In a JNS op-ed, B’nai B’rith International CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin and Director of U.N. and Intercommunal Affairs David Michaels mark 50 years since the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution, which paved the way for today’s institutionalized anti-Israel prejudice and helped fuel global anti-Semitism.

Read the full piece at JNS.org.

The autocrats and opportunists at the United Nations lob any conceivable canard at Israelis, no matter how brazen; from “apartheid” to “gender-based violence” to “Judaizing” Jerusalem.

Many of Israel’s supporters and detractors alike have been stunned by the virulence of recent anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment, even in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terrorist assault on Israel, and even in the United States. Last week, in New York, the most Jewish city outside the Jewish state, a politician with a record of accusing Israel of “genocide” and defending a call to “globalize the intifada” was elected mayor. This was not a harbinger of a shift back to moderation in mainstream American politics.

While disturbed by these developments, it would be a stretch to say we were stunned. We know from all too much history just how adaptable and alluring anti-Semitism can be. And we, unlike all too many elites, are acutely aware of a powerful driver of anti-Jewish perceptions globally: the United Nations.

Eight decades ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish community invested desperate hope in the founding of the world body and its noble humanitarian mission. Our own organization was present at the San Francisco conference that launched the United Nations, and we’ve been active at U.N. agencies ever since.

But what started as a pathbreaking effort to unify and better the international community eventually became anything but: the United Nations has frequently devolved into a quasi-democratic institution hijacked by non-democracies for the most cynical of political purposes. In particular, an automatic majority of nearly 60 Arab and Muslim governments and their partners has exploited the multilateral system to single out Israel for unparalleled censure, demonization and mistreatment. In forum after forum, from the U.N. General Assembly to the U.N. Human Rights Council to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, the Middle East’s solitary democracy is routinely condemned more than all the world’s tyrannies, and all the world’s countries, combined.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the most infamous moment in the United Nations’ sharp turn toward anti-Israel prejudice. On Nov. 10, 1975, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution equating Zionism, the independence movement of the Jewish people, with “racism.”

No matter that the U.N. Charter upheld all peoples’ right to self-determination. No matter that Zionism—a big tent spanning right and left, capitalists and socialists, religious and secular, Jews and Christians—sought nothing more than to revive a safe haven for Jews in their small ancestral homeland, reversing (like so many other newly free countries) a legacy of foreign colonialism and dispossession.

No matter that the General Assembly itself had blessed Zionism’s objectives by endorsing Israel’s establishment in 1947 and admitting Israel as a U.N. member state in 1949. And no matter that Israel alone has modeled pluralism and civil liberties in its region, despite the most challenging of circumstances, and pursued peace with every willing neighbor, including Palestinians.

None of these mattered to Israel’s adversaries, who have never blushed at the hypocrisy of discriminating against the only Jewish member of a club populated by so many others with flags featuring crescents, crosses and other symbols of identity. To the contrary, the autocrats and opportunists at the United Nations lob any conceivable canard at Israelis, no matter how brazen; from “apartheid” to “gender-based violence” to “Judaizing” Jerusalem. Now, the United Nations latest “commission of inquiry” on Israel, one comprised entirely of strident partisans on the subject, has done precisely what we would expect and pushed the unsurpassable genocide libel.

That libel, like past ones, will not just isolate and stigmatize Israel’s diverse citizens but also subject Jewish minorities everywhere to a wave of renewed hate and threats.

The cheapening of serious human rights concepts, like racism and, especially, genocide, will have the intolerable effect of obscuring actual victims of the most grave, systematic and deliberate persecution anywhere.

In 1991, as part of efforts to advance genuine peace between Arabs and Israelis, the United States achieved a rare victory at the United Nations with the repeal of Resolution 3379, the motion that defamed Zionism as a form of racism.

Sadly, though, even that historic step proved no lasting impediment to repeat offenses at the United Nations. Just 10 years later, days before the Sept. 11 attacks, the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, was overshadowed by shocking scenes of anti-Semitism and an official outcome document that again singled out Israeli policies for implication as racist. Today, South Africa’s rulers, allied with and silent in the face of harrowing atrocities by Iranian and other despots, have spearheaded an International Court of Justice case accusing the Jewish state alone of genocide.

Let us make no mistake: It’s not only the jihadists of Hamas and their Iranian patrons that reject Israel’s very existence. At the United Nations or elsewhere, implying that “Zionists” are the new Nazis isn’t merely a taunt but an invitation to perennial warfare aimed at Israel’s destruction.

If Israelis and Palestinians are ever to have a better future, anti-Zionists must be called out as the anti-Jewish bigots that they are.

Daniel S. Mariaschin is CEO, and David J. Michaels is director of UN and intercommunal affairs at B’nai B’rith International.