Anti-Zionist rhetoric is seemingly everywhere nowadays. But there was a time when Jewish women defeated said rhetoric within the United Nations.
In the Aug. 8, 1985, issue of Washington Jewish Week, Lisa Schneider reports on the U.S. and Kenyan delegations of women who played a key role in removing a clause equating Zionism to racism in the final document of the U.N. End of the Decade for Women Conference.
“Betty Friedan, noted author and pioneer in the women’s movement in the U.S. said that at the 1980 conference in Copenhagen, she was ‘outraged as a woman, as a feminist and as a Jew’ by the ‘despicable canard’ equating Zionism with racism, which she said was used as a ‘red herring to prevent action to advance women to equality,’” Schneider wrote.
Schneider also reported that Maureen Reagan, head of the American delegation at the time, disclosed that the U.S. delegation was prepared to lead a walkout if the anti-Zionist language had been used.
Despite the win, Schneider explained the conference was not “devoid of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
“According to Barbara Leslie, U.N. representative for the National Council of Jewish Women, statements such as ‘Israel is the root of all evil’ were made frequently during the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) forum,” she wrote.
Schneider detailed more than a half-dozen incidents involving antisemitism and anti-Zionist rhetoric at the conference.
“All of the women agreed that the Jewish delegates, who conferred daily at the Nairobi synagogue and Jewish community center, were far more organized to counter the anti-Zionist propaganda than they had been in Copenhagen,” Schneider wrote.
mresnicow@midatlanticmedia.com
