In 1975, when I was fourteen, my older (and much wiser) cousin, Jill had been carrying signs to school which read: Zionism Is NOT Racism. I’m sad to say, I had no real knowledge of what her signs meant. I had no idea that the Soviet Union—through what would become both a successful and tragic effort—was working to defame Israel in order to regain influence in the Middle East and parts of Africa, influence it had lost after Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War, when Israel suddenly became a strategic asset to the United States.
On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The vote passed by a wide margin: 72 in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstentions. That resolution became—officially—the policy of the United Nations. It was not based on truth, morality, or history. It was based on fear, expediency, and anti-Jewish bias.
Many countries, already anti-Israel and desperate for Soviet support or Soviet-aligned resources and markets, were willing to trade away the safety and dignity of the Jewish people for political gain. Several of these nations had oppressive governments, collapsing economies, rampant corruption, and they followed the Soviet lead like a dog to its master.
That UN declaration—Zionism equated with racism—remained on the books for sixteen years, until December 16, 1991, when the United Nations revoked it through Resolution 46/86, this time with 111 voting for revocation, 25 against, and 13 abstaining. It took sixteen years to undo what should never have been etched into the moral architecture of the world. Its revocation, however, did not undo the harm it caused. The Soviet Union spent vast resources—estimated in the hundreds of millions, and likely more—promoting this campaign across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Western intellectual circles. And those who still repeat these canards should know that they are echoing a lie manufactured for them, not by them.
Much of what you’re now seeing on our campuses, in the streets, in front of synagogues and places of Jewish learning—from actors, musicians, academics, and polemicists—the violence, the vitriol, the attempts to demoralize Jews and those who support Zionism, a four-thousand-year-old longing of our people to return to our homeland—can be traced, at least in part, to that UN declaration. Its stain not only endures, it has spread.
I have a declaration of my own.
I declare—to myself first, and to anyone listening—that I will not, under any circumstances, surrender my dignity as a Jew. I will not bow to threats, to lies, to ideological fashions, nor to propaganda insisting that Jewish survival, sovereignty, or identity is immoral. This anti-Jewish ideology was propagated by the Church, by Czarist Russia, by Nazi Germany, by European philosophers, and later by Soviet commissars—old ideas now eagerly lapped up and modernized by the academy and by politicians on the left, who, eager to burnish their oppressor-versus-oppressed bona fides, employ pseudo-intellectual terms such as colonialist, imperialist, genocidist, eco-cidist, pink-washer, or ethno-state racist.
And on the right, the very same poison appears, only in different rhetorical clothing—accusations of “globalists,” “dual-loyalists,” shadow financiers, cultural subverters, or those supposedly pulling strings behind the scenes. Different vocabulary, same ancient hatred.
History has been littered with attempts to degrade Jews, to delegitimize our existence.
Voltaire, an Enlightenment era philosopher celebrated to this day, wrote menacingly:
“The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most abominable greed with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for the peoples who tolerate and enrich them.”
(Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique)
This from a man who argued for tolerance—except when speaking of us.
In the forged Czarist antisemitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, its anonymous fabricators wrote as if Jews had said this:
“We shall destroy the money markets… and we shall become lords over all the earth.”
That sentence was never written by Jews.
It was written about Jews—by those seeking to justify persecution, expulsions, and massacres.
The lie of global domination was repeated again by Hitler, who wrote:
“The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”
(Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf)
These words became the pretext for ghettos, deportations, gas chambers, and the murder of six-millions of my people. They did not describe reality—they manifested terror.
And yet—despite the fame of these voices,
despite the intellectual weight society grants them—
their conclusions remain vile, false, utterly rejectable.
I stand in public disagreement with the entire historical record of hate.
And today, the voices are different,
but the claim is familiar.
Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the so-called “less militant” PLO, speaking about Jewish historical connection, said publicly:
“Israel has no historical connection to this land.”
That is not analysis.
It is historical erasure.
A falsehood so obvious that it is taken as fact by people who are either profoundly ignorant, or willfully intent on separating the Jewish people from our ancestral homeland.
At rallies in the United States and Europe within the last two years, protesters have shouted:
“There is only one solution—Intifada revolution.”
and
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Whatever defenders claim, these have become euphemisms for eliminating Jewish sovereignty—and in some cases, the Jewish people altogether.
I reject these modern distortions just as I reject the older ones.
I’ve been asked why I don’t offer a more “balanced” account of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—as if I imagine everything Israel has ever done is perfect. I don’t. It’s war; it’s tragic; it’s bloody; there is human loss no one should minimize.
But here is my answer:
Criticism of Israel has become so one-sided, so ubiquitous, and so relentlessly framed as unquestioned moral truth, that I see no need to repeat what is already shouted everywhere else. My aim here is not to restate the already dominant critique, but to speak into the silence surrounding Jewish history, and the right of Jews to sovereignty, safety, and continuity.
My own life bears witness.
When my wife and I traveled in 1988 through the Soviet Caucasus, the practice of Judaism was illegal. Zionism was treason. People whispered their identity, fearful of neighbors, employers, police. Everywhere I went, there were Jews whose eyes lit up when I gave them tefillin, mezuzot, or prayer books.
These objects were contraband.
Our identity was contraband.
Our dignity was contraband.
Nothing in me has changed since then.
But something has crystallized.
Since October 7, in the face of a world eager to invert victim and perpetrator, I stand stronger.
Not to persuade the world—
but to strengthen my own people.
Not to convince detractors—
but to stand before my children and grandchildren,
knowing that I did not remain silent.
Therefore:
I will not tire.
I will not weaken.
I will not surrender the beauty, genius, stubborn survival, moral inheritance, and sacred responsibility Judaism confers.
I do not exist because the world tolerates me.
I exist because God helped my people miraculously survive every attempt to erase us.
And I stand gratefully, defiantly, lovingly,
inside that lineage.
Peter Himmelman
