The 1984 of Orwell has arrived at the United Nations, Israeli Ambassador Yehuda Blum told a group of 600 women attending the B’nai B’rith Women international biennial convention. “Words have lost their meaning” in the UN, he said, where “the Soviet Union, Iraq and Syria are called peace-loving nations.”
The UN “has become the focal point of international terrorism,” Blum declared. In the General Assembly, “people can say with impunity what they couldn’t say elsewhere.” He cited as an example the description of Israel as a “cancerous tumor” used by the representative of one Arab country.
Blum was adamant, however, in his belief that Israel must remain in the UN, despite the abuses that it endures there. “Giving up membership is tantamount to giving up our place in the international community,” he said. “Membership in the UN is a sign of statehood like the national flag. Withdrawing would be saying to the world that we consider ourselves a pariah, as our Arab enemies wish us to feel. There is no reason to oblige them.”
“Throughout the ages we have been called names and couldn’t reply,” Blum said. “Now we are still called names but have a microphone to reply.”
Continuing, Blum declared: “I consider it a great privilege to be a spokesman for the Jewish State. I myself had my Bar Mitzvah in a concentration camp. If you had told me then that I would witness the birth of Israel and would be one of its citizens, I would not have believed it.
“I consider myself a spokesman for my classmates who went up in the smoke of Auschwitz and Treblinka. I think of them when I sit behind the name-plate of Israel.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
