Specters of Genocide

Understanding Racial Liberalism

Racial liberalism names the ideas informing the U.S. state’s official commitment to the national integration of African Americans. Legal and discursive commitments to Black integration were seen to evidence U.S.-led liberal capitalism’s capacity to dispense freedom and serve as a moral guarantor for a globalizing Americanism.16 The management and representation of African American integration into an officially antiracist nation-state was understood as crucial in the Cold War fight against communism, part and parcel of an American civic religion of freedom. The U.S. state as an exemplary liberal democracy was seen as the privileged site through which to advance commitments for civic inclusion and the desegregation of space, resources, and life chances. Liberalism’s raciality garnered its decisive ideological force in the early Cold War period precisely through processes of regulation and normalization that recalibrated the contours of a proper national subject. Racial liberalism thus fused economic and political criteria to create an individuated subject of rights, one whose moral compass was guided by a rubric of civic inclusion within a secular public sphere, and pointed to the pluralist nation as the primary site of political identification.

Intertwined with its geopolitical investment in African American integration was the U.S. state’s commitment to Jewish national assimilability.17 Racial liberal ideas understood World War II’s Atlantic Front retrospectively as a war against racism. Anti-Semitism’s eradication exemplified not only an antiracist intervention into an order of white supremacy patently abhorrent after World War II but also an anticommunist intervention into the Soviet bloc treatment of Jews. Jewish assimilability in the United States indexed an exceptionalist narrative of liberal pluralism, an idea whose origins trace at least to the 1910s.18 Jews becoming “white” ethnics involved grafting Jewishness onto the secular Protestant ethos framing the notion of national “Judeo-Christian” values.19 Yet, Michael Rogin shows, as early as the 1920s, the vigorous enactment of Jewish non-Blackness via mainstream cultural performance—the embrace of blackface, the Jewish rearticulation of minstrelsy, and so forth—framed Jewish assimilability as predicated on a foundational white supremacist substructure.20 By the 1950s and early 1960s, Jews participated in civil rights desegregation and voting rights struggles to demonstrate liberal inclusion as an American civic promise, performing pluralist commitments by fighting Jim Crow.21 At the same time, often inadvertently, Jewish integration fused conceptions of Jewishness and political Zionism, and sedimented into the dominant racial order the exclusion and devaluation of Palestinians and Arabs as proper political subjects. It obscured liberalism’s enduring historical investment in racial exclusion and recoded settler colonial violence in West Asia as Jewish national liberation.

A third aspect of racial liberalism was expressed in debates about the function and value of international governance institutions, and the United Nations in particular. The UN’s key predecessor, the League of Nations, explicitly advanced a Eurocentric notion of benevolent paternalism—one whose Mandate system asserted the racialized claim that “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” would receive the “tutelage” of European powers to transition from colonial rule to national independence.22 Britain’s Mandate for Palestine (1922) reproduced the language of the Balfour Declaration (1917) promising that Britain would facilitate a “Jewish national home in Palestine” and was slated to expire after thirty years. The UN emerged in the wake of the League’s failure to prevent World War II and inherited much of its paternalism. In the immediate postwar years, the UN was a site to articulate a set of shared principles around the concept of human rights, the prevention and punishment of genocide, and an enactment of a peaceful transition into a decolonized world. These principles infused cosmopolitan statements like the UN’s 1946 resolution “to put an immediate end to religious and so-called racial persecution and discrimination,”23 as well as the necessity, expressed in an important 1960 declaration, “to bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations.”24

Such global visions of liberal antiracism, human rights, and decolonization catalyzed what the historian Mark Mazower calls an “imperial internationalism.”25 The UN could be leveraged to maintain Euro-American hegemony, articulating the political and deliberative horizons of decolonization. The UN framed decolonization as an orderly, peaceful operation guided by Euro-American-style cosmopolitanism, which it drew directly from the League of Nations worldview. This framing deepened, rather than challenged, what the cultural theorist Randall Williams calls the “international division of humanity.”26

At the same time, a wide range of organizations wielded the UN’s formalized commitments to struggles for national liberation and decolonization in ways that exceeded the parameters of U.S. racial liberalism and the broader Euro-American project of which it was a part. These organizations made legible the legacies of settler colonialism and white supremacy that were uncontainable within U.S. civil rights discourse. Purportedly U.S. “domestic” constituencies advanced claims through the UN. The Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 petition charged Jim Crow’s pervasive anti-Black violence as a legacy of genocide fueling wars abroad.27 The Organization of Afro-American Unity underscored precisely these concerns a decade later.28 Similarly, third world projects such as the Non-Alignment Movement, the Organization of African Unity, and the Arab League leveraged the UN’s rhetoric and mechanisms. The persistent crisis of South African apartheid was registered at the UN as early as 1950, when the General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the South African policy of “racial segregation.”29 The UN mobilized against the apartheid regime in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, founded the UN Center against Apartheid in 1976, supported broad-based boycott and institutionalized anti-apartheid struggles, and, in a series of 1973 resolutions, condemned the “unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism and Israeli imperialism.”30 From the UN’s inception the Palestine question was central to its fashioning of a postwar geopolitical order. The UN made a commitment to the partition of Palestine in 1947, recognized Israel’s founding in 1948, devised an institutional architecture to respond to the Palestinian refugee crisis in 1948, and founded the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in 1950. Palestine’s presence at the UN persisted, including, in 1975, when the General Assembly established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and conferred the Palestinian Liberation Organization observer status.

Postwar racial liberalism was likewise saturated by the affective, political, and ideological residues of the genocide of six million Jews and five million gays and lesbians, mentally and physically disabled people, Jehovah’s witnesses, “gypsies,” political dissidents, and so-called antisocials. Where and how the event of the Holocaust was understood to evidence racial violence had dramatic effects on the frameworks that contained, managed, and directed the collective pathos wrought by this terror. It indelibly buttressed the way that Israel and Palestine were perceived in the United States. Not only were reckonings with the Holocaust mobilized as part of U.S. and Israeli political culture,31 but they weighed on the UN’s discourse addressing Zionism and racism.

“The Swastika Epidemic”

One of Resolution 3379’s key precedents grew out of the United Nation’s 1973 commitment to embark on a decade of action to “combat racism and racial discrimination.” This commitment was based on the UN’s Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which was codified in 1963, adopted as a convention in 1965, and entered into force in 1969. While CERD was mobilized for a wide range of ends and carried the imprimatur of being the first major treaty to codify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the declaration’s origins lie in the vexed contentions around how to identify and combat anti-Semitism in a post-Holocaust world.

A brief history of the emergence of the declaration reveals how anti-Semitism became figured as an ahistorical virus, one whose agential force was cast beyond the bounds of reason. Anti-Semitism was often theorized through the metaphor of a viral disease permanently lurking within the social body, activated in individuals, and treatable through the subtle management of American social science. While Hannah Arendt and others critiqued this metaphor, frustrated that the concept of eternal anti-Semitism presumed that Jew hatred was “the natural consequences of an eternal problem,” it nevertheless had substantial traction among American Jewish defense organizations.32 At the same time, many believed that theorizing anti-Semitism required distinguishing between race and religion. This belief inserted a pervasive epistemic ambivalence into the UN debates themselves, whose effects were powerfully felt by 1975. An unstable chain of equivalences traveled analogically across the texture of the debates. Many thought that American social science could lend an epistemological certainty to treat an object—anti-Semitism—whose meaning refused to stay still.

As recent scholars have compellingly shown, anti-Semitism’s epistemic ambivalence has shaped the race/religion distinction across the longue durée of the modern colonial world system.33 It was a very particular flashpoint that inspired action at the United Nations. On Christmas Eve 1959, two twenty-five-year-old men defaced the Roonstrasse Synagogue in the West German city of Cologne. The synagogue had served as a stark reminder of the Nazi violence, having been targeted during the November 1938 Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht. In September 1959, in a major reconciliation and healing ceremony, the synagogue was rededicated. It was defaced only a few months later, kicking off what became known widely as the “swastika epidemic” that swept across Western Europe and the United States. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) cataloged approximately two thousand incidents of anti-Semitism in forty countries, with eight hundred in West Germany alone.34 Over nine weeks, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that some 643 anti-Semitic incidents occurred in the United States, from swastikas smeared on temples, community centers, homes, churches, sidewalks, college campuses, and automobiles to phone threats and bricks hurled through windows. Anti-Semitic slogans appeared on walls of schoolrooms and storefronts. The ADL reported incidents in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and at least eighteen other cities. Of the 167 apprehended offenders, most were between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Few belonged to what the ADL described as “neo-Nazi clubs,” though over twenty such clubs were discovered by the ADL during its investigation.35 According to the historian Stuart Svonkin, the consensus among Jewish American organizations was that the “swastika epidemic” was not an organized expression of a cohesive political project. Rather, it revealed how quickly seemingly “latent” anti-Semitism could be enacted without much provocation. “Anti-semitism is so endemic and so near the surface,” intimated one commentator, “that it can be triggered overnight all over the world.”36

As they narrated the “swastika epidemic” as an event, these organizations represented anti-Semitism as the carrier of a totalitarian threat to American society. In early January 1960, at the behest of the American Jewish Committee, the International League for the Rights of Man called on the UN’s Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities to condemn such acts. In a widely circulated pamphlet, “As the UN Probes Prejudice,” the AJC set forth an understanding of anti-Semitism through the broad logic of an “outbreak” (5), deploying an epidemiology model to frame how anti-Semitism’s “contagious nature defies geographic containment” (6). The AJC implored the UN subcommission to recognize the event as a “symptom of a crippling social disorder demanding profound study and long-range corrective treatment” (5). Anti-Semitism was nothing less than a “dangerous infection—easily spread and implanted in immature or warped minds, and always ready to flower into ugly violence at the drop of a cue” (14).

American social science was tasked with developing “antidotes” to this disease. Social science was seen as a knowledge regime especially well-suited to conceptualizing and preventing genocide, particularly through a social-psychological heuristic. Among the best-known expressions of this hope was the American Jewish Committee’s 1944 sponsorship of the major multiauthor, seven-volume Studies in Prejudice (1950). Produced through a partnership between Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research and UC Berkeley’s Public Opinion Study Group, Studies in Prejudice claimed that American social science was particularly capable of diagnosing and combating anti-Semitism. Published in the years immediately following World War II, Studies in Prejudice shifted debates about anti-Semitism from Adorno’s, Horkheimer’s, and Arendt’s immanent critiques of Enlightenment reason to an instrumental Cold War theorization that coded anti-Semitism as an eternal, if also an individual, prejudice that could be activated if the conditions supported it. In this light, Cold War anti-Semitism marked the kernel of a viral transatlantic totalitarianism that warranted state intervention in the name of American freedom.

Studies in Prejudice was in fact a substantial revision of Horkheimer and Adorno’s proposed “Research Project on Anti-Semitism,” which they brought with them when they fled Europe. The project’s “intellectual assimilation” garnered the Horkheimer circle a broader audience in the United States.37 Their partial embrace of American social science enabled the circle to gain material support for some of the most influential contributions of critical theory (most notably, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s Minima Moralia). Studies in Prejudice moved away from previous critiques of the social totality that reckoned with the instrumentalization of reason and the forms of empiricism reifying social categories and masking social contradictions. Instead, the project drew on methods more properly recognizable to mainstream U.S. sociology, namely, a Positivist social science that treated “totalitarianism” as the primary object of critique. Anti-Semitism marked the leading edge of a totalitarian political formation figured as U.S. liberal democracy’s constitutive other. In this revision, anti-Semitism was framed as what members of the institute called a “rehearsal” for totalitarianism’s capacity to “annihilat[e] liberty and democracy,” one that functioned as the “spearhead of the totalitarian order.”38 To link its case studies of 1920s Weimar Germany and the contemporary U.S. context, the Studies in Prejudice project encoded a logic of virality whose “biologization” of anti-Semitism was figured as latent in the subjects of liberal democracy and potentially activated should the conditions arise. Horkheimer and his coauthor Samuel Flowerman championed this position in the brief essay prefacing each of the seven volumes:

At this moment in world history anti-Semitism is not manifesting itself with the full and violent destructiveness of which we know it to be capable. Even a social disease has its periods of quiescence during which the social scientist, like the biologist or the physician, can study it in the search for more effective ways to prevent or reduce the virulence of the next outbreak. . . . What tissues in the life of our modern society remain cancerous, and despite our assumed enlightenment show the incongruous atavism of ancient peoples? And what within the individual organism responds to certain stimuli in our culture with attitudes and acts of destructive aggression? (21)

In this way, Horkheimer and Flowerman refracted complex debates about method, evidence, and audience through an array of U.S. national concerns by conceptualizing anti-Semitism as a latent virus in the social body. Their prefatory remarks were prominently featured in the AJC’s pamphlet produced in the wake of the “swastika epidemic.”

If anti-Semitism’s virality marked one of the decisive U.S. heuristics at the United Nations, the other was the UN’s own ambivalent framing of anti-Semitism vis-à-vis race, nation, and religion. The title used by the UN’s Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities to respond to the “swastika epidemic” foregrounds this ambivalence. The subcommission tasked itself with pursuing an inquiry into “anti-Semitism and other forms of religious and racial prejudice.” This ambivalent coupling of race and religion echoed a 1946 resolution from the UN’s first General Assembly. Rather than analytically clarifying the relationship between race and religion, the subcommission’s resolution intensified its undecidability and expressed alarm at a growing list of concerns, including “the manifestations of anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and national hatred and religious and racial prejudices of a similar nature” (4). The subcommission recommended the preparation of an international convention against religious and racial discrimination, a task that the UN’s Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Affairs Committee (known in brief as the “Third Committee”) took up in earnest in 1962. In its deliberations, the Third Committee quickly decided to delink race and religion and to draft instruments related first to the elimination of racial discrimination, followed later on by a complementary set of instruments to address religious intolerance.39

A contemporaneous history of what became the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination suggests that this delinking of race and religion “had been brought about by political undercurrents which had very little to do with the merits of the problem. The opposition to coverage of religious as well as racial discrimination had come from some of the Arab delegations; it reflected the Arab-Israeli conflict.”40 When the Third Committee began drafting the Declaration for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, there had been little express interest in enumerating what these various “forms” actually were. At the behest of Marietta Tree, the U.S. ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights, the U.S. delegation proposed an article that targeted anti-Semitism specifically. Tree was acting on a request from Rabbi Yitzhak Lewin. Lewin was a member of World Agudat Israel, an anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish nongovernmental organization, who wanted to ensure that the origins of this declaration in the “worldwide outbreak” of anti-Semitism were registered in the instrument itself.41 The Soviet delegation responded by proposing that anti-Semitism be listed as one among a panoply of forms of racism, including “Zionism, nazism, neo-nazism and all other forms of the policy and ideology of colonialism, national and racial hatred and exclusiveness.”42 The Jordanian representative suggested the inclusion of “fascist, colonial, tribal, Zionist and similar practices.”43 By the time debate closed, the subcommittee agreed on listing apartheid, segregation, separation, and the promotion of racial superiority and expansionism as forms of racial discrimination.

Ten years later, when Resolution 3379 was brought before the General Assembly, it was articulated atop an ambivalent epistemological edifice. The UN’s formal commitments to decolonization and national self-determination that preceded the pledge to end racial discrimination were sutured to a theory of anti-Semitism as a viral disease lurking dormant in the social body. As I demonstrate in the balance of this chapter, the prominent Arab scholar–activists who drove the resolution articulated an alternative analysis of Zionism’s differential distribution of human value and valuelessness—what they theorized as racism. This analysis garnered widespread support among decolonizing member states at the UN, even as it was delegitimized in the United States and Israel as immoral, obscene, false, and infected with anti-Semitism. An Arab critique of settler colonial racism was seen through the frames of U.S. racial liberalism to activate anti-Semitism and demand a Cold War anticommunist defense of liberal democracy.

The Anomaly of Settler Colonialism

Scholars of Arab descent committed to Palestinian national liberation theorized the emergence, contours, and effects of racism in shaping the social terrain in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Organizations like the Palestine Research Center, the Institute for Palestine Studies, and the Association of Arab American University Graduates produced a historically nuanced critique of Zionism as an extension of settler colonialism, one predicated on sharp racial distinctions not only between Arabs and Jews but also between northern European Jews and their trans-Mediterranean, Arab Jewish, and Black counterparts. These organizations negotiated the powerful specter of the Holocaust and routinely distinguished Zionism as a political project from Jewishness as an ethno-religious identification and set of faith practices.

An analysis of racism was important to the globalizing contours of Palestinian liberation struggles. The original Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Charter, for instance, signed in June 1964, was cast in the vernacular of third world anticolonialism. It included an article defining Zionism as a historical articulation of settler colonial racism. Zionism named a “colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goals, racist and segregationist in its configurations and fascist in its means and aims.” In the interest of resolving regional and international “tension and turmoil,” the charter invited “support and sustenance of the community of nations” for the Palestinian people. The 1968 revision to the charter both expanded and sharpened this conceptualization. Written in the wake of the 1967 war and accounting for the rise of armed struggle as a privileged movement tactic, it framed Zionism as “organically associated with international imperialism.” Struggles for the “liberation of the homeland” resonated from Palestine and its diaspora to the Pan-Arab domain of Nasserism, to the multiple sites of antiracist struggle in Latin America, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.44 Such an internationalist framing kicked off what the historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin deftly calls the PLO’s “global offensive.”45

Alongside the PLO’s formal political framework, in February 1965 the PLO founded the Markaz al-Abhath al-Filastini, the Palestine Research Center (PRC). Based in Beirut, the PRC was a major conduit for archiving, publishing, and distributing knowledge germane to Palestine’s national life and culture. Its directors were among the period’s leading writers on Palestine, including the historian Anis Sayegh, the attorney and researcher Sabri Jiryis, and the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Between 1965 and 1982 the PRC produced over four hundred monographs, pamphlets, and maps in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, as well as the quarterly periodical Shu’un Filastiniya, or Palestine Affairs.46 Early PRC publications covered topics ranging from the Palestine question in international law to issues of civil rights under occupation, U.S. policy toward an Arab–Israeli arms race, conditions of Arab life inside 1948 Israel, and memoirs of a prisoner inside an Israeli jail. One journalist likened the PRC’s library to “an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage,” housing at its height approximately twenty-five thousand bound volumes alongside a broad swath of documentation germane to life in Palestine prior to 1948, from land deeds and photographs to cartographic documentation of every Arab village present at the time of Israel’s founding.47 The PRC was looted during Israel’s invasion of West Beirut in September 1982, and the infrastructure was demolished by a fatal car bomb in early 1983.48 According to Jiryis, most of the archival contents were returned to the PLO during a prisoner swap in November 1983 and deposited in a site in Nicosia, Cyprus.49

The Palestine Research Center was initially run by Fayez Sayegh, then a political science professor at American University of Beirut (AUB), before it was turned over to his brother Anis. Fayez Sayegh was born in Kharaba, Syria, in 1922. He grew up in Palestine, before leaving in 1947 for the United States, where he received a PhD in philosophy with a minor in political science at Georgetown University, and held teaching positions at Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Macalester, and AUB.50 Sayegh routinely published scholarly monographs on Palestine, Zionism, Arab nationalism, and the United Nations. He served in the Lebanese, Yemeni, and Kuwaiti delegations at the UN, before becoming the chief of the Arab States delegation. From 1968 until his death in 1980, he was the rapporteur of the special committee established under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Many of the PRC’s publications had a critical bearing on the strategic production of knowledge by and about Palestinians, Arabs, and the historical conditions under which the Palestine question had emerged. The PRC’s first publication in its “Facts and Figures” series, published in September 1966, was a brief pamphlet titled “Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem,” a document that had profound repercussions in the United States.51 The long-form Palestine Monographs series opened with Sayegh’s own “Zionist Colonialism of Palestine,” published in English, French, and Arabic in September 1965. The central thrust of this pamphlet focuses on how the “fate of Palestine . . . represents an anomaly” in postwar history. “The fading-out of a cruel and shameful period of world history has coincided with the emergence, at the land-bridge between Asia and Africa, of a new offshoot of European Imperialism and a new variety of racist Colonialism.”52 Sayegh narrates the result of this anomaly in the tragedy of indigenous Palestinians losing both their land and their right to self-determination. He theorizes the logic of this dispossession as predicated on a theory of racism that is a “congenital, essential, and permanent” feature of the “Zionist settler-state” (21). Sayegh draws on an archive of settler state building to identify Zionism’s racial doctrines of self-segregation, exclusiveness, and supremacy. He traces Zionism’s development to the mid-1880s “scramble for Africa” and the articulation of a generalized European “credo of Nationalism” (1); through to the 1897 Basle Conference, where Theodor Herzl’s World Zionist Organization (WZO) was founded; and to the WZO’s institutionalization at the turn of the century in the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Colonization Commission, the Jewish National Fund, the Palestine Office, and the Palestine Land Development Company. Sayegh then tracks the alliance of the WZO to the British Empire in the midst of World War I, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and the British Mandate under the League of Nations. From here, Sayegh renders what he perceives as U.S. imperial support for the project being articulated via the United Nations after 1948.

In a subsequent 1970 monograph for the Research Center, Sayegh elaborates on Zionism’s “principle of religio-racial exclusionism” that animates the settler colonial infrastructure of the “Palestine Problem.”53 Palestinian indigenous dispossession and displacement, the “importation of alien colonists,” and the colonization of land and national resources form the core of this infrastructure (8). He expands the framework of “anomaly” of the Palestine problem noted earlier to recognize the “moral anomaly” of a post–World War II settlement for European Jews that produced another community of displaced persons, “forcibly dislodging a people from its rightful realm in order to make room for outsiders” (21). Sayegh notes a political anomaly in Palestinians’ individual and collective rights being at once articulated, guaranteed, and wholly unprotected by the United Nations. Yet the paramount anomaly remains the resolutely historical one: Zionism has “all the essential earmarks of a classical colonial venture” advanced alongside the “most extensive decolonization program ever implemented in the history of mankind” (21).

While Sayegh centers the effects of settler colonialism on the differential distribution of land, rights, and resources, and the dispersal and dispossession of indigenous Palestinians, Hasan Sa’b’s “Zionism and Racism” focuses on the construction within Zionist thought of the notion of a Jewish race.54 Written for the PRC in 1965, the same year as Sayegh’s initial monograph, Sa’b foregrounds Jewish critics of Zionism and distinguishes between what he calls Zionist investment in “Race” as against “liberal Jews and assimilationists” who speak of “Man” (6–7). He reads across the canon of Zionist thinkers—Chaim Weizmann, Theodor Herzl, Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am—to clarify their formulation of a theory of a coherent, exclusivist, and nationalist Jewish “race.” “Their emphasis on Jewish exclusiveness, and the influence of European racialist doctrines,” Sa’b asserts, “led them to an emotional, an intellectual, and a religious identification of ‘nationalism’ with ‘racism’” (5). To contrast what he calls Israel’s “incarnation of a neo-racism,” Sa’b turns to arguments produced by American Jewish organizations like the American Council for Judaism that were critical of the Israeli state project. He highlights “outstanding Jewish thinkers (including Einstein, Cohen, Rosenwald, and Magnes)” who vigorously advocated for humanitarian and philanthropic support for Jews beyond “the racial, narrow-minded, chauvinistic, isolationist, and totalitarian nationalist elements of Zionism” (16). Sa’b foregrounds Albert Einstein’s mid-1940s critiques of a Jewish state formation.55 The famed physicist declined an offer to become an early president of Israel, noting his fear for “the inner damage Judaism will sustain” in a state-building process that would inevitably require “borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest” (17). Sa’b draws on a lesser-known Jewish critic of Zionism, the philosophy professor Morris Cohen, who, in a published exchange with Horace Kallen in the midst of debates around the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, argued that American Zionist desires for a Jewish state emphasized a “tribalism” that ran counter to the modernizing forces of assimilation in the United States.56 Sa’b excerpts the organized Jewish American Reform movement’s turn-of-the-century critique of state building as violating Judaism’s religious identity: “Zionism was a precious possession of the past. . . . As such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion” (20). Contrasting the claim that Israel was a “humanitarian refuge” from anti-Semitism, Sa’b suggests instead that the state of Israel “discriminates between Jews and Arabs, between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, and even between Western and Eastern Israeli citizens” (16).

The Palestine Research Center’s anonymously authored pamphlet “Israeli Racism” was published in September 1975, just weeks before the opening debate at the United Nations. While it restated common elements from the PRC’s earlier analyses, the examination of Israel’s settler origins gives way to the examination of contemporary Israeli racial discrimination. The pamphlet highlights the state’s post-1948 institutionalization of differential treatment toward Israeli Arabs and “Oriental Jews.” It focuses on the Defence Emergency Regulations, codified by the British Mandate government in 1945 and used against Arab Israeli citizens as the basis to “restrict movement, place of residence, right to assembly . . . expropriate land, and to imprison Arab . . . citizens without charge for months or even years at a time” (9). The pamphlet documents how the average monthly income of a typical Arab family was less than half of a European Jewish family. Arab Israelis received an education of limited content and quality, while access to government services such as electricity and irrigation were substantively curtailed. Territorial covenants precluded certain lands from being rented or sold to Arabs. Oriental Jews were likewise shown to fare poorly in these areas. The pamphlet ends by pivoting to another arena of racism in Israel, namely, its ties to “the largest remaining bastion of settler-colonialism in the Third World, South Africa” (14). The Israel–South Africa connection was exemplified in their similar historical development and contemporary structure, their important trade and politico-military links, and the forms of resistance enacted by a common category of “dispossessed indigenous inhabitants” (16).

The specter of the Holocaust haunts these publications. They elaborate a genealogy of the emergence and practice of Israeli settler colonial racism in the face of a widespread American common sense that frames Israel as a paradigmatically humanitarian response to Nazi genocide. The rhetorical and analytical proximity of Zionism and Nazism, for instance, demonstrates a relationship that Sayegh’s “Zionist Colonialism” contends with only briefly. Sayegh ascertains a conceptual point of identification between Nazism and Zionism in their shared goal of the “elimination of the unwanted human element in question” (26). While Sayegh characterizes the Nazi methods for realizing a “Jew-free Germany” as “more ruthless and more inhuman” than those used for an “Arab-free Palestine,” the goals remain identical—the forcible removal of a racialized population (27). Sa’b likewise foregrounds the comparative traffic between these historical dynamics. The opening page of “Zionism and Racism” equates “the belief in a Jewish race” with “the belief in a German race,” asserting that both were myths, albeit ones with contemporary world-reordering effects (5). The “same intellectual climate” of European nationalism produced the concept of a chosen race equally absorbed by Zionism and Nazism, whose “racial consciousness led the two ideologies to the belief in a super-race or super-nation, which is endowed with a special historic destiny and called upon to fulfill a unique cultural mission” (9). Sa’b highlights Rabbi Elmer Berger’s query about the shared conceptual vocabulary of Zionism and Nazism: “Isn’t it a curious thing, and tragically ironic,” writes Berger in his 1946 book Jewish Dilemma, “that Zionists and extreme anti-Semites agree on the same solution—isolate the Jews in a country of their own” (23)? Sa’b closes by shifting the terms from that of commensuration—based on a logic of equation and analogy—to one of a more complex relationality. “The Zionists advocate one justice for the victims of Nazi persecution in Europe and another for the victims of Zionist persecution in Palestine. In rejecting Zionism, the peoples of the Middle East have condemned its racial approach to both the Jewish and the Arab peoples” (33). In doing so, Sa’b tenuously grasps hold of an alternative memory of the Holocaust in the service of a substantive anticolonialism in Palestine.

Settler Colonialism at the United Nations

Fayez Sayegh presented an argument at the United Nations in October and November 1975 that drew directly from the work of the Palestine Research Center. His argument mobilized the PRC’s analysis of the interplay between racialized settler colonialism in Palestine and the interlocking histories of Jewish genocide and state-sanctioned Palestinian dispossession. In his remarks before both the Committee on Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Affairs and the General Assembly, Sayegh presented a detailed, nuanced, and thoughtfully argued case. His remarks detail Zionism’s historic investment in population transfer—arrayed through structures facilitating immigration for Jews, on the one hand, and dispossession and expulsion of indigenous Arabs, on the other. He highlights the geopolitical linkages between the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Israeli government, noting how the states shared a common racial logic. And while he registers the proximity of Nazism and the Holocaust in the debates, Sayegh also strenuously disarticulates political Zionism from Judaism. An Arab Information Center–sponsored advertisement in the New York Times in the immediate wake of the resolution’s passage plainly drove home this point: “The United Nations Has Condemned Zionism; The United Nations Has Not Condemned Judaism.”57

In his remarks at the UN, Sayegh describes the central aim of Zionism as a “total transformation” for Jews worldwide through “the detachment of Jews from their respective countries and their mass-transfer to Palestine, and the detachment of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs and their mass-transfer from Palestine” (8). In this way, Zionism enacted simultaneous “pumping-in and pumping-out” operations. Sayegh draws evidence of “pumping in” directly from Herzl, citing extensively from both his published works like Der Judenstaat and his diaries. He shows how Herzl theorized Zionism as an exclusive form of secular nationalism that drew on early twentieth-century nationalist and colonial thinking. Sayegh likewise demonstrates how the 1897 Basle Program was predicated on the “promotion . . . of the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers.” The “pumping in” policy was expressed five decades later in the Law of Return and the Nationality Law, both of which granted automatic access to Israeli citizenship for Jews worldwide (9).

That being said, as Sayegh recalls, the mobilization of large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine achieved only a modicum of its aims. In contrast, Zionism’s “pumping out” of indigenous Palestinian Arabs had been, in Sayegh’s estimation, “more efficiently conducted in practice and it has met with greater success” (9). Tactics of land, home, and other property acquisition were central to the Zionist project, as was an increasingly difficult set of obstacles for displaced Palestinians to return to their homes. Dispossession was articulated through differential racialization. Sayegh traces the historical production of a “color-line” that divided the “‘white’ Jews from Europe and America” from the “Oriental Jews and the Black Jews” (15). He illustrates how “their daily life is governed by multiform ‘distinctions,’ ‘exclusions’ or ‘restrictions’” (21) by citing numerous news articles describing the marginalization of Oriental Jews, the protests of the Israeli Black Panthers in 1971, and the legal challenges and deportation proceedings brought against Falashas and the Black Jews in 1972 who had immigrated from Chicago and Liberia. In regard to Palestinian Arabs, Sayegh recounts the de jure and de facto modes of discrimination, including the Keren Kayemeth Law of 1953, the Covenant of 1961 linking the state apparatus to the Jewish National Fund, and the Agricultural Settlement Law of 1967—all of which installed and maintained substantial restrictive covenants on Arab Palestinian access to land and resources.

The complex presence of a pervasive intra-European anti-Semitism informs the relational history that Sayegh attempts to narrate, phrased here as a “tragic irony”: “That former victims of racial discrimination elsewhere should have turned around and inflicted similar forms of discrimination against the remnants of the Palestinian Arab people is one of the more tragic ironies of contemporary history” (21). In closing his case in support of the resolution, Sayegh echoed the language of the racial discrimination declaration, stating plainly:

Zionism, essentially, vests certain rights—very important rights—in some people and denies them to others. . . . Therefore, in accordance with the authoritative United Nations definition, the discrimination which is inherent in Zionism is incontestably a form of racial discrimination for it is based on “descent” or “national origin” or “ethnic origin,” all of which are subsumed under the generic concept of “race.”58

Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Quandary of Race

Scholars of Arab descent addressing the United Nations persistently theorized the relationship between Zionism and racism. In doing so, they offered an analysis that disrupted U.S. state narratives. U.S. racial liberal frameworks routinely obfuscated the historical and structural dimensions of the Palestine question, redirecting a racial critique of Zionism into an argument about a viral anti-Semitism and framing its ideological contours within a Cold War lexicon of a shared U.S. and Israeli exceptionalism. Here, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s work at the UN gave voice to this Cold War exceptionalist framework. While Moynihan’s strategy during his brief eight-month stint (June 1975 to February 1976) was widely debated—was Moynihan too brash, too much a “brawler”?—the substance of his argument against Resolution 3379 was lauded as exemplifying a broad American consensus. U.S. Congressional representatives from across the political spectrum emphasized their support for Moynihan’s position. They entered his speech no less than three times into the Congressional Record the day after the resolution’s passage. Congress subsequently investigated the value of American participation in the UN as a legitimate body for the development of international norms and refused to pay a portion of U.S. dues to the UN in protest of the latter’s recognition of the PLO.

Moynihan’s response to Resolution 3379 illustrates a broader racial liberal common sense that Moynihan himself had been active in shaping for at least the previous decade, conjoining anxious investments in Black integration domestically to the projection of U.S. power internationally. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963), for which he was a coauthor, and “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (1965), for which he was sole author, illustrate how racial liberalism was elaborated across a range of geographic and institutional sites. Beyond the Melting Pot consolidated a multiethnic whiteness whose “immigrant analogy” positioned Black people as always already deficient as compared with the properly assimilable European Jews; “The Negro Family” sought to fashion an interventionist policy apparatus committed to American equality that reified white heteropatriarchal kinship norms. The figure of the Black Muslim that haunts Beyond the Melting Pot and “The Negro Family” as liberal democracy’s inassimilable other prefigures the specter of a totalitarian terror that Israel and the United States will be uniquely positioned to contest. Indeed, such a discourse primed post-1965 domestic policy for a Cold War internationalism that became entangled with Israel’s processes of racialization and the military and administrative occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In this way, Moynihan’s engagement with the UN resolution elaborated the contours of the proper liberal citizen subject in a Cold War world; set up the United States and Israel as indelibly linked bastions of the “Free World”; and stigmatized those ideas, practices, and people that troubled Zionist norms. Moynihan’s UN speech prefigured an emergent enmeshment with Israel in a globalized war against terrorism—framed as war for liberty against totalitarianism, with the “totalitarians” ensconced as an enemy race always already outside the domain of proper political subjecthood.

Moynihan’s ground-clearing 1963 work of comparative urban sociology, Beyond the Melting Pot, centered a nation-of-immigrants paradigm of whiteness. It reproduced a bootstraps narrative of pluralist success and tidily pathologized Blackness for lacking culture. Moynihan and Nathan Glazer (the book’s primary author and architect) theorized race to function conceptually like ethnicity, replacing the history of structural inequality from racial slavery and Jim Crow with a narrative of immigrant inclusion in American national life. African Americans were conceived as the “latest” in the wave of immigrants to the urban north. This “immigrant analogy,” as the legal scholar Ian Haney-López argues, “erased the enormous differences in historical experience between white immigrants and racial minorities, and gave new legitimacy to the belief that not structural disadvantage but inability, now cultural rather than innate, explained the social and material marginalization of racial minorities in the United States.”59 The book privileged a normatively white national subject even as it functioned to authorize the subsequent consolidation of a color-blind ideology that bracketed the historical institutionalization of racial hierarchy generally and anti-Black racism specifically. In regard to substantive interventions to ameliorate racism’s institutionalization through race-conscious policy prescriptions, Beyond the Melting Pot provided the sociological warrant to suggest that such things constituted “reverse discrimination,” a claim made with increasing urgency by Glazer and Moynihan beginning in the late 1970s. Glazer and Moynihan’s text laid the groundwork for racial liberalism’s figuration of a theoretically pluralist nation of individuals as immigrants—articulated in reaction to the critiques of pluralism’s failures in practice enunciated by the New Left, Black Power movements, and critics of Israel.

Following quickly on the heels of Beyond the Melting Pot was Moynihan’s “Negro Family” (1965). Produced in the broader context of a liberal state–philanthropy nexus to proffer policy solutions to the “crisis of race relations,” “The Negro Family” conceived of the problem of African American integration in the United States through racialized gender tropes and adumbrated comparisons with the Jewish Holocaust.60 Using the collapsed race/ethnicity paradigm expressed in Beyond the Melting Pot, “The Negro Family” asserted that “important differences in family patterns” have survived from the “age of the great European migration to the United States.”61 Those immigrants with “unusually strong family bonds . . . have characteristically progressed more rapidly.” “But there is one truly great discontinuity in family structure in the United States at the present time,” Moynihan noted: “that between the white world in general and that of the Negro American” (5). Such a claim naturalized ethnic whiteness through the “nation of immigrants” narrative while casting Black families as pathologically deviating from the national norm. In Moynihan’s estimation, the central problem of the modern Black family—its impoverished conditions, chronic male unemployment, and lack of formal education—originated in an emasculating “matriarchal structure.” Having woman-headed households “seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well” (29).

To advance this argument, Moynihan turns to an analytical juxtaposition between slavery in the United States and the Nazi concentration camp—two “total institutions.” This juxtaposition was popularized by Stanley Elkins in his “damage” theory of intergenerational trauma. Slavery, like the concentration camp, was seen to create irreparable psychic and social damage whose individualized effects Moynihan saw as still posing an impediment to American integration. Such “damage,” according to the report, was exacerbated by the crucial historical distinction between liberty and equality. While liberty was granted to African Americans upon emancipation, argues Moynihan, achievement of equality required the regulative work of state intervention. On this point, Moynihan echoes an argument that Glazer put forth in a 1964 contemporaneous essay called “Negroes and Jews: The New Challenge to Pluralism.” Substantive critiques of the formal equality that had in Glazer’s view so benefited Jews in the United States were putting pressure on the broader social architecture of liberal pluralism. Demands for equality of results in economic and educational terms were replacing demands for equality merely of opportunity. Moynihan recognized this as “the principle challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution” (3).

“The Negro Family” argues that equality could most effectively be advanced through reparative work on Black manhood. The ideal for such reparation was most profoundly articulated in Moynihan’s abstract—raceless—notion of the Armed Forces. Moynihan argues that the expression of equality was to be found in preparation for military combat, where Black men could become proper masculine subjects. The importance of responding to demands for equality through state intervention could not be overstated in Moynihan’s estimation, precisely because of the growing influence of the Black Muslims. In tones reminiscent of Cold War liberalism’s broader anxieties around the Nation of Islam,62 Moynihan suggests that the Black Muslims provided an alternative and resolutely inassimilable domain through which to conceive of a “proper” notion of manhood—one “based on the total rejection of white society.” “In a word,” writes Moynihan, “the tangle of pathology is tightening.”

Racial Liberalism’s Global Horizon

Moynihan’s service in the Johnson and first Nixon presidential administrations solidified his credentials in conceiving and articulating domestic policies suitable for a Cold War racial liberal order. By the mid-1970s this work took on an overt international character, with Moynihan serving as the U.S. ambassador to India. In this position, Moynihan drew on and intensified his domestic disposition in ways that would reach a crescendo in the United Nations debates on Zionism and racism.

In “The United States in Opposition” (1975), an essay published in the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary Magazine in which Moynihan reflects on his post in Delhi, he laid out the contours of what an internationalization of Cold War liberalism would require. Norman Podhoretz, Commentary’s editor and Moynihan’s close confidant, heavily promoted “United States in Opposition” during a major press conference in February 1975—the only such event orchestrated for the publication of a Commentary essay. In the essay Moynihan argues that the United States was misusing its role in the rapidly decolonizing world, too readily assuaging claims for redress and reparations by the many newly independent nations. He asserts that the political philosophy undergirding third world political independence was in fact a British import. According to Moynihan, British parliamentary socialism had been both moral and equitable during Britain’s slow departure from its colonial possessions, but was now being translated into something both anti-American and practically unified, in the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77. This bloc of decolonizing nations began to make collective demands through the UN, and American diplomats were, in Moynihan’s view, inadequately responding. The poverty present in third world countries, for instance, was, according to Moynihan, not an effect of a long history of Euro-American-centered racial capitalism—as many in the Group of 77 were suggesting—but was rather “of their own making and no one else’s, and no claim on anyone else arises in consequence.”63 Moynihan’s ideological shift in ten years is notable. He had first traced U.S. Black poverty to a gendered pathology with roots in racial slavery—even advocating a commitment to equality of results; later he advised President Nixon that political expedience required “benign neglect” regarding U.S. racial conflict; and still later he opposed an internationalist structural argument to counteract the underdevelopment of the third world.64 Ever racial liberalism’s defender, Moynihan argued that it was time for the United States to make the case strenuously and resolutely for liberty, as opposed to the equality demanded as part of the global process of decolonization. “International liberalism and its processes have enormous recent achievements to their credit. It is time for the United States to start saying so. . . . We are of the liberty party, and it might surprise us what energies might be released were we to unfurl those banners.”65

Following his Commentary-sponsored press conference, Moynihan became something of a media darling. He was someone willing to speak America’s tough truths to the growing influence of the USSR in the third world, a figure well calibrated for the task of moving past the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War. In March 1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger offered Moynihan the position of U.S. ambassador to the UN, and in June Moynihan was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. “We are in a propaganda war,” he would say at his confirmation hearings. “We have to respond with a comparable level of effort to that which is directed against us.”66 Debate involving UN Resolution 3379 would become Moynihan’s primary battleground.

In this debate Moynihan’s most outspoken, and most overtly anti-Semitic, adversary was Idi Amin, then serving as chairman of the Organization of African Unity and president of Uganda. Amin flagrantly asserted in an October 1975 speech to the General Assembly that the United States was “colonized by the Zionists who hold all the tools of development and power.” Zionists, Amin argued, dominated

all the banking institutions, the major manufacturing and processing industries and the major means of communication; and have so much infiltrated the CIA that they are posing a great threat to nations and peoples which may be opposed to the atrocious Zionist movement. . . . I call for the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations and the extinction of Israel as a State.67

In sidestepping the question of Zionism as a historically produced ideological construct—precisely what Resolution 3379 was claiming—and proffering instead a vicious conspiratorial anti-Semitism, Amin’s remarks provided precisely the kind of inflated rhetoric that the U.S. delegation seized on to make its case. Moynihan responded with vitriol. In learning of the General Assembly’s tacit support of Amin’s screed, Moynihan suggested that “there is blood in the water and the sharks grow frenzied.” He argued that the specter of communism and totalitarianism was growing, and the “free world” was in retreat. In response, the spirit of American liberalism could be the only defense: “Ours is a culture based on the primacy of the individual—the rights of the individual, the welfare of the individual, the claims of the individual against those of the state” (159–60). Critique of Zionism’s racial logic “reeked,” Moynihan later wrote in his post-UN memoir, “of the gas chamber and the concentration camp” (118). While Amin’s speech spurred Moynihan’s public denunciation on the floor of the General Assembly, the more Moynihan considered the situation, the more, he said, another smell wafted forth. “The charge against Zionism somehow emanated from Moscow. It reeked of the totalitarian mind, stank of the totalitarian state. So it was not at all from a concern for Israel as such that I came to be occupied above all with its survival” (168). The Cold War framing required a recommitted embrace of a muscular conception of liberty, albeit one that retained its historical complicity with racism. In this regard, his UN speech complements many of Moynihan’s earlier writings on ethnicity and “The Negro Family.” Again, as in the other frames enjoining the domestic American scene to Israel, Moynihan deployed the memory of the Holocaust. Moynihan plainly acknowledged his own ignorance about U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, noting he took his cues from Kissinger at the State Department.

On the topic of Israel, Jewishness, and anti-Semitism, he likewise claimed ignorance, relying primarily on Norman Podhoretz as his “maven” on such matters.68 Podhoretz worked closely with Moynihan to prepare the U.S. response and, as recalled in Moynihan’s post-UN memoir, provided the speech the exact language for its opening and closing sentences: “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act” (197). Other sections of the speech, particularly those on Zionism as a national liberation movement, drew from the work of Bernard Lewis, who, Moynihan noted, “seemed to know most about the history of the subject.” Lewis had arrived at Princeton University from Britain in 1974 and soon found an outlet for his more polemical essays in Commentary. Podhoretz consulted directly with Lewis and synthesized his views for Moynihan, many of which had also been reflected in Lewis’s recent Commentary essay “Palestinians and the PLO: A Historical Approach.”69

In denouncing the UN resolution, Moynihan avoided engaging any of Fayez Sayegh’s historical arguments, collapsing them instead into Amin’s hypostatized rhetoric as indicative of “a general assault by the majority of the nations in the world on the principles of liberal democracy.” He hastily discounted Sayegh’s argumentation, noting in his memoir that “the Arabs were at their worst, or best, as they might think: replete with charters and pacts and proclamations of long ago, leering with proofs of Jewish wickedness sniped from editorials of Israeli newspapers or the pronouncements of anti-Zionist Jews” (181). Instead, Moynihan proclaimed, the U.S. delegation focused primarily on the nominative question of defining racism. “I think we’ve got them another way. . . . The resolution doesn’t define what racism is,” Moynihan was quoted as saying in the strategy sessions that he held with his counsel, Leonard Garment, his research assistant Suzanne Weaver, and Podhoretz.

Garment laid out this line of argument in the Third Committee debate:

The language of this resolution distorts and perverts. It changes words with precise meanings into purveyors of confusion. It destroys the moral force of the concept of racism, making it nothing more than an epithet to be flung arbitrarily at one’s adversary. . . . By equating Zionism with racism, this resolution discredits the good faith of our joint efforts to fight actual racism. It discredits these efforts morally and it cripples them politically. (182–83)

While there was general consensus on the meaning of the term racial discrimination, the U.S. delegation argued, the UN had no working definition of the “incomparably more serious charge” of racism. Moynihan’s claims that General Assembly documents show “racism” as a concept was discussed only once, in December 1968, and in that context the key question was how racism related to Nazism. The possible contours of this relationship—along with racism’s relationship to colonialism, apartheid, and segregation—did indeed animate deliberations at the United Nations, going as far back as the first General Assembly’s resolution on “religious and so-called racial persecution and discrimination” in 1946. The U.S. delegation flattened such a genealogy into a simplified syllogism. If Nazism was a form of racism, and if Zionism was a form of racism, then ipso facto Zionism must be a form of Nazism, a statement that Moynihan called “complete lunacy.”70 In his memoir Moynihan suggests that the term racism was imported into UN discourse by the U.S. delegation to the April 1968 International Convention on Human Rights in Tehran. The Kerner Commission report on the race riots of 1967 had been published only weeks before the convention. “The term racism, especially white racism, achieved a certain vogue,” writes Moynihan, who links the American delegation to Tehran to Kerner Commission participants. “For whatever reason, apart from this new word, the delegation brought little along with it” (175).

In his General Assembly speech, Moynihan relied on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary for conceptual clarity, tacitly delinking racism from broader historical analysis by focusing instead on semantics. The dictionary, Moynihan argues, defined racism as “the assumption that . . . traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another.”71 This assumption is “usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over others” (96). Moynihan used the latter part of the definition to argue against the claim that Jews are a “particular race.” Contrary to the numerous citations furnished by Sayegh and the Palestine Research Center from Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and others, Moynihan claimed that Zionism as a “strictly religious and political movement” never operated under such assumptions. “That Jews are a ‘race’ was invented not by Jews but by those who hated Jews. . . . It was a contemptible idea at the beginning, and no civilized person would be associated with it.” Zionism was rather a part of an “upsurge in national consciousness and aspiration,” a “national liberation movement” (97).

Moynihan lauds Zionism as akin to other national liberation movements in ways that echo nearly verbatim the argument Lewis makes in “The Anti-Zionist Resolution” published several months later in Foreign Affairs. According to this line of thinking, Zionism was exceptional in its open pluralistic ideology, in contrast to the more narrow nationalisms emanating from the Third World. Zionism “was not a movement of persons connected by historic membership in a genetic pool. . . . To the contrary, Zionists defined themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish anyone born of a Jewish mother or—and this is the absolutely crucial fact—anyone who converted to Judaism.” Israel was a multiracial and multireligious melting pot, whose polity was drawn from a “range of ‘racial stocks’” including “black Jews, brown Jews, white Jews, Jews from the Orient and Jews from the West” (97). While it was true that “most such persons could be said to have been ‘born’ Jews,” Moynihan concedes, “there are many Jews who are converts.” Further, “the population of Israel also includes large numbers of non-Jews, among them Arabs of both the Muslim and Christian religions and Christians of other national origins. Many of these persons are citizens of Israel, and those who are not can become citizens by legal procedures very much like those which obtain in a typical nation of Western Europe” (97). Nowhere does Moynihan address the “color-line” argument raised by Sayegh, let alone the PRC’s thick accounting of settler colonial racism. An exceptionalist abstract liberal pluralism was all that Moynihan had to offer.

Moynihan’s closing argument revealed his true ideological adversary to be the Soviet Union. The “lie” at the heart of the resolution would do “irreparable harm to the cause of human rights” (98). Moynihan traces the concept of human rights to the seventeenth-century emergence of political liberalism that defines the individual as distinct from the state, precisely the notion of liberty that his “United States in Opposition” essay strenuously advocated. As in those earlier arguments, vast swaths of the Third World were cast as susceptible to the totalitarian logic of the Soviet Union ready to twist the meaning of words beyond repair: “If we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries, we will not have words to replace them, for philosophy today has no such words” (99).

Struggles over the content and meaning of all words leave their mark on history, in archives, in narratives themselves.72 Struggles over the meaning of words require uncovering and narration; they cannot be destroyed in any substantive material sense. Moynihan’s work at the UN attempted to delink racism from history. Its abstract formalism provided an international framework that resonated with the “color-blind” ideologies of U.S. neoconservatism. U.S. neoconservatism would draw from Moynihan’s strenuous embrace of an exceptional liberty as the proper geopolitical horizon in ways that attempted to extricate race from the structural violence that persisted in both the United States and Israel. In light of this genealogy, we can see how racial liberalism was incubated as a tacit disavowal of the broadly effective materialist critiques of Zionist settler colonialism brought by scholars of Arab descent committed to Palestinian liberation.

A Metaphor for Democracy?

“Israel a metaphor for democracy” proclaimed the headline to the July 6, 1976, Jerusalem Post report on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s first trip to Israel.73 Moynihan had just weeks earlier entered a crowded contest for one of New York’s U.S. Senate seats after resigning from his UN post the previous February. The position papers for his Senate campaign, drafted by Podhoretz and Weaver, foregrounded his deft social scientific approach to different ethnic communities in New York City, his willingness to take difficult stands in the face of international pressure, and his unflinching commitment to defend Israel as central to an expression of American civic religion. One campaign pamphlet featured an image of Moynihan at the United Nations, rising out of his seat behind a U.S. nameplate. “He spoke up for America . . . He’ll speak up for you,” it read.74

In July 1976 Moynihan traveled to Jerusalem to receive an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University in recognition of his strenuous argument against UN Resolution 3379. In his acceptance speech on Mount Scopus, Moynihan maintained that Israel had “become a metaphor for democracy in the world. If the Israeli democracy, which persists in the face of the uttermost peril and difficulty, can be discredited, then it can clearly be established that democracy is not a political and cultural system which can survive in a perilous and difficult world.”75 An essay published soon after his trip, “Totalitarian Terrorists,” echoes these sentiments. In it, Moynihan narrates how, while he was in Israel, and unbeknownst to him, the Israeli military executed a successful mission to rescue scores of passengers from a hijacked airliner in Entebbe, Uganda. The virality of anti-Semitism as the leading edge of totalitarianism merged with what one of Moynihan’s Israeli interlocutors called the “disease” of terrorism. “Does not the West know this—that the disease spreads?” Israel’s pointed and successful antiterrorism practice exemplified for Moynihan what a strenuous defense of liberty should look like, offering up a case study for war-weary Americans.76 The Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism a few years later would fuse this Cold War framing of terrorism as a totalitarian threat to liberal democracies—a viral disease akin to anti-Semitism—that warranted the intensification of a racialized security apparatus.

In one of his last major campaign speeches, just weeks before election day 1976, Moynihan reiterated this idea by intertwining Israel and the United States as two “parties of liberty” intimately linked in buttressing the “free world” against the so-called scourge of totalitarianism.

It is above all because Israel is a democratic country that the United States owes Israel continued political support. But there is more to the case even than that. For Israel is not merely one democratic country among others. In its mortal peril, it has become a metaphor for the condition of democracy in the world today. The entire democratic world is under siege, just as Israel is under siege—the main difference being that Israel already recognizes the danger and the other democracies are only slowly waking to it. . . . To defend Israel is to defend liberty and democracy and therefore also to defend the United States.77

Throughout the bicentennial period—when triumphalist reflections on U.S. notions of freedom and liberty pervaded American popular culture—Moynihan mapped a geopolitical cartography positioning Israel and the United States as metaphorical figures bound together by global siege and global insecurity. This cartography was at once inflected by the ideological coordinates of the Cold War and “infected” by an emergent notion of a so-called terrorist international for which it was seeking a viable cure.78 Figuring Israel as a symbolic stand-in for liberty and democracy justified an expansive war against a totalitarian threat that laid the groundwork by the early 1980s for an articulation of a shared “war against international terrorism.”79

At the same time that Moynihan was thickening U.S.-Israel geopolitical connections, Fayez Sayegh was busy founding the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. EAFORD’s 1976 inaugural symposium in Tripoli, Libya, focused on the theme of “Zionism and racism.” Over five hundred participants from eighty countries attended the conference, and participants from nineteen countries presented a multidisciplinary range of academic papers. The conference proceedings include essays by Elmer Berger, Anis Al-Qasem, Stefan Goranov, Alfred M. Lilienthal, Sami Hadawi, Walter Lehn, Naseer Aruri, Richard P. Stevens, Gary Smith, Hatem I. Hussaini, and Mick Ashley. Zionism and apartheid were understood by many at the conference as “two sides of the same coin.”80 Abdelwahab Elmessiri’s essay, “Distinctive Traits of Zionist Settler Colonialism,” echoed arguments developed by the Palestine Research Center and expressed at the United Nations. Elmessiri identified a form of population transfer predicated on territorial expansion and internal racial and cultural heterogeneity that was both independent from the sovereignty of its sponsors and dependent on their financial and military support. Edward W. Said’s contribution to the conference focused on the “intellectual origins of Zionism and imperialism” and prefigured substantive arguments he would elaborate in fuller form in Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam. Here he avers that the “tragic blindness of Zionism lies in its having been born not only in the European oppression of Jews, but amongst and as part of the European oppression of black, yellow, brown, and red peoples.”81 By the end of his presentation, such a global racial logic becomes the conditions for shared struggle: “And if—as niggers, Arabs, wops, gooks, slope-eyes—we have been declared scientifically unfit for human rights, it is now time for us together to expose and destroy the whole system of confinement, dispossession, exploitation, and oppression that still holds us down and denies us our inalienable rights as human beings.”82

Sayegh’s own presentation at the symposium was titled “Racism and Racial Discrimination Defined.” In it, Sayegh theorizes racism at its most abstract in order to identify its “genetic nature.”83 At racism’s base was the “most crucial fact” of an affective investment in racial belonging as the grounds of identity. In this way, “mankind” was “essentially divided” into “unbridgeable racial groups” whose “inherently different characteristics” become the principles to array a matrix of purportedly inherent notions of superiority and inferiority. The “policy consequences” of this doctrine included practices of spatial segregation, social discrimination, and, most interestingly, a dynamic relationality between racist systems. “When they are within the same orbit,” writes Sayegh, “they are in a clashing relationship . . . Nazism versus zionism—the war of death between the two.” In contrast, as a way to frame the mutually reinforcing interactions of racist systems, Sayegh notes that “when they are apart, and not stepping on one another’s toes, then . . . there is a natural alliance between them, especially as they confront the rising tide of anti-racism throughout the world” (2). Such geographic distance allowed Sayegh to theorize the deepening ties between Apartheid South Africa and Israel. From arms shipments to trade agreements, by 1976 the two settler states had forged an enduring “natural alliance,” one that would paradoxically become central to internationalizing Palestine solidarity struggles.84

The Twisting of History

It is not incidental that Resolution 3379 is the only General Assembly resolution to be formally revoked by the United Nations. On December 16, 1991, at the dawn of the post–Cold War period, in the wake of the first Gulf War, and at the behest of Israeli and U.S. diplomats who had been organizing to “right the wrong” since the mid-1980s, the General Assembly rescinded 3379 via a one-line declaration.85 Israel conditioned its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference on 3379’s revocation. U.S. president George H. W. Bush addressed the General Assembly using the same logics of equation and Holocaust memory that Moynihan had used sixteen years earlier. Bush argued that “to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history.”86 Importantly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a unipolar world, the time was ripe for repealing the resolution. “History had been frozen by Communism,” Bush averred in his remarks to the assembly. The fall of the Soviet bloc had signaled “history’s resumption” through the triumph of free markets and liberal democracy. The United Nations should, according to Bush, move along into the new world order.

Yet dread over a UN-supported racial analysis continues to reverberate into the political present. The official U.S. delegation to the 2001 World Conference against Racism walked out over such an analysis and boycotted both the 2009 and 2011 conferences for the same reason. In 2012 U.S. president Barack Obama vowed that his administration would “always reject the notion that Zionism is racism.”87 A racial critique of Zionism is often framed as exemplifying the resurgence of anti-Jewish racism, the specter of a “new Anti-Semitism,” even presaging another holocaust. Some have argued that a racial analysis of Zionism and Israeli state practice should be combated by, among other measures, using the antidiscrimination laws codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.88

Reckoning with the relationship between racism and Zionism makes legible the post–World War II reconfigurations of racial meanings that attempted to settle race matters through a liberal democratic framework predicated on Palestinian exclusion, dispossession, and dehumanization. For these reasons, among others, it remains a tense issue in the United States. Racial liberalism’s investment in what Horace Kallen once called Zionism’s route to the “harmonious adjustment of the Jew to American life” was, one might say, a structural adjustment. It bound settler colonialism in Palestine to Jewish emancipation and assimilation, the management of a Holocaust memory, and a broad post–civil rights consensus. It offered, to paraphrase the cultural critic Chandan Reddy’s searing insight, freedom with violence.89 Reckoning with such a genealogy reveals (as opposed to obfuscates) the relational dynamics of race at play in this historical entanglement. As I show in the chapters to come, these dynamics not only played out in the realm of official state geopolitics but also were robustly engaged in the circuits of cultural production linking Black freedom struggles, American Jewish reconfigurations, Arab American organizing and activism, and antiracist and anti-imperialist feminisms.