rejected the 1937 Peel Commission's proposed partition giving them a Palestinian Arab state. They rejected the 1947 UN partition plan. They rejected the 2000 Camp David proposal offering Palestinian statehood on roughly 92 percent of the West Bank with land swaps, shared Jerusalem, and refugee compensation. They rejected the 2001 Taba framework addressing the issues left open at Camp David. They ignored the 2008 Olmert offer proposing Palestinian statehood on roughly 94 percent of the West Bank with land swaps for the remainder, a capital in East Jerusalem, internationalized holy basin, and Israeli acceptance of a small symbolic refugee return.
Each rejection was followed not by counter-proposal but by violence. The Second Intifada followed the Camp David and Taba rejections. The Gaza disengagement of 2005, in which Israel unilaterally withdrew all settlements and military presence, was followed by rocket attacks, the Hamas takeover of 2007, and three wars before October 7, 2023.
The Question of Palestine was never about the welfare or rights of Palestinians. It was solely about denying rights to Jews.
BDS: the polite rebrand in compressed time
The most visible contemporary manifestation of anti-Zionism is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, launched in 2005 with the public framing that its target is Israel and its policies, not Jews. BDS positions itself as a civil-society human rights campaign modeled on the South African anti-apartheid movement, deploying the contemporary international system's most respectable vocabulary.
The framing falls apart on two facts.
The first is that BDS itself acknowledges its lineage when pressed. Omar Barghouti, the movement's founder, stated in 2011 that the 2005 BDS Call "was not the beginning" of the movement but "a culmination of decades of Palestinian boycott initiatives." He continued: "for more than a century Palestinians have used boycotts." Riham Barghouti, another founder, confirmed in 2023 that BDS "builds off a long history of Arab boycott and Palestinian boycott." The lineage they acknowledge begins with the Fifth Palestine Arab Congress of 1922, which formally called for the boycott of Jewish businesses in Mandatory Palestine, twenty-six years before Israel existed. The Arab League formalized the boycott in 1945, three years before Israel existed, targeting what the League called "products of Palestinian Jews." The target was Jews. The State of Israel was not yet available as a substitute.
The second is that BDS does not boycott Arab-owned Israeli businesses - only Jewish-owned ones. The same Israeli legal jurisdiction, the same Israeli taxes, the same Israeli civic obligations — but the boycott operates only against the Jewish-owned firms. The criterion the movement claims (opposition to Israeli policy) cannot account for this. The criterion that does account for it is the criterion the framework has been operating since 1922: opposition to Jewish economic activity, in whatever surface vocabulary the era allows.
It is Marx's argument about the Jewish Question revised for the 21st century.
Criticism seeks improvement. Anti-Zionism seeks elimination. BDS, like every form of polite antisemitism this series has examined, is the second.
The Jewish Question applied to philo-semites
The framework's scope is not limited to Jews. Recall that the antisemites who claimed they were not antisemites — the Tageblatt writers quoted by the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881 — threatened Prince Bismarck with becoming a target of the Question if he continued to defend Jews. "The Jewish question will exist even against him." The polite tier of the framework, the tier that distinguished itself from the brutalities of Jew-baiting, was the tier that issued this threat. The genteel antisemitic threats underlying the Jewish question extends to defenders of the Jews. It treats those who support Jews as themselves candidates for the framework's operation.
We see this happening today. If a non-Jew defends Israel, they immediately get treated like Jews: social media threats, digging into their past, doxxing their families. These threats get noticed by the general population of people who might be sympathetic to Jews.
The framework does not need to actually destroy defenders of Israel or Jews. It needs only to make defense costly enough that most potential defenders calculate that the cost is too high. Bismarck, threatened by the Tageblatt, was the German Chancellor with substantial political capital; the threat was real but he had resources to absorb it. Yet almost none of the academics with tenure considerations, nor the journalists with career considerations, nor the politicians with constituency considerations, nor the corporate executives with consumer considerations, have Bismarck's resources. They often calculate that defending Israel or defending Jews is not worth the threats, the social cost, or the professional damage. Each withdraws into silence or into more moderate-sounding language that does not expose them to the framework's enforcement. The Jewish Question framework wins without ever having to actually punish a defender, because the threat itself is sufficient to clear the field.
This is the framework's most efficient operation. The cumulative effect of many individual calculations is a public sphere in which defenders of Jews and of Israel are rare, defenders who do speak are marginalized, and the polite tier's framework operates without serious public opposition. The mechanism is unchanged from 1881.
The framework's enforcement is the threat. The threat comes not from the Jew baiters or the pogromists, but from the people who claim that they are not antisemitic in the slightest. They just point out that the mob might want to go after the offenders. They might claim to abhor violence but they are happy to leverage it to solve the Jewish problem.
The diminishment program continues
The Jewish Question framework's various pillars all converge, on examination, on the same underlying demand. The right of return, fully implemented, ends Jewish demographic majority. The settler-colonial framing, taken seriously, requires the dismantling of the "colonial" society. The binational state proposal, by definition, ends Jewish sovereignty. The "from the river to the sea" formulation, on its plain meaning, requires that there not be a Jewish state between the river and the sea. The UN commemorating May 15 as the "anniversary of the Nakba" shows that the problem needing solution is the Jewish state's very existence. The pillars differ in respectability and in the speed at which they require Israel to dissolve. They agree on the destination.
The international community insists that Jews must diminish themselves and stop insisting on the right to self determination in order to be accepted. It is the Jewish Question all over again.
And just like some Jews accepted the framework then, some Jews accept it now.
Reform Judaism tried to drop Jewish peoplehood and become Germans of the Mosaic confession. The Bund tried to drop Jewish religion in favor of secular socialist Yiddish culture. The Mendelssohn family did drop everything across five generations, and ended with the family bank liquidated and the Lutheran descendants reclassified as Jews under the Nuremberg Laws. Nothing they did was ever enough, because the excuses for treating Jews differently were never the real reasons.
The contemporary framework is performing the same operation at the state level. It is asking Israel to drop demographic majority, drop Jerusalem, drop the Jewish character of the state, in exchange for acceptance. And like some Jews in Europe did then, some Jews today accept the terms dictated by polite antisemites who claim they of course are against the Holocaust and don't support October 7, but if only Israel would give up on being so darn Jewish, then we would really have peace.
This is the logic of the Jewish Voice for Peace and J-Street Jews, and their analogies in Europe and Australia. They accept the lie that somehow the Jews are the reason for antisemitism, and Jews merely need to adjust their self-image to give up on some of their rights and then they would be respected and loved.
It didn't work then and it wouldn't work now.
The historical record predicts what would happen if the diminishments were performed. The framework would absorb each one and demand the next, because the framework's load-bearing assumption is not satisfied by any specific diminishment. It is satisfied only by the cessation of the Jewish object the framework has selected.
The imaginary line
The Jewish Question existed because educated nineteenth-century Europeans needed a way to articulate the structural assumption that Jewish presence required management without sounding like the mob. The Question was, from its origin, a liberal response to the extremes of antisemitism — a way of saying we are not them, we are the responsible ones, we engage seriously with a serious problem. The line between Jew-baiting and the Jewish Question was the line educated Europeans drew so they could occupy a moral position superior to the mob while sharing the mob's load-bearing assumption.
Anti-Zionism, as portrayed in mainstream media and operative in the UN, is the same construction. It exists because the international community needs a way to articulate the structural assumption that Jewish sovereignty requires management without sounding like Hamas, Hezbollah or Hitler. The respectable form of anti-Zionism is a liberal response to the extremes of contemporary antisemitism — a way of saying we are not them, we condemn the brutalities, we engage seriously with a serious question of human rights and decolonization. The line between calling for Israel's destruction and demanding Israel transform into a non-Jewish state is the line educated Westerners draw so they can occupy a moral position superior to those who chant "Globalize the Intifada" while sharing the same underlying framework. Now, as then, the respective Questions are antisemitism that pretends to be liberal and enlightened, not like the crude people who call for violence.
In both cases, the line is imaginary. The demand that Israel drop the Jewish part of its state, never demanded of Muslim or Christian states, is just an extension of the antisemitic but polite 19th century demands that Jews give up Judaism, Jewish institutional life, or the laws that held them together for 3,000 years in order to not be attacked as Jews. The argument then was that Jews caused antisemitism by being too Jewish. Today the argument is that Israel causes antisemitism by refusing to commit national suicide. Either way, the polite version and the crude version have the same goal: elimination of a critical component of Jewish existence, whether it is religious, cultural, economic or national.
The UN, by its own institutional account, dates the Question of Palestine to 1885. The first event on its timeline is the coining of the word "Zionism." The framework documents its own lineage on its own institutional website. The Question of Palestine is the international system's institutional attempt to negate the only successful Jewish answer to the Jewish Question. The framework knows what it is. It says so on its own pages.
Believe it.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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