Conference Probes Link Between Terrorism, Anti-Semitism

Twenty-one Jewish men, most of them elderly, are cut down by terrorists’ bullets while worshiping at a synagogue in Istanbul. Two Americans are among 20 dead in the hijacking of a Pan Am jet at Karachi. A bomb explodes in a Paris restaurant, the fourth terrorist incident in that city within two weeks.

It was in this climate of violence that L.A. Jews met to explore “Israel, Zionism and the United Nations”--and the link between anti-Semitism and worldwide terrorism.

Tight Security

Security was tight--metal detectors and handbag checks--as Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu, that country’s permanent representative to the United Nations, arrived at the Century Plaza for Sunday’s conference. Prophetically, Netanyahu was sharply critical of what he sees as a do-nothing Western response that allows terrorists to “laugh all the way to the blood bath.”

The following day, one person was killed and 51 injured in a bomb blast at Paris police headquarters.

The daylong meeting, co-sponsored by committees of the American Zionist Federation, the Jewish Federation Council and the World Zionist Organization, drew more than 600 people. It was billed as part of an international campaign for rescission of the 1975 United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

But it was clear that terrorism--and terrorist acts against Jews--were equally high on the agenda of participants. And more than one speaker forged a connection between anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism and the resulting hatred that nurtures violence. When a Turkish synagogue is attacked, “This is not anti-Zionism. This is anti-Semitism,” said Ehud Sprinzak, an Israeli political scientist and specialist in extremist politics, violence and terrorism who is a visiting fellow at the Center of International and Strategic Studies, Georgetown University. “Anti-Zionism has become the respectable anti-Semitism of the times.”

An elderly woman in the audience nudged her white-haired companion, to make sure she was listening. “Very important stuff to talk about here, Sarah,” she said. “The life of the Jewish people is at stake.”

Many in the audience, wearing blue-and-white “I Am a Zionist” buttons, seemed to share this sense of urgency, to comprehend what Netanyahu in a news conference called the “intrinsic connection” between racism and anti-Zionism and the “unholy alliance between the anti-Semites and the terrorists.”

At day’s end, the body passed by acclamation a resolution to be sent to Secretary of State George Shultz, Sens. Alan Cranston and Pete Wilson, the Southern California delegation in the U.S. House, the U.N. secretary general and representatives of the 72 nations that voted for what it termed the “infamous” 1975 resolution that condemned Zionism as racism. Among the nations that voted with the anti-Zionists was Turkey. The resolution sent by the L.A. conference also condemns the “vile resolution” issued by last month’s Non-Aligned Nations Conference in Zimbabwe, equating Zionism with racism. The L.A. resolution calls for “a full-scale attack against international terrorists and those countries that support and shelter them.”

(Zionism is a term used by Jews who accept it as a political movement to define “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people,” with re-establishment of the state of Israel as realization of the major element of Zionist ideology. The U.N. resolution condemning Zionism as racism received impetus from the Soviet Union, which views Israel as a proxy for American interests in the Middle East, and was supported by the Arab bloc).

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the U.N. resolution, the L.A. meeting also sent a petition to U.N. General Secretary Javier Perez de Cuellar applauding the action of the 99th Congress in condemning adoption of Resolution 3379 and demanding that member states expunge the 1975 resolution from U.N. records.

The United Nations--the body that resoundingly passed the anti-Zionist resolution a decade ago--came in for considerable tongue-lashing. At an early session, Marcia Volpert, chair of the communications committee, Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, posed the question, “Is the United Nations still worth our energy, still worth our support?” Dennis C. Goodman, a career foreign service officer who once served as deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, spoke of ongoing Israel “bashing” in the U.N. while Israel’s Western allies stand by.

Landmark in ‘Deterioration’

Defense Minister Rabin, calling passage of the resolution in 1975 “a landmark in the moral and political deterioration of the United Nations,” said that body “has contributed nothing” to peace in the Middle East--that, in fact, peace between Israel and Egypt was achieved in 1977 “because the United Nations was not involved.”

And terrorist acts have gone on, Rabin said, with no condemnation by the U.N. of nations that abet the terrorists--”No, these events passed unnoticed by this organization that has got the fake name of United Nations.”

There is no question, Rabin added, that the worshipers in Istanbul “were bitterly attacked and killed for one reason--because they were Jewish.” He said anti-Semitic fallout from the U.N. anti-Zionism resolution “served as a moral encouragement to such an act” and further “expressions of hatred” by member states can be expected.

Rabin added, “Don’t expect the United Nations to do anything against international terror.”

Netanyahu said that, while “the U.N can’t do anything good, I’m afraid it’s very effective on the bad side of the equation.” Historically, he said, anti-Semitism always had a home in a particular country at a particular time but today, for the first time, a mind-set of anti-Semitism has seized a world body (the U.N.) “and it’s bloody effective.”

Why has the pro-Zionist movement not taken action heretofore to rescind the resolution? Uzi Narkiss, who as head of information for the World Zionist Organization initiated the international campaign of which the Los Angeles conference is a part, offered three reasons: A fear of conferring further credibility on the resolution, a belief in the impossibility of reversing or annulling it and a mistaken idea that “there was no real risk that it would be believed.”

The result, he said, was a decision to “let the crazy storm pass in the conviction that it would be forgotten and not leave any significant scar.” But recently, Narkiss said, Zionist leaders accepted that the resolution had not been quietly forgotten, indeed that it had come to confer “an aura of respectability” on the idea of equating Zionism with racism.

As cases in point, he mentioned the raising of the equation on British campuses in an attempt to deprive Jewish societies of rights granted to other student associations and, in this country, to a seminar that compared apartheid, Nazism and Zionism as forms of racism. In the Soviet Union, Narkiss said, the resolution was used in Anatoly Shcharansky’s trial to “prove” that Zionism was contrary to law, as racism is a major offense under Soviet law.

Because of passage of the U.N. resolution, Narkiss said, attacks on Zionism were given credibility and “are no longer the prerogative of a lunatic fringe or of fanatic opponents.” Inherent in this, he said, is the potential for resumption of “the chain of anti-Semitism which had been halted under the impact of the Holocaust for 40 years.”

‘We’re Not Angels’

Sprinzak called the resolution the culmination of “a systematic effort to illegitimize the state of Israel” by discrediting the ideology on which it was founded, but said it goes beyond politics. He noted, “We’re not angels. There are things in Israel that are open to criticism. This is not the issue.”

To discredit the discreditors, he said, it is necessary to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. He defined the latter as “a racist ideology against the Jews, wherever they are.” Whereas anti-Zionists claim to be simply ideologically against the state of Israel, he added, “Scratch sufficiently an anti-Zionist and you’re bound to find an anti-Semite.”

Harry James Cargas, who is a professor in the Department of Religion at Webster University in St. Louis and serves on the council of the National Christian Leadership Council for Israel, was roundly applauded when he said he defines himself not as a Roman Catholic but as “a post-Auschwitz Catholic,” one who was “more moved by what happened at Auschwitz than what did not happen at Rome at the same time.”

The “U.N. lie” cannot be ignored, he said, because “words lead to gas chambers.” But, Cargas noted, Israel has lost support within the liberal Protestant community, partly because of what he termed “honest confusion” as to who is a real Jew and thus eligible for admission to Israel under the law of return. (Halacha , traditional Jewish law, recognizes lineage through the mother. The debate continues among Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews over which Jewish conversions should be recognized).

Rabin came to his midday news conference with his own agenda--to discuss the recent summit talks between Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, which he termed “a landmark in improvement of relations between Egypt and Israel,” and to condemn the terrorist attacks in Karachi and in Istanbul, as well as the kidnapings of two Americans in Beirut, as the acts of those mobilizing to block any moves toward peace.

If the United States does not take the lead in combatting worldwide terrorism, Rabin said, “We all will suffer.” He added, “Whoever believes that terror can be eliminated by one raid (the U.S. air raid on Libya) or even by one war is wrong.”

Rabin noted that a number of Arab countries, including Libya and Syria, give terrorist organizations “support, if not encouragement,” allowing them to establish headquarters and training bases, financing them and providing terrorists with passports as well as “use of diplomatic pouches to transfer arms to other countries.”

In the case of the Karachi hijacking, Rabin said, “I’m surprised and puzzled” that the U.S. government and the American public apparently “don’t know who is responsible,” even though the three hijackers are in the hands of Pakistani authorities. He asked: Why don’t we know who they are, who they’re acting for and the identity of their ultimate contact?

As for the Istanbul attack, he said, the Turkish government has informed Israel that the two terrorists, who died in the attack, acted alone and “we have no clear-cut evidence who’s responsible,” but there is some evidence linking the assassins to the terrorist network of arch-terrorist Abu Nidal, who was last reported in Libya.

‘Intelligence Exchanges’

Asked specifically what actions he thought the United States should take to combat terrorism, Rabin, a former Israeli prime minister, said the world is looking to this country for leadership, that there should be “intelligence exchanges, exchanges of knowledge . . . I don’t expect combined (offensive) operations” against terrorist targets.

Ambassador Netanyahu said the attacks in Karachi and in Istanbul were so meticulously planned that they could have been directed only by “a major organization” with support of a sovereign state. It is useless to point a finger at individual terrorists, he said--”The foot soldiers of terrorism are nothing without the godfathers.”

For example, he said, “Those weapons weren’t parachuted into Turkey . . . they didn’t drop from the sky,” but were most likely smuggled in by diplomatic pouch.

“The success of terrorists in one part of the world . . . inspires terrorists elsewhere,” he observed. Will it heat up again? “It’s up to us (Israel, the United States and the Western European nations) . . . if the terrorists think we are serious, then they will stop.”

That, he said, means expelling diplomats, shutting down embassies, mandating boycotts and embargoes on their exports and refusing permission for their airplanes to land.

“Until the West changes its attitude,” he said, “the terrorists will continue . . . why shouldn’t they?”

The key to fighting back, Netanyahu suggested, is to “strip away this curtain of lies” being spread by the terrorists in the name of freedom and, to some extent, being accepted by their victims. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “The freedom they want is the freedom to massacre old men, to murder children.”

If a vote on rescission of the U.N. resolution were today, Netanyahu said, “a cluster of countries” would come over to Israel’s side but “I wouldn’t say at this point we could roll it back.”

There will not be an effort to pass a resolution in opposition, he said, because the United States and other member nations would view that as “a provocation of such monumental proportions (that) the result might be the collapse of the United Nations,” which he referred to as “that den of iniquity.”

Rather, he said, “We have taken the offensive on the moral battlefield for public opinion.”