Mr. Biden, This Is How You Defend Israel

 At the UN General Assembly this week, our president delivered a milquetoast defense of our ally. Half a century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan did the opposite.

For the last week, hordes of diplomats have been wining and dining their way around Manhattan, where they have been quartered for the United Nations General Assembly. Anyone familiar with this annual circus could be forgiven for tuning out.

So it might have escaped your notice that multiple UN grandees have availed themselves of this illustrious opportunity to demonize the world’s sole Jewish state. Israel is battling Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, two terrorist groups that will not rest until they have obliterated a nation America has always counted among its closest allies.

And yet, this week, very few Americans seemed to bat an eyelid when a self-professed democratic leader—Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—said, on U.S. soil, on the first day of the General Assembly: “Just as Hitler was stopped by the alliance of humanity 70 years ago, Netanyahu and his murder network must also be stopped by the alliance of humanity.”

A historically illiterate, deeply offensive comparison between the architect of the genocide of European Jewry and the leader of the world’s only Jewish state. How could Erdoğan justify saying such a thing in a room full of global leaders? 

Sadly, it’s an easy question to answer. Thugs and autocrats and antisemites have always viewed the United Nations as a cudgel meant to batter the West. Just as every country on Earth whose name includes “the people’s republic” is neither for the people or a republic, every UN member that uses its membership to decry the deaths of innocents in Gaza—but not Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, North Korea, China, or anywhere else—could not care less about innocents. This is posturing pure and simple, and it’s meant to elevate Erdoğan’s standing among his fellow bottom-feeders while cornering Israel, undermining its raison d’être, chipping away at the founding ideals of the United Nations.

Unfortunately, the American president lacks the fortitude or moral vision to say as much. In his remarks in New York, Joe Biden offered up a potpourri of platitudes that will move no one: “Full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest,” “a diplomatic solution is still possible,” and so forth.

To imagine what might have been, we may recall a very different Irish Catholic Democrat, who, 49 years ago, gave a very different speech at the United Nations. One that robustly defended Israel. One that condemned the organization’s treatment of the Jewish state. One that articulated the values of democracy and pluralism and tolerance, which so many Western leaders now seem congenitally incapable of articulating.

I refer, of course, to the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who was the U.S. ambassador to the UN during one of its most egregious betrayals of Israel.

 

It was a rainy day in New York, November 10, 1975, and the UN General Assembly was gathered to vote on Resolution 3379, which called for the “elimination of all forms of racial discrimination.”

At the time, much of the Middle East was still smarting from Israel’s victory in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Then—as now—many leaders saw the UN General Assembly as an opportunity to wage diplomatic warfare against the Jewish state. These included a man renowned for his flagrant abuse of human rights, the Ugandan despot Idi Amin, who once said Hitler “was right to burn six million Jews.”

Ahead of the General Assembly, Amin’s was one of the loudest voices in a coalition that had conspired to add a grim clause to Resolution 3379: “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

Moynihan had been appointed ambassador to the UN by President Gerald Ford only a few months earlier, in June 1975. But he hit the ground running, lobbying furiously against this moral depravity, speaking out against it at every opportunity.

At the time, there was no question that America would vote against the resolution, and yet Moynihan’s staunch opposition to it wasn’t shared by all in the Ford administration. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger feared Moynihan was overdoing it. Before the General Assembly, Kissinger instructed a colleague to tell Moynihan that he needed to get approval for any remarks he planned to make.

“Tell him these are direct instructions from me,” Kissinger said. 

But by the time the delegates had arrived in New York, he knew it was too late: Most member-states planned to vote for the resolution. UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim—who the world would later discover had taken part in Nazi war crimes—threw a party in Idi Amin’s honor. (In 1987, the United States barred Waldheim from entering the country.)

Meanwhile, Moynihan prepared his speech, with the help of his friend Norman Podhoretz, editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine. He ignored Kissinger’s instructions.

When, on November 10, the delegates convened to vote, the Israeli ambassador to the UN reminded those assembled what was at stake. “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution, based on hatred, falsehood, and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value,” said Chaim Herzog—before tearing the resolution in two. 

Nevertheless, 72 countries voted for Resolution 3379, 35 voted against it—including the United States—and 32 abstained. 

When the result was announced, Moynihan rose to speak. 

“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,” he said.

He repeated the line almost verbatim at the end of the speech. 

“As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number—not this time—and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost.

“What we have here is a lie—a political lie of a variety well-known to the twentieth century, and scarcely exceeded in all that annal of untruth and outrage.

“The terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences. Not only will people begin to say—indeed they have already begun to say—that the United Nations is a place where lies are told, but far more serious, grave, and perhaps irreparable harm will be done to the cause of human rights itself.”  

The backlash to Moynihan’s speech was swift.

“But we are liars, 72 liars?” thundered Saudi representative Jamil Baroody. “God help any candidate in this country who is not supported by the Zionists!”

Kissinger was incensed. “I will not put up with any more of Moynihan. I will not do it,” he vowed the following day.

And yet ordinary Americans across the political spectrum celebrated Moynihan’s bold support of Israel. The ambassador had worked in both Democrat and Republican administrations, for both Kennedy and Nixon, and he had hit upon a moral stance with bipartisan support.

In his book Moynihan’s Moment, Gil Troy writes that though this was a moment of “bitter partisan division, with both the Democratic and Republican parties purging their moderates and veering to the extremes,” Moynihan’s “campaign against Resolution 3379 set a new template for American nationalism,” supported— “surprisingly”—by those on both the left and the right.

Democratic senator Frank Church wrote to Moynihan saying: “You have done what you said you would do: Speak out for human rights and the democratic tradition, and you have done so with great force and dignity.”

“Keep up the wonderful work,” wrote Republican senator Barry Goldwater. “It’s time that somebody from the United States started talking as you have been talking.”

Moynihan resigned his post in February 1976—less than a year after taking the job. But he left a popular man. In November of that year, New York voters elected him to the Senate. There he would serve for nearly a quarter of a century.

Resolution 3379 lasted for 16 years, until December 1991, when the General Assembly revoked the declaration that Zionism was racism.

It is not a coincidence that this happened at the same moment that the Soviet Union was in a state of collapse—when Americans, under the leadership of men like George H.W. Bush in the White House and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Senate, understood who we were, what we stood for, what hills we had no choice but to die on. 

That American leaders are unwilling, or unable, in 2024, to offer up anything beyond the blandest of clichés in defense of our closest ally in the Middle East does not bode well for America’s own sense of self.

https://www.thefp.com/p/things-worth-remembering-daniel-patrick-moynihan-un