As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.N.’s infamous resolution describing the liberation movement of the Jewish people, Zionism, as racism, we can draw a direct link between that moment and the surge of anti-Zionism and antisemitism five decades later.

This resolution was a product of the Soviet propaganda machine. Concocted by the Soviets as one more way to attack the West, the United States, and the Jewish people, it won the overwhelming support of the majority of U.N. members, mostly authoritarian states. It is no accident that it closely followed the end of the Yom Kippur War, started by allies of the Soviets—Egypt and Syria—but ending with their having to beg for pressure on Israel before they were decimated by the Israel Defense Forces.

While the Soviets saw this as a major propaganda victory against the West, for Israel and the Jewish people it set off the denigration of the Jewish state as a moral outlier by so many around the world and made Zionism a dirty word. This was so even though in 1991, following the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.N. rescinded this accusation against the Jewish state. ........

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