Nearly fifty years ago to the day, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination".

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The resolution was a Soviet bloc and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) initiative to delegitimise Israel by linking Zionism with apartheid and colonialism after the 1967 and 1973 wars. It is an eerily similar strategy to that employed by Israel's enemies today.

The resolution was framed under an agenda item to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination, yet it targeted only the right to self-determination of the world's one Jewish state, without comparable scrutiny of any other country or national movement. A resolution that claimed to combat racism in fact institutionalised it against the Jewish people.

UN Resolution 3379 is unremarkable in its singling out of the world's only Jewish state. That has become a familiar pattern in the UN system. What makes it remarkable is that it produced the only occasion on which the General Assembly has admitted that one of its flagship anti-Zionist texts was wrong, and formally wiped it from the books.

Even more remarkable was that Australia, under prime minister Bob Hawke and foreign minister Bill Hayden played an instrumental role in having the resolution rescinded. In a display of bipartisan unity, the Australian Parliament was the first in the world to formally call on the UN to reverse Resolution 3379, followed later by the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

Hawke described the resolution as "a misrepresentation of Zionism" that "has served to escalate religious animosity and anti-Semitism", and his government mandated Australia to "lend support to efforts to overturn" it. The........

© Canberra Times