Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did not concern themselves much with the United Nations, viewing it mostly as a debating society in which the United States and its allies were outnumbered. It annoyed them, to be certain—all those inferior peoples daring to ignore America’s wishes and even pursue their own interests. When, in October 1971, a group of African nations voted to admit Communist China into the UN Security Council, the president complained to Secretary of State William Rogers about “these cannibals jumping up and down and all that.… This bunch of people who don’t even wear shoes yet, to be kicking the United States in the teeth.”1
The United Nations was important to Israel, having been instrumental in the Jewish state’s creation and a barometer of its acceptance in the wider world. By 1973, however, the organization had little in common with the one that had played the pivotal role in Israel’s creation a quarter century earlier. Some fifty-four countries had voted to accept Israel into the United Nations after it declared independence—but after five years, just seven of them had presented their diplomatic credentials in Jerusalem. Israel initially managed to avoid many of the earliest Cold War conflicts that divided the body, successfully forging especially warm relations with emerging African nations. Golda Meir would later recall that she was “prouder of Israel’s International Cooperation Program and of the technical aid we gave to the people of Africa than I am of any other single project we have undertaken.” (Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, called her “the mother of Africa.”)2
But these nations, like many of those involved with the Non-Aligned Movement (a forum of 120 countries that, ostensibly, chose neutrality in the US-USSR competition), also gradually embraced the common view among Muslim, Arab, and Marxist-oriented nations that Zionism was essentially a “settler-colonial” enterprise and Jews had no place in the Middle East. It was no coincidence that during this era Israel changed the focus of its attention to South Africa, helping to build and support its racist apartheid system and aiding in its attempt to develop nuclear weapons technology—which led in 1979 to the covert testing of a nuclear device in the South Atlantic. Israel also simultaneously befriended the worst human rights abusers on the planet by providing arms and military knowhow to wherever it was welcome, including more than a few African and Latin American dictators that human rights organizations have accused of committing genocide against their own people.3
Israel benefited enormously from its representation, both in its Washington embassy and in its UN mission, by a silver-tongued, Oxford-educated diplomat, Abba Eban. Regardless of whether a vote went Israel’s way, Eban’s extraordinary eloquence in General Assembly debates reassured American Jews that Israel was getting the better of whatever argument might be taking place. President Lyndon Johnson judged his worth to be that of countless divisions in the field. An album of Eban’s 1967 address to the General Assembly “sold out in New York like a Beatle’s LP,” according to one (wild) estimation. Exaggeration notwithstanding, this was a common view among those inclined to agree with Eban, and even among some who did not.4
The Palestinians, in contrast, were forced to accept the representation of other Arab nations. These were usually happy to keep up attacks on Israel in order to unite their own populations and make cause with leftist and Soviet-supported nations around the world. But they showed little interest in persuading the persuadable. Arab and Muslim anger was often focused on Israel in the General Assembly, with the fate of the Palestinian refugees usually occupying center stage. But within the Security Council, where actual decisions got made, Israel could usually depend on the United States to thwart any measure it deemed to be of genuine significance.
In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Israel did find itself forced to attend to UN business. This business had to do with Security Council Resolution 242, which addressed the territories Israel had conquered in the war. The resolution, sponsored by Great Britain, called for a full Israeli withdrawal, but did so in language so opaque that Israel could argue it was not called upon to do anything at all. This was thanks in significant measure to the tireless work of the US ambassador to the United Nations, the former US Supreme Court justice (and prominent American Jew) Arthur Goldberg. The resolution’s key sticking point was the lack of a definite article preceding the word “territories” in the phrase “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in recent conflict,” at least in its English-language version (it was there in the French version, which the Israelis ignored). Arab nations, backed by the Soviets, insisted it meant every square inch. To Israel and the United States, it meant just “some” of territories now under occupation.
Israel always insisted it was ready to make a deal whenever its neighbors were willing to accept its existence and negotiate permanent borders. Arab leaders, at least in public, consistently called for a complete Israeli withdrawal from all conquered territories together with the resettlement of every last refugee who wished to return (as well as their progeny). These positions were perfectly incompatible, and it strains credulity to think either side intended them to be taken entirely seriously. In addition to the fact that allowing Arab refugees to return to their homes and villages never enjoyed even remotely significant political support in Israel, Ben-Gurion’s government had ensured that it would become literally impossible. According to a US State Department study written shortly after the 1948 war, “Israeli authorities have followed a systematic program of destroying Arab houses in such cities as Haifa and in village communities in order to rebuild modern habitation for the influx of Jewish immigrants from DP camps and Europe.” There were therefore “literally no houses for the refugees to return to.”5
In public, meanwhile, the Palestinians continued to stick to their demand that Israel just disappear. The world-famous linguistics professor and left-wing foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky tells of attending meetings with senior PLO officials during the early 1970s at the invitation of Palestinian American activist and Columbia University literary scholar Edward Said. As Chomsky recalled, Said had invited him as part of his effort to increase ties between PLO officials and “people who were sympathetic to the Palestinians but critical of their policies.” Chomsky found these meetings “pointless.” “We would go up to their suite at the Plaza, one of the fanciest hotels in New York,” he later said in an interview, “and basically just sit there listening to their speeches about how they were leading the world revolutionary movement, and so on and so forth.” Chomsky discerned in the PLO “a fundamental misunderstanding of how a democratic society works.… But the Palestinian leadership simply failed to comprehend this. If they had been honest and said, ‘Look, we are fundamentally nationalists, we would like to run our own affairs, elect our own mayors, get the occupation off our backs,’ it would have been easy to organize, and they could have had enormous public support. But if you come to the United States holding your Kalashnikov and saying we are organizing a worldwide revolutionary movement, well, that’s not the way to get public support here.”6
These tendencies were very much on display on November 13, 1974, when PLO leader Yasser Arafat traveled to New York to address the UN General Assembly. He was accompanied by Ali Hassan Salemeh, a figure whom Israeli intelligence credited with planning the kidnapping of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Dressed in military fatigues and with an empty pistol holster hanging from his waist—the United Nations did not allow guns, but it had no position on holsters—Arafat made the strongest case for the Palestinian cause, along with the most devastating attack on Israel, ever heard by most Americans. But he did so behind a wall of pseudo-Marxist revolutionary jargon so thick that it obscured whatever justice lay beneath it. He described Zionism as “a scheme born [for] the conquest of Palestine by European immigrants, just as settlers colonized, and indeed raided, most of Africa.” He added that the Zionists were dedicated to “building colonies, everywhere cruelly exploiting, oppressing, plundering the peoples of those three continents,” thereby “gladdening the hearts of imperialists and racists everywhere.” These words would not have been out of place in a US Communist Party pamphlet published in the 1940s.7
Arafat spoke for nearly three hours and made a number of points about the conflict that would have shocked most Americans, especially American Jews, had they been able to listen to this almost perfectly inappropriate messenger without the prejudices he so intensely inspired. Arafat noted that even though the 1947 UN partition resolution had unfairly granted the Jews—whom he called “the colonialist settlers”—54 percent of what had been Palestine, they had ended up with “81 percent of the total area of Palestine.” This was a significant exaggeration of a perfectly reasonable argument. Arafat also put the number of Arabs uprooted by the Israelis in the 1948 war at an even million. This was yet another exaggeration of an important point. Most historians put the number somewhere in the area of 750,000, but it is impossible to know just how many were expelled and how many chose to leave but expected to return later, after the invading Arab armies put an end to the Zionists’ dream of their own country. Arafat added that the invaders had “occupied 524 Arab towns and villages, of which they destroyed 385, completely obliterating them in the process.” And “having done so,” he said, “they built their own settlements and colonies on the ruins of our farms and our groves.” Here again, the man in the military fatigues and kaffiyeh had a point, and one that was almost never heard in American debates on the question.8
Arafat went on to insist that the causes of the conflict did “not stem from any conflict between two religions or two nationalisms. Neither is it a border conflict between neighboring states. It is the cause of a people deprived of its homeland, dispersed and uprooted, and living mostly in exile and in refugee camps.” Again, from the Palestinian point of view, this was an entirely fair point. They had been pretty much minding their own business in 1896 when the First Zionist Congress in Basel chose Palestine as the future homeland of the Jewish people. By the time Arafat spoke in 1974, however, this hardly mattered. Israel, as the saying goes, was “real.” Yes, the Palestinians were, as Edward Said put it, “victims of the victims.” A series of historical injustices against the Jews culminating in one of the worst crimes in human history had inspired yet another injustice to be suffered by the Palestinians. But recognition of the latter injustice was not going to make it go away. And the fact that at the time of Arafat’s address, the PLO’s Palestinian National Covenant called for the “elimination of Zionism in Palestine” (Article 15) and the destruction of the “Zionist and imperialistic presence” therein (Article 22) meant that his entire approach was an obvious nonstarter.9
Arafat also attacked Israel’s reputation with liberals and progressives by calling attention to its regressive policies abroad, in particular its close relationship with South Africa. He had a point here, too, and one that would grow stronger and more salient over time. He built on this argument by attacking what he termed Israel’s “long record of hostility even towards the Jews themselves, for there is within the Zionist entity a built-in racism against Oriental Jews.” But here again, in addition to being perhaps the least effective carrier of this message in the world, the PLO leader also went overboard with an otherwise meritorious argument. Oriental, or “Mizrachi,” Jews did (and still do) experience considerable discrimination at the hands of Israel’s Ashkenazi (European) elite. But Arafat also added that while the PLO “vociferously condemn[ed] the massacres of Jews under Nazis rule,” he nevertheless insisted that “the Zionist leadership appeared more interested at that time in exploiting them as best it could in order to realize its goal of immigration into Palestine.” This point was not entirely divorced from historical reality, but neither was it completely sound. And it is something that Americans were decidedly not going to concede to a man they considered a terrorist criminal. Arafat could only serve to further alienate whatever potentially sympathetic audience in the United States he may have had.
Arafat also went after the Israelis with some justice and yet more hyperbole about their treatment of their Arab minority. What he called “the small number of Palestinian Arabs who were not uprooted by the Zionists in 1948” were “at present refugees in their own homeland,” he said. “Israeli law treats them as second-class citizens—and even as third-class citizens since Oriental Jews are second-class citizens—and they have been subject to all forms of racial discrimination and terrorism after confiscation of their land and property.” Palestinian Israelis were, and remain, a significant minority in Israel, constituting over 20 percent of the population. And while they have many formal rights—more, democratically speaking, than in most Arab countries—they remain deeply discriminated against compared to Jewish Israelis. Until 1966, Israel’s Arab towns and villages were placed under Israeli military rule, with their inhabitants subject to all manner of harsh restrictions without recourse to courts or democratic processes. Since then, they have enjoyed rights of free speech, freedom of travel, freedom of assembly, and the right to vote. But a state that defines itself as “Jewish” creates all manner of ways in which non-Jewish individuals are treated as second-class citizens—from the moment they set foot on streets named after the people they consider to be their oppressors to the inferior roads, schools, parks, and police forces they must endure. Neither occupied nor offered full equality, Arab citizens of Israel have been forced to live in a kind of existential purgatory of competing claims and loyalties, almost always an afterthought to whatever crisis was presently in the news.10
Finally, Arafat reached for what he must have imagined to be his ace in the hole: “Let us remember that the Jews of Europe and the United States have been known to lead the struggles for secularism and the separation of Church and State. They have also been known to fight against discrimination on religious grounds. How then can they continue to support the most fanatic, discriminatory and closed of nations in its policy?” But here, again, if he had been sincerely seeking to reach Israel’s American supporters with this point, he was sadly mistaken. Even if the equation between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and various nations’ treatment of the Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities were a perfect one—and of course it was not—that hardly implied that American Jews would henceforth reconsider their support for Israel. First, people who have experienced oppression, to say nothing of mass murder, often feel that they do not have the luxury of caring too much about the treatment of others. If the Jews felt they had been “pushed off a cliff and landed on the Palestinians,” as a common metaphor went at the time, well, that was just too bad.
Only the most fanatical of Israel’s supporters disputed the fact that the Palestinians had suffered a catastrophic injustice in 1948. But most American Jews and other supporters of Israel agreed with the arguments of its leaders that it was the Arab nations and the Palestinians themselves who were to blame: first for refusing to accept partition; next for declaring war on Israel; and third for refusing to take responsibility for the refugees who, the Israelis insisted, had voluntarily fled in response to propaganda radio broadcasts urging them to do so. Arafat demonstrated that he was genuinely playing to a crowd of the already convinced, rather than seeking to win new converts to his cause. He closed with a clear threat, albeit one wrapped inside brilliant rhetorical flourish: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
Arafat did not make much progress with US media. In an article that reads as typical of the time, the New York Times account of the speech quoted the Israeli diplomat Yosef Tekoah (whose delegation boycotted the speech) calling the PLO “murderers” and declaring that “Arafat, today, prefers the Nazi method.” Tekoah insisted that “the murderers of athletes in the Olympic Games in Munich, the butchers of children in Maalot, the assassins of diplomats in Khartoum do not belong in the international community.” In a subsequent Times “news analysis” of the speech, Tekoah would be the only person, besides Arafat, quoted by name. But the article also explained, quoting only anonymous sources, that despite Arafat’s speech sounding like a “shrill prelude to a fifth Middle East war,” sophisticated observers who looked past his “angry rhetoric” understood that “Arafat had to talk the way he did because the P.L.O. has its uncompromising charter and ideology, and he has to put up a show for the Arab public.” In the liberal Nation, an editorial criticized both sides before adding, “We cannot control others, but on the American side, everybody should lower his voice and work for the co-existence which, in the Middle East, is the only alternative to holocaust.” If Yasser Arafat had set out to prove Abba Eban’s famous quip that the Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” he could hardly have done a better job.11
Arafat’s UN address would turn out to be a curtain raiser to a frontal assault on Israel’s legitimacy, culminating, eighteen months later, in the November 1975 General Assembly adoption of Resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
The formal campaign for the resolution had begun the previous summer in Mexico City, at the United Nations’ World Conference of the International Women’s Year. That gathering decreed that women would share in “the struggle against neocolonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, racism, racial discrimination and apartheid.” American Jewish feminists who had traveled to the conference were shocked by the anti-Israel animus they encountered there. Betty Friedan, who led the US delegation, found in her delegation’s resistance a determination “to combat the use of feminism itself as an anti-Semitic political tool.” She came home resolved to fight for Zionism as well as feminism, further shedding her past Marxism-infused universalist beliefs. She would also later help found the celebrity-heavy “Ad Hoc Committee of Women for Human Rights” as an effort to raise consciousness about the label of “racism” being “applied solely to the national self-determination of the Jewish people.”12
Following Mexico City, the General Assembly’s “Third Committee,” which was concerned with social, humanitarian, and cultural affairs, agreed by a substantial majority that Zionism was indeed a form of racism. It called upon the General Assembly to do likewise. The resolution, which enjoyed no formal enforcement power, was widely understood to be a stepping-stone for the Arab states, together with their supporters in the Soviet bloc, to try to expel Israel from world bodies such as UNESCO, the International Labor Organization, and eventually the United Nations itself. The pitch for the resolution signaled a new direction for the Palestinian struggle, making it no longer merely about the return of the lands, but instead about the ideology that had led to the Palestinians’ displacement. Chomsky and Said, then quite likely the two best-known supporters of the Palestinian cause in America, and perhaps the entire world, criticized this turn. Chomsky noted the resolution’s “profound hypocrisy, given the nature of the states that backed it (including the Arab states),” to say nothing of its misplaced criticism of “Zionism as such rather than the policies of the State of Israel.” Said would later write, in his influential essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” originally published in 1979, that whatever Israel’s sins, it did not help the Palestinian cause to see it “sloppily be tarnished with the sweeping rhetorical denunciation associated with racism.” As with Arafat’s UN address, the Palestinians’ overreach undermined the genuine claims to the rights they had so long been denied.13
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late four-term US senator from New York, would owe his initial election victory to this historical moment. Moynihan had been an assistant secretary of labor, a Democratic operative, a US ambassador to India, and a Harvard faculty member. President Ford’s decision to appoint him to the job of US ambassador to the United Nations in June 1975 was widely understood to be a symbol of growing conservative contempt for the world body. Moynihan, indeed, was many things: a scholar; an intellectual; a polymath; a polemicist; an Irish street-fighter, both literally and metaphorically; and an extremely high-functioning alcoholic. But one thing this intellectually ambidextrous political operator definitely was not was a diplomat—and never less so than when he chose to take up Israel’s cause in the United Nations.14
Those who knew Moynihan were shocked to hear of his appointment. Kissinger must have known that he would have trouble containing—much less controlling—the man the New York Times would term “the brawler at the UN,” and it remains a bit of a mystery why he agreed to the appointment. Already extremely controversial for his work in the Johnson administration, where he wrote about the breakdown of the “Negro family,” and in the Nixon administration, for his promotion of a period of a “benign neglect” of America’s racial problems, he was now appointed by Ford and Kissinger on the basis of a series of articles he published in Commentary attacking “Third World kleptocrats” and their first world “apologists.” In the most important of these, titled “The United States in Opposition,” and telexed from New Delhi, he suggested that other nations should feed their own people rather than complain that “Americans eat too much,” and that American diplomats cease apologizing for their nation’s “imperfections.” Following the humiliating US evacuation from Saigon, together with the sight of a criminal president being ushered from the White House and then pardoned for his crime, this was a message that resonated with many. The New York Times Magazine reported that Moynihan believed he had received “a clear mandate to raise some hell,” and he chose the “Zionism Is Racism” resolution to raise it with. Now fully ensconced in the bosom of the fanatically pro-Israel neoconservatives at Commentary, and tutored on the Zionist cause by Norman Podhoretz, Moynihan made Zionism’s cause America’s cause. “We are conducting a foreign policy,” Kissinger was heard to complain. “This is not a synagogue.” But it was too late. He had created an Irish Frankenstein.15
Much at Podhoretz’s urging, Moynihan treated his time at the UN very much like that of a man with a 1976 New York Senate race on his mind. The “Zionism Is Racism” issue was tailor-made for any potential candidate for that office, but none more so than Moynihan. Kissinger thought the United States should “pay no attention” to the resolution, and Moynihan’s insistence on using what he considered to be costly demagoguery to advance his own name at the expense of US diplomatic priorities drove him to distraction. He demanded that Moynihan clear all remarks with him in advance, which did not even come close to happening. “I will not put up with any more of Moynihan. I will not do it,” he told President Ford. “He is going wild about the Israeli issues.”16
The Israelis were deeply concerned about the resolution. Israel’s UN representative, the Irish-born former chief of Israeli military intelligence and future president Chaim Herzog, wanted American Jewish organizations “in every locale to begin advocating and protesting.” But the Israelis were, yet again, disappointed by what they judged to be the timidity of their American cousins. “Where were the Jewish people?” Herzog asked a reporter. “Why,” he demanded, “in this city, in the midst of the largest Jewish concentration in the world, with a small Israeli delegation fighting desperately against the heaviest possible odds to defend Jewry from a major anti-Semitic attack against Jews wherever they may be,” did American Jews not rise to the occasion? Why, instead, did they allow “the lead on this issue [to be] taken to its eternal credit by the United States delegation?” This was both unfair and untrue. At least fourteen major newspapers had condemned the resolution in editorials, as did fully 415 members of Congress, African American groups, Christian groups, and the president of the United States. But somehow, Pat Moynihan got all the credit. Rising to oppose the resolution, Moynihan spoke in broad rhetorical strokes with long, pregnant pauses. “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge”—he paused—“it will not abide by”—he paused again—“it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” “The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that it is not.”17
Coverage of the speech and the vote (72–35, with 32 abstentions) in favor of the resolution turned Moynihan into a national celebrity. “A Fighting Irishman at the UN Talks Tough—and Many Americans Feel, Talks Sense, Too,” ran a People magazine headline above a rapturous story naming Moynihan one of the year’s “25 Most Intriguing People.” On CBS Evening News, Eric Sevareid commented that “the country is simply tired of feeling self-disgust. That explains the almost joyous response to Moynihan’s passion and candor at the UN.”18
Moynihan lasted only eight months in the UN job. Kissinger clearly signaled to friendly journalists that if Moynihan did not jump, he would be pushed. Moynihan managed to make his “resignation” a cause célèbre among conservatives, including, especially, Ronald Reagan. (Reagan, who was getting ready to challenge Ford from the Republican far right at the time, complained that it was “too bad that the Administration could not keep such a good man.”) New York Times pundit Russell Baker asked, “What President, what Secretary of State, dares fire an Irishman who has raised his shillelagh in the cause sacred to the heart of the Jewish vote?” Moynihan claimed to be leaving the post to return to Harvard and reclaim his professorship there, insisting that he “would consider it dishonorable to leave this post and run for any office.” Curiously, however, he had already switched his voting residence from Cambridge to his upstate New York farmhouse. He could not help but notice the tens of thousands of letters he was receiving from Americans urging him on. A February 1976 poll showed that support for Moynihan’s actions in the United Nations stood at 78 percent among Jewish respondents, 60 percent of whom favored his entry into the New York primary race for the Democratic US Senate nomination.19
New York’s more conservative Democrats were buyers in the market for a candidate. The 1976 Senate race was sure to become an intra–Democratic Party culture war. Paul O’Dwyer, the machine pol from times of yore and the favorite of party regulars, and Ramsey Clark, formerly Johnson’s attorney general, and now on his way to the furthest reaches of anti-American leftism, were pegged early as also-rans. The real battle was between Moynihan, now the intellectual-turned-neocon culture warrior, and Congresswoman Bella Abzug, the famously outspoken feminist and left-wing Jewish liberal. Israel all but dominated campaign debate, and coincidentally, it was also where Abzug was most vulnerable. In Congress, she had once voted against selling Phantom fighter jets to Israel. She would forever deny this. Lecturing a previous Jewish congressional opponent, she had said, “This is one Jew you’re not going to out-Jew.” Ironically, she was now being “out-Jewed” by an Irishman. Outside her campaign headquarters, members of Meir Kahane’s extremist Jewish Defense League chanted, “Israel, Yes. Bella, No,” and, “A vote for Bella is a vote for Communism.” Moynihan, meanwhile, had the humorous habit, when speaking to Jewish groups numbering in the hundreds, of going “off the record” so he could share secrets with them about his championing of Israel’s cause in contrast with Abzug’s spotty support.20
Moynihan’s campaign certainly enjoyed the luck of the Irish. Over the July Fourth holiday weekend, for instance, he happened to be in Jerusalem—a precinct of New York for election purposes—where he was being honored by Hebrew University. By coincidence, his visit coincided with “Operation Thunderbolt,” a heroic and successful Israeli raid on Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport, where Palestinian and German terrorists were holding 106 hostages (almost exclusively Israeli) after hijacking an Air France flight. Upon his return to New York, Moynihan held a press conference celebrating the raid. He reminded listeners that he had gotten into trouble at the United Nations for calling Idi Amin a “racist murderer” after the Ugandan dictator had called for the “extinction” of Israel.
Moynihan was thus able to appeal to American Jews’ feelings of vulnerability and their pride and relief at Israel’s military prowess in kicking the asses of the terrorists and humiliating the evil dictator. He thus reaffirmed his position as a Jewish ally against the whole world, as represented by the United Nations and its embrace of the terrorist Arafat and the antisemitic “Zionism Is Racism” resolution. Whatever New Yorkers felt about any local issues that may have separated Abzug and Moynihan, these emotions carried the day. Abzug was hardly anti-Israel. Following a post-1967 tour of its captured territories, she had lionized the Jewish state for its democratic bona fides and condemned the “implacable hatred for Israel” among Arab nations. She defended it again following the 1973 war. But even if Abzug were as pro-Israel as she claimed now to be—and of course she was not—the New Leftists supporting her candidacy were not. During the campaign, she found herself forced to resign from the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom. It was her only reasonable option, given the upcoming election, after the group sent out a letter, with her name listed on the letterhead, condemning Israel’s request for $2.5 billion in military aid.21
In The Nation, meanwhile, in an article by Paul Good, Moynihan found himself accused of possessing “an imperial ego to foreign relations, making him as insensitive in this realm as he was domestically.” This made him “particularly unfitted to deal with people of color,” Good wrote. In Harper’s, the famed Vietnam War correspondent Frances Fitzgerald attacked Moynihan’s “paranoia about communism, cultural chauvinism, manifest-destiny mythology and the go-it-alone, tough-it-out syndrome,” terming him to be “possibly the most hated man in the underdeveloped world.” These complaints did not move many Jews, however. Whatever they may have felt about “people of color” or Moynihan’s past controversies regarding “the Negro family,” most Jewish voters had decided to put the concerns of the “tribe” ahead of all others.22
The proverbial icing on the cake was Moynihan’s endorsement by the New York Times. The paper’s editorial board voted 11–2 to endorse Abzug, but its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr.—whose family owned the paper—overruled them and demanded an endorsement of Moynihan, leading the editorial board’s chief, John B. Oakes, to resign in protest. The Times’ embrace of the “more Zionist than thou” team was an ironic one, given the paper’s history of vociferous American-Council-on-Judaism-style anti-Zionism, a position it retained longer than almost any other significant mainstream media institution. Now, its endorsement likely provided Moynihan with his razor-thin ten-thousand-vote margin of victory. Moynihan carried the Jewish vote by a large margin, while losing heavily with Blacks and other people of color.23
Having won the Democratic nomination, Moynihan had an easy time in the general election in a three-way race with a Conservative Party incumbent. Virtually overnight, Moynihan had ridden to not merely national but global prominence as the neoconservative scourge of America’s—and Israel’s—enemies. And to many American Jews, these had now become one and the same. Though Moynihan’s politics would remain remarkably mercurial over his twenty-four years in the Senate, his election presaged an entirely new political constellation within America’s Israel debate. Never again could a president consider a decision about Israel without facing a neoconservative campaign to ensure the Jewish state complete freedom of action, not only with regard to the Palestinians and its neighbors, but also with its superpower sponsor, the United States of America.