Jewish Chronicle Reporter, 28 February 1992

Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd this week used a reception celebrating the December repeal of the United Nations? “Zionism is racism? resolution to criticise Israel for its West Bank settlements [1]

Speaking at the event, organised by the Britain-Israel Parliamentary Group, Mr. Hurd, who was sharing a platform with Shadow Foreign Secretary Gerald Kaufman, said that Britain “looks to Israel not to preempt negotiations by the continued expansion of settlements in the occupied territories.”

He also called on the Arabs “to consider their own attitudes and the measures which they can take which will build the necessary confidence.”

Mr Hurd said the British government was “very glad? to have co-sponsored the repeal of the “notorious? resolution, which, he said, had disfigured the records of the UN for 16 years. “Its repeal reflects a new seriousness, a new sense of responsibility in the UN which has spread since the end of the cold war.”

Mr Kaufman said he regarded the resolution as “not simply ugly, not simply wron but personally hurtful.”

Zion, he said, was not simply part of the word “Zionism”. “It was my religion. It was politics, because the political party in my house when I grew up wasn’t just the Labour Party, it was the Jewish Labour Party, Poale Zion, of which my father was always a member. Zion for me was Mount Zion, which I went to on my first visit to Israel 31 years ago.

“Zion was something beautiful and holy. Racism, on the other hand, is a cast of mind which I was brought up to find profoundly offensive and which, representing as I do a multiethnic constituency, I have come to find more and more offensive.”

Israeli Ambassador Yoav Biran said that Israelis and Jews all over the world “never doubted the immorality of this notorious resolution, of this baseless allegation.”

He added that it was not so much a stain on Zionism’s reputation as “a blot on the UN record.”

Labour MP Greville Janner described the evening as “a simchah.”

Explaining the word for the benefit of the MP?s present and the diplomats from the countries which voted for the repeal, he said: “It is a simchah when Dougla Hurd and Gerald Kaufman speak from the same platform ” and I agree with both of them.”

The joint hosts were Mr Michael Latham, MP, president of the Britain-Israel Parliamentary Group, and Mr John Marshall, MP, its chairman.

[1]  UN General Assembly resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975 which was repealed in 1991, is not framed around the question of the 1967 occupation of Palestinian territories, contrary to what is said here. It contains only one operative paragraph in which the General Assembly determined  “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”