The truth about Zionism

Fifty years ago today, on Nov. 10, 1975, my father, Chaim Herzog, then Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and later the country’s sixth president, stood before the U.N. General Assembly to respond to the infamous resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism.”

In front of a hostile hall, he affirmed: “Zionism is nothing more—and nothing less—than the Jewish people’s sense of origin and destination in the land linked eternally with its name.”

He declared that it was not Zionism or the State of Israel that stood on trial that day, but the United Nations itself.

And in one of the most stirring and enduring moments in the history of that body, he tore his copy of the resolution in two, right there at the podium.

He had felt, he later told me, that he was speaking not only as Israel’s ambassador, but on behalf of the past and future generations of a persecuted and maligned people. The resolution, as he saw it, was not just another U.N. political maneuver.

It was a direct assault on the Jewish people’s identity, history, and fundamental right to self-determination—a form of organised political bullying meant to silence a voice and to demoralise a people. The pitch he had chosen was simply equal matching; a visceral, if still rational, meeting of the vitriol being lodged against our people.

It was a speech that was widely regarded as one of the finest and most effective in history. But while the resolution itself was later revoked, the spectre of the sentiment that fueled it still reverberates—the lingering accusation, whispered or shouted in different forms—that Zionism is somehow a moral stain, an illegitimate aspiration.

It has been audible, sometimes softly, sometimes piercingly, across the decades since—and, once again, in our own time. It was immediately there, implicit in the language of many, on Oct. 7, 2023. And over the past two years of devastating war against Hamas in Gaza, the old chorus has decidedly returned: Israel, by defending itself, by existing, is already guilty.

The tools and rhetoric may have evolved since 1975, but the core impulse remains: to deny the Jewish people the moral right to self-determination, to cast the very existence of our state as a transgression, and to portray Israel as a racist entity undeserving of security or peace.

Yet as my father insisted then—and as we must continue to insist now — the truth flies in the face of these accusations.

Zionism is not racism. It is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people; a return to an indigenous homeland after millennia of persecution.  In its redress of a historical injustice, in its desire to restore dignity to a people, it is an expression of the same universal yearnings for equality, freedom, and dignity that have animated all struggles for justice.

That is the true moral framework of our story. And while the past two years have tested it in ways we could not have imagined, what has emerged from the pain and heartbreak of this time has also reaffirmed it: the extraordinary resilience, solidarity, and mutual responsibility that define us.

These are the same moral energies that rebuilt a people from ashes. They are what have enabled us to respond with courage, dignity and purpose to the catastrophe of Oct. 7, and they are what continue to animate our national life today.

As Jews and Israelis, we will survive the current onslaught of hate. We will prevail against those who still seek to divide and demoralise

us. Through faith in our shared mission, in the moral gravity of our calling, and in the justice of our path.

Chaim Herzog is the President of Israel