The leading pro-Arab organization in Britain has dissociated itself in part from the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism.
The Council for Arab-British Understanding (CABU), in its latest annual report, conceded that Zionism in Europe and Russia “may indeed have had the character of a national liberation movement, its aim being to free Jews in the diaspora from Western and Christian persecution and to promote a Jewish national renaissance.”
However, in Palestine, Zionism had a different character, “that of a colonizing, settler movement which aimed at dispossessing and supplanting or subjecting the native population,” the report said. It added that the November, 1975 UN resolution obscured this distinction. “To be effective, criticism of Zionism must be specific, not generalized. It should specifically exclude those manifestations of Zionism which are benign or at least innocuous and should concentrate on those which unquestionably are imperialistic and reprehensible.”
The CABU admitted that in Britain the Arabs got the worst of the argument unleashed by the UN’s anti-Zionist resolution. It complained that most of the British press and news media “reverted to that unthinking defense of Israel which was so prevalent before 1967…Once again there was hysterical denunciation of the Arabs and of anyone who ventured to suggest that they might have some right on their side.”
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