The 1970s represented a new era for the global distribution of power. In 1973, Arab oil producers had implemented an embargo against the U.S. for its support of Israel in that year’s Arab-Israeli War. The embargo, which lasted six months, stood as a stark reminder of the dangerous possibilities of a world united against the U.S. There was, as Kissinger told a group of congressmen in the summer of 1975, “a practical necessity to change the direction we are headed,” and to improve U.S. prestige among G-77 nations. The world appeared to be drifting away from the U.S., a trend which needed to be reversed.
That shaped how Kissinger approached a no-win debate in the UNGA that eventually produced Resolution 3379 on Nov. 10, 1975, arguably the most divisive in the body’s history. It labeled Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination,” explicitly linking Israel, and the ideology behind its founding, with European imperialism and white supremacy. They all, the document proclaimed, shared “the same racist structure.”
That the U.S. would oppose the resolution — and that it would pass anyway — was never in question. The debate offered no opportunity for the type of compromise Kissinger was looking for and he hoped to move past it quickly.
For Ambassador Moynihan, however, the resolution was precisely the place to confront the broader changes afoot at the U.N. It would not be through compromise, as Kissinger suggested, but through strident defiance.
In the ambassador’s eyes, 3379 was more than just an attack on Israel’s legitimacy. It was an attack on democracy itself. Where the G-77 saw a foreign population forcibly taking land from Palestinian Arabs with the support of the old imperial powers, Moynihan saw an embattled bastion of democracy surrounded by dictatorial regimes. As he spoke out against the resolution, Moynihan received significant public support in the U.S..
His view resonated with some Americans for ideological reasons — the fact that Israel elected its government while most of its enemies did not — and with others because of race. The latter group saw Israelis, regardless of their actual ancestry, as more like white Americans than their Arab enemies. One writer in National Review noted in 1970, for example, that Israel was among a group of “white enclaves… destined for a crucial role in the history of Western civilization.” All of Moynihan’s supporters believed America’s position in the U.N. mattered and required defending.