The diplomatic back-story on "Zionism equals racism." 

However the U.N. World Conference Against Racism turns out, it will go down in history as the occasion when the idea of Zionism as racism was nearly revived. On Monday of this week, American and Israeli delegates walked out of the Durban, South Africa, gathering after failing to change resolutions branding Israel as "racist." On Wednesday France warned that it and the other members of the European Union were considering doing the same. But even if they don't, the condemnations of Zionism inserted in the conference's draft resolution at the behest of the Palestinians should not have been so difficult to expunge.

The fiasco has many proximate causes, most notably heightened tensions of late between Israel and the Palestinians. But to understand how Durban happened, it helps to return to the fall of 1975.

Twenty-six years ago, Middle East hostilities were more bitter than they are today. There were no peace treaties, and the region's geopolitical alignment had congealed along Cold War lines. Israel, after early socialist sympathies, stood solidly with the West. The oil-rich Arab states, once prospective American allies, had firmed up their ties to the Communist world. The exception was Anwar Sadat's Egypt, which had broken with the Soviet Union and after the 1973 Yom Kippur War was inching, nudged by the United States, toward recognizing Israel.

An Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty would have dealt a blow to both Arab unity and Soviet regional influence, and the prospect of such an accord was partly what sparked the trouble in the summer of 1975. The handwriting first appeared in July, when a U.N. conference on women's rights issued a declaration that called for the elimination of "Zionism, apartheid, [and] racial discrimination." Throughout the summer, Soviet and Arab diplomats made noises about ousting Israel from the world body when the General Assembly convened for its 30^th annual session that fall. Increasingly, other Third World or "non-aligned" countries—some Islamic nations, some former colonies that viewed Israel as an outpost of Western imperialism—showed a willingness to go along.

Sure enough, on Oct. 1, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who was serving as the head of the Organization for African Unity, spoke to the General Assembly and called for the "extinction of Israel as a state." He urged Americans "to rid their society of the Zionists," who he said controlled the country's banks and news media and had turned the CIA into a "murder squad to eliminate any form of just resistance anywhere in the world." Amin's remarks drew a standing ovation from the U.N. delegates and he was feted by U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

In previous years, such Third World mischief had met with only pro forma reproofs from American diplomats fearful of antagonizing the non-aligned states. But the new U.N. ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, deplored the State Department's customary go-along, get-along style as a kind of appeasement. Indeed, the previous March, after stepping down as ambassador to India, he had published a controversial article in Commentary titled "The United States in Opposition."

The piece argued that the United States, chastened by the Vietnam War and other misbegotten adventures, had too long tolerated Third World attacks on America, the West, and liberal democracy. Such passivity encouraged the worst instincts of these regimes—most of which were authoritarian in nature—and confined America to a defensive posture in multilateral arenas. Moynihan called on American leaders not to withdraw from international challenges but rather to speak out against the "tyranny of the U.N.'s 'new majority' " of post-colonial states.

After Amin's speech, Moynihan put his views into practice. He conspicuously boycotted Waldheim's banquet, dining at the home of journalist Teddy White instead. The next day, in a speech to the AFL-CIO, he endorsed a New York Times editorial's description of Amin as a "racist murderer" (Amin had had tens of thousands of innocents killed). Moynihan argued that tyrants, in the Communist and Third Worlds alike, wished to annihilate liberal democracies like Israel because they posed a threat. Overnight the ambassador became a target of vilification around the world.

The Amin affair, however, was just Round 1. The real fight came when Cuba, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and South Yemen introduced a resolution into the United Nations' Third Committee censuring Zionism as a form of discrimination. Arab spokesmen claimed that Zionism demanded not just the ingathering of Jewry to Israel but also the displacement of Arabs from the same land. By allowing Jews from any nation to claim Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return while forbidding the return of Palestinians displaced in the 1948 war, Israel, they said, was practicing racism.

Despite an effort by European and moderate African nations to table the measure, it passed the committee on Oct. 17, 70-29, with 27 abstentions. The General Assembly planned to entertain it three weeks later.