Israel Bitter at UN Vote

Israel reacted with bitter resentment at last night’s vote by the UN General Assembly. A policy paper issued by the Foreign Ministry today described the resolution, adopted by a 72-35 majority with 32 abstentions as “a page torn from the annals of Nazism.”

But the Ministry declared. “Zionism will continue to survive and flourish long after the UN resolutions have sunken into oblivion….The real victim of these attacks will be the UN itself whose moral authority has been destroyed, whose words have ceased to matter and whose decisions are irrelevant to the affairs of mankind.”

United States Ambassador Malcolm Toon said after the vote last night that the UN had adopted resolutions “that all mankind will regret” but affirmed that “these resolutions will have no bearing on the future of Israel and no bearing on the relations between Israel and the U.S.” which he described as “strong and healthy across the board.”

The American envoy was referring to the anti-Zionist draft adopted last night and to the two pro-PLO-resolutions adopted by the General Assembly earlier yesterday. He made his remarks in the course of an address to the opening session of the Histadrut Solidarity Conference in Tel Aviv, sponsored by the Histadrut Foundation in the U.S. and attended by American trade union delegates.

The World Zionist Organization Executive, meeting special session this morning, adopted an “emergency plan” for world-wide Jewish counter-action, Acting chairman Leon Dulzin said the WZO would call on Jews in countries which supported the anti-Zionist resolution to raise the issue strongly with their respective governments no matter how unpleasant that task might be. Dulzin said that the action of governments which voted to equate Zionism with racism clearly did not reflect the opinion or will of the people of those countries.

In a radio interview, World Jewish Congress President Nahum Goldmann said the vote was “one of the most immoral” ever taken by the UN General Assembly. It was an “absurd perversion” of history and sought “to deny the Jewish people their right to statehood,” Goldmann said. He called for a momentous world Jewish reaction expressing a renewed and all-embracing Jewish identity with the State of Israel. The WJC, he said would do all it could to raise such a reaction of “total identity” by world Jewry for Israel.