Moynihan angry over UN's Zionist vote

Dr Kissinger, the American Secretary of State, could almost be the original of the old schoolboy howler, 'He flew off in all directions'. It's so difficult to keep up with him that if I begin by saying on his flight home from Tokyo last week, some fusspot is bound to write to me and say that last week Dr Kissinger was in Moscow or Peking or Paris or Berlin.

Anyway, by 'my' last week, Dr Kissinger was flying back to Washington from Tokyo. Whatever else he is, Dr Kissinger is a droll man in private and he's all too well aware of his reputation for circling the globe about once a fortnight. So, just to relieve the gravity of the talks he and his advisers were holding aboard the plane, he wrote out a message for Top Secret Despatch over the plane's radio telephone system to the State Department and it bore the heading, 'Arrangements for the Visit to the United States of the Secretary of State'. 

It's a nice, light touch, no heavier than a snowflake perhaps, but a welcome sign that a statesman weighed down with the Russian moves into Angola, the fights in Washington about a bigger or smaller defence budget, the possible calm or hideous outcome in Portugal, the enormous troubles which we might go into some time that are now afflicting President Ford, it's nice to know Dr Kissinger retains his private humour. 

I think I ought to mention the short and moving ceremony Dr Kissinger attended this week – 'my' this week – in his home town in Germany. It has not had the strong emphasis it ought to have had, especially at a time when the United Nations Assembly was succeeding in the woeful business of making Israel out to be a racialist state. Dr Kissinger, we should never forget, talks with that accent that so many television comedians love to mimic for the simple stark reason that he's a German Jew. He comes from a small town near Nuremberg. In the autumn of 1938, on the heels of the Munich Agreement, the Nazis celebrated their having brought us to heel with a new orgy of Jew-baiting and, as we were to learn later, of Jew-slaughter. In the small town of Fürth, they systematically murdered most of the 3,000 Jews and demolished seven of the town's eight synagogues. 

Somehow a sense of the coming pogrom came to a 52-year-old Jew who taught in the town's business school. His name was Louis Kissinger. In August 1938, a month before this pogrom, he bundled his wife and two sons, including the 15-year-old Heinz Alfred Kissinger, out of town and emigrated with nothing to the United States. Heinz Alfred is now Henry Kissinger and he's just at the age at which his father made the decision to get out of his native land. Other Kissingers thought it would not happen to them and are, for the most part, buried in the town or were later transported to the infamous concentration camps and are forgotten ashes in Dachau or Belsen or Buchenwald, or wherever. 

About ten days ago, Dr Kissinger had a happy idea. On Monday 15 December he was due to fly from London to Madrid to hold a meeting with the new ruler, or rulers, of Spain and he changed his mind. He told reporters that it was perhaps a little early for the visit to Spain since the new men had been in office only three weeks. He went instead to Nuremberg and on to Fürth. It must have been arranged, I suppose, very quickly in advance because his old parents – his father is now 89 – and his brother were along with him. He was received by the mayor and given the town's gold medal for distinguished native citizens. He said, first in German and then in English, 'I accept your distinction and I shall treasure it. I am honoured and moved and grateful'. 

They then moved off to the only synagogue the Nazis left standing. Inside it is a plaque which records in Hebrew and in German, 'On 22 March 1942, the last occupants of this building, 33 orphaned children, were sent to their deaths in Izbica'. No mention was made otherwise at this ceremony of the Nazis, the purges, the death chambers or even of the German defeat in the Second War. It's conceivable that there were children there who wondered what it was all about and in case there were any adults listening who wonder the same, somebody had better tell them, or maybe remind them, that the most imaginative thing ever done by General Dwight Eisenhower, as a Supreme Allied Commander, was to force the German military to parade through these death camps and see the piles of naked, emaciated bodies rotting in shallow graves. 

'Here,' wrote General Bradley, who was along with Eisenhower, 'death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us. Eisenhower's face whitened into a mask.' When Eisenhower, the same day, wondered at the mentality that would compel these German people to do a thing like that, a staff officer said, 'Not all the Germans can stomach it, sir. In one camp, we paraded the townspeople through to let them have a look. The mayor and his wife went home and slit their wrists.' 

Well, there may seem little point in going on about it at this late date but it will never be too late to recall why so many Jews, from so many countries, came to feel, right or wrong, in the late 1940s that the only safe permanent haven was their own national state. 

Which reminds us that last Wednesday night, the 30th General Assembly of the United Nations, after its annual session, came to an end. It ended, as usual, with a minute of silent prayer, for nations that pray to any known God or a minute of meditation for the others. A minute was hardly long enough to meditate on some of the profound and, from the Western point of view, disastrous changes that have overtaken the world organisation this year. 

The American ambassador, or chief delegate, is, as you may know, a new man with a new and pungent style. Pungency, I ought to say right away, is not what is expected of an ambassador. Ambassadors exist not to make policy, but to follow policy handed down from on top – a truth that Adlai Stevenson, for one, learned to his incurable sorrow. But the new man at the United Nations is a broth of a boy, an Irish American born in the New York slum district known as Hell's Kitchen, from where he went off like a rocket, up through bright, academic honours to a professorship at Harvard and, most recently, to the American embassy in India. He's a large, mercurial type with a mobile, mischievous face, almost boisterously conspicuous anywhere he goes and he's a type of man who possesses a natural kind of distinction, almost of aristocratic bounce, that doesn't so much belie his origins as make you forget them. 

I think we'd better celebrate him or at least take sharp notice of him now because I should guess the chances of his remaining at the United Nations are slim. He's already offered to resign twice because in the UN he insists on speaking his mind and venting his emotions, especially when those emotions are of outrage or disdain. He, thus, becomes too often an embarrassment to the administration which, since the beginning of the United Nations, has laid down American policy carefully in the White House and then allowed the UN ambassador to enlarge on it in discreet terms or to deck it out with sprigs of eloquence, humour, or whatever. Daniel P. Moynihan is probably too explosive, too unpredictable, to stay tethered on a long leash to the White House. 

Well, at the end of this year's assembly session, he refused to forget the assembly's resolution of 10 November which, by an overwhelming vote, branded Zionism as a form of racism. I imagine that in a quieter world and among a circle of philosophers, this is a tenable thesis but the United Nations is not a quiet world and the arc of the Middle East is not a circle of philosophers. The November resolution was not a proposition put before a seminar in political science or comparative religion. It was, to its proponents and most of those who voted for it, a disguised act of defiance of the right of Israel to exist. And soon afterwards, the Security Council voted by nine to three, with only three abstentions, to allow Mr Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation to sit and take part in the council's debates on, I quote, 'Israeli aggression against Lebanon'. 

To the Americans and the others who voted 'no', this was virtually a vote to recognise the liberation organisation as the government-in-exile of a state about to come into being and Mr Arafat as its head. That's how the victors took it and there was great rejoicing among the Arab and Asian and African states who now carry twice the weight that the Americans and Western Europe used to carry in the UN. Mr Moynihan spoke then with blistering anger and last Wednesday in a final speech before the assembly, he said, 'that this chamber has been repeatedly the scene of acts which we regard as abominations'. This time he generalised his anger after a preliminary reminder of the vote of 10 November. 'There are events,' he said, 'that occurred here which the United States will never forget.' 

His main theme – which is true enough but riles the vast majority of the delegates who hear it – is that out of the 140-odd member nations now, there are no more than 28 functioning representative democracies in the world. So you can imagine that to be voted down and constantly humiliated by delegates who are never chosen by their peoples but who represent a clique or a party, or a dictatorship that grabbed the upper hand, is something up with which Mr Moynihan, I should guess, will not long be able to put. 

We ought to end on a Christmassy note by saying, 'Well, anyway, Washington still keeps Mr Moynihan and, in this city, he stoutly defends Dr Kissinger and so, we might slap-happily assume, do all Americans but the American Jewish Congress has just filed a legal suit against Dr Kissinger charging him with restricting Jews from working on American-backed projects in Saudi Arabia. 

What this means is that Saudi Arabia tends not to issue visas for work to Jews who are also Zionists. So, if a Jew is kept out, he hollers that Dr Kissinger goes along with what Mr Moynihan calls 'an abomination', namely the doctrine that Zionism is racism, so Israel is a racist state. 

We can only wish poor Dr Kissinger and fuming Mr Moynihan a forgetful Christmas and a stoical New Year.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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