20 June 2022 11:14 UTC | Last update:3 days 4 hours ago
From Chaim Herzog in 1975 to Gilad Erdan last year, Israeli officials have taken dramatic steps to avoid accountability for the state’s crimes
On 10 November 1975, the late Chaim Herzog, then Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and the father of President Isaac Herzog, stood on the podium at the UN General Assembly and dramatically tore up the text of Resolution 3379, adopted that same day.
Resolution 3379 declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Israel was shocked. A major boulevard in Haifa named in honour of the UN was swiftly renamed “Zionism Boulevard” by the Haifa City Council. What a joke of fate: the street once named in gratitude to the UN for declaring in 1947 its support for Israel’s establishment as a state was renamed three decades later due to a different decision of the same organisation.
A country established thanks to the power of the UN and the international community acts to undermine them the moment they become critical of its behaviour
Chaim Herzog was an immediate superhero in Israel. It was the peak moment of his career. Israelis deemed his theatrical gesture a fitting response to what the country perceived as an act of global antisemitism. Nearly all Israelis, the younger me included, held that opinion at the time. Comparing Zionism to racism? It could only be antisemitism.
Years passed. The UN rescinded that decision in December 1991, but another few decades later, everything looks different again. Zionism, which today is essentially about the preservation of Jewish supremacy in a country inhabited by two peoples, no longer seems too far off from how it was presented in the original UN decision.
Likewise, the gesture made by Herzog senior at the UN podium – shredding the pages of a decision that the majority of the world’s nations had accepted as lawful – seems much less appropriate today than it did at the time.
Human rights violations
What has shifted not an inch since the adoption of Resolution 3379 in 1975 is Israel’s attitude towards international organisations and international law. Nearly half a century later, we find the current Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, doing something similar. On 29 October 2021, he stood on the same stage and tore up the latest annual report of the UN Human Rights Council.
This time, the performance was perceived as repulsive and violent, and earned much less respect. But Erdan also suggested consigning the report to its rightful place in “the dustbin of antisemitism”.
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