UN General Assembly resolution 3379, adopted on 10 November 1975 by 72 votes to 35 with 32 abstentions, determined that “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Resolution 46/86 revoked it on 16 December 1991, and neither text uses the words “white supremacy”. The pairing joins a movement that Israeli statute defines by descent and religion to a hierarchy defined by color, so the question is whether the two vocabularies meet: the Law of Return’s 1970 definition of a Jew turns on a Jewish mother or conversion, with no color or origin test. The measurements pull in two directions: 50.3% of 1,200 Arab citizens surveyed by Sammy Smooha in 1995 regarded Zionism as racist, while a 2022 survey of about 3,500 Americans found overt antisemitic attitudes most concentrated among young adults on the far right.
Key Findings
- 72 to 35, then reversed: United Nations General Assembly (1975, 1991) resolution 3379 determined Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination” by 72 votes to 35, with 32 abstentions, on 10 November 1975. Resolution 46/86 revoked the determination by 111 votes to 25, with 13 abstentions, on 16 December 1991.
- 50.3% in 1995: In Smooha (1997), 50.3% of 1,200 Arab citizens of Israel surveyed face to face in September to October 1995 regarded Zionism as racist.
- A peoplehood clause, a descent test: Knesset (2018) clause 1(c) reserves national self-determination in Israel to “the Jewish People”. Knesset (1950, amended 1970) section 4B, inserted in 1970, defines a Jew by a Jewish mother or conversion, with no color or origin criterion.
- 5.7 million of 7.1 million Israel-born: Central Bureau of Statistics (2025) counted 7.1 million Jews in Israel at the beginning of 2024, of whom 5.7 million were born in Israel and 275,000 in Africa.
- Concentrated on the far right: Hersh and Royden (2022), surveying about 3,500 US adults, found overt antisemitic attitudes rare on the political left, more common on the right and most concentrated among young adults on the far right.
Has any official body equated Zionism with racial supremacy?
The UN General Assembly adopted resolution 3379 on 10 November 1975 by 72 votes to 35, with 32 abstentions. Its operative sentence reads: “Determines that zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It is the closest any official instrument comes to the equation, and it classes Zionism with racism, not with white supremacy.
Sixteen years later the same Assembly reversed it. Resolution 46/86, adopted on 16 December 1991 by 111 votes to 25 with 13 abstentions, has an operative text of one sentence: “Decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379 (XXX) of 10 November 1975.” The recorded votes, taken from the verbatim records A/PV.2400 and A/46/PV.74, are records of what member states did on those dates. The 1975 determination itself was the Assembly’s position, and it stood for 16 years.
Neither text uses the words “white supremacy”. The link to white-minority rule in southern Africa runs through the 1975 preamble, which sets out four grounds. It recalls resolution 3151 G of 14 December 1973, which condemned “the unholy alliance between South African racism and zionism”. It takes note of resolution 77 (XII) of the Organization of African Unity, adopted at Kampala between 28 July and 1 August 1975, which held that “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin.” It also cites the Declaration of Mexico of the 1975 World Conference of the International Women’s Year and the Lima Political Declaration of Non-Aligned foreign ministers of 25 to 30 August 1975.
In those preambular texts the comparison with southern Africa is an analogy between regimes, carried by the word “racist”. The operative determination names racism and racial discrimination and goes no further. The resolution’s wider case is read clause by clause in the arguments that Zionism is racist.
Who argues Zionism resembles white-settler rule, and since when?
In Sammy Smooha’s face-to-face survey of September to October 1995, 50.3% of 1,200 Arab citizens of Israel regarded Zionism as racist. The sample was drawn inside the Green Line and excluded East Jerusalem. Smooha published the figure in Israel Studies in 1997, so the racism reading had a measured constituency among Israel’s own Arab citizens three decades ago.
The 1995 wave was the fifth among Arab citizens in a series Smooha ran in 1976, 1980, 1985, 1988 and 1995, and it recorded wider and narrower positions beside the racism item. In it, 75.0% objected to Israel keeping a Jewish majority and 35.3% rejected Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish-Zionist state. A further 6.8% denied Israel’s right to exist at all. These are 1995 measurements of Arab citizens alone; they carry no reading of opinion today and none of Jewish citizens.
The settler-colonial comparison also has a dated, signed scholarly statement about its permissibility. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism was launched on 25 March 2021, and its publisher’s page states that it was “Initially signed by 210 scholars” and now has “more than 400 signatories”. Guideline 13, in the signatories’ typeset English PDF, holds that “even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.”
That guideline sits in section C, headed “examples that, on the face of it, are not antisemitic”. The preamble directs that guidelines 6 to 15 “should be taken together” and read “always with a view to context.” The Declaration is a statement by its signatories, adopted by no state, parliament or intergovernmental body. Its guideline 13 classifies a kind of comparison, not any particular use of one.
A dated academic statement of the settler-colonial reading itself is Tariq Dana’s “Notes on the ‘Exceptionalism’ of the Israeli Settler-Colonial Project”, published online in Middle East Critique on 12 May 2024. Dana argues that Israeli settler colonialism is exceptional within settler-colonial studies, citing Zionism’s ideological roots, the absence of a conventional metropole and reliance on Western alliance. The journal states that it publishes “analyses drawing on heterodox theoretical perspectives”. The article contains no figures.
Does Israeli constitutional text classify anyone by race?
Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty contains the word “race” zero times in its 574 words of operative text. That count is taken from the Knesset’s English translation, which includes amendments through 1 May 2022. The Knesset labels that translation unofficial, and the Hebrew governs. The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law draws its line by peoplehood, not by race.
Clause 1(c) of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People reads: “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” The Knesset labels this translation unofficial as well. Clause 1(b) calls Israel “the nation state of the Jewish People”. Clause 7 states: “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”
The Human Dignity and Liberty text also returns zero occurrences of “equal”, “discrimin”, “religion” and “nationality”. It enumerates dignity, life and body, property, personal liberty, exit and entry, and privacy, and no equality right. Its section 1 says rights “shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles included in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel”, which points to that Declaration without enacting its text. The Nation-State Law likewise carries no equality clause and no individual-rights clause. These absences are facts about two texts, not findings about how the State treats any person.
Arguments that Israel’s constitutional order encodes a hierarchy are arguments about clauses 1(c) and 7. The category those clauses name is a people, and the statute that defines membership in it is read in the next section. Whether the Nation-State Law defines the state on racial grounds is examined against a treaty definition in the Nation-State Law’s racial-grounds question.
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics gives the scale of the population outside the people named in clause 1(c). On the eve of the 78th Independence Day, in preliminary figures to 22 April 2026, it counted 10.244 million residents. Of these, 2.157 million (21.1%) were Arabs and 7.790 million (76%) were Jews and Others, and 296,000 (2.9%) were foreigners, a figure that relates to the end of 2025.
Does the Law of Return set a color or origin test?
Section 4B of Israel’s Law of Return, inserted by an amendment passed on 10 March 1970, defines a Jew as “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” The test is descent, conversion and religious membership. The definition contains no color, region or origin criterion.
The Law does confer a right on one defined group, and that is the directionally true core of the privilege claim. Section 1, as enacted on 5 July 1950, reads in full: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” A translator’s note in the same text defines an oleh as “a Jew immigrating, into Israel.” The English text is a scan from the series Laws of the State of Israel, published by the Knesset and marked neither official nor unofficial.
The 1970 amendment did two opposite things, and they stay separate. Section 4B defined who is a Jew “For the purposes of this Law”. Section 4A extended the same rights to named relatives who need not be Jewish: “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew”. The one exception is “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion”. Section 4A(b) adds that it is “immaterial” whether the Jew through whom the right is claimed is alive or ever immigrated.
| Provision | What the English text published by the Knesset says | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Section 1 | “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh” | Knesset, enacted 1950 |
| Section 4A(a) | Rights extend to a child, grandchild and spouse of a Jew, and to the spouses of the child and grandchild | Knesset, amendment of 1970 |
| Section 4B | A Jew is a person “born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism” and not of another religion | Knesset, amendment of 1970 |
On the face of these texts, the line the Law draws runs through maternal descent, conversion and religion, with an extension to non-Jewish family members. Neither page carries a count of any kind. Figures on immigration under the Law belong to the Central Bureau of Statistics, not to the statute.
Were Jews classed as white in European race science?
Sander Gilman’s 1991 study The Jew’s Body, published by Routledge, traces how European and American medicine, science and culture constructed antisemitic ideas about the Jewish body and mind. In the discourse Gilman reconstructs, Jews appear as a distinct and racially marked body, not as members of the majority race of the societies that studied them.
Gilman’s book is interpretive scholarship. It is a history of ideas, and it carries no rate or count of how many Europeans held those ideas. Its use here is narrow and dated: it places the racial classification of Jews inside the medical and scientific record of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That classification, in Gilman’s account, set Jews apart from whiteness rather than inside it.
The demographic record of the same era sits in Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. In its release for Holocaust Day 2025, the Bureau counted a world Jewish population of 16.6 million on the eve of World War II in 1939 and 11.5 million on the eve of the State’s establishment in 1948, a fall of 5.1 million across the years of the Holocaust. At the beginning of 2024 the Bureau put the figure at 15.7 million, still below the 1939 level.
The Bureau records where those populations lived. In 1939, 449,000 Jews, 3% of the world total, lived in the territory that became Israel. By 1948 the figure was 650,000, or 6%. For every country other than Israel, the Bureau uses a “core” Jewish population definition taken from the American Jewish Year Book 2023, published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, not from its own collection.
Where were Israel’s Jews born, on the official count?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 7.1 million Jews living in Israel at the beginning of 2024, of whom 5.7 million, about four in five, were born in Israel. The remaining 1.4 million were born abroad. The count records birthplace, so the Israel-born majority appears in it as Israeli, whatever the origin of their parents.
Of the 1.4 million Jews born abroad, the Bureau places 1.0 million as born in Europe or America and 275,000 as born in Africa. Its Holocaust Day release also profiles the roughly 120,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel, using estimates for the beginning of 2025. Of these survivors, 60.7% were born in Europe and 36.9% in Asian and African countries. They include 16.8% born in Morocco and 10.9% born in Iraq, the persons the Bureau identifies as having undergone the Farhud pogrom.
A separate Bureau release, published for the Sigd festival in 2023, counted 168,800 residents of Ethiopian origin at the end of 2022. About 92,100 (55%) were born in Ethiopia and 76,800 were born in Israel to Ethiopian-born fathers. A further 6,144 Israel-born residents whose mothers were born in Ethiopia fall outside that total under the Bureau’s definition, which traces origin through the father.
The Bureau’s population groups are defined by religion and community, not by color. “Arabs” covers Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze. “Others” covers non-Arab Christians, other religions and persons registered as not classified by religion. The birthplace series does not classify the Israel-born majority by ancestral origin, so no Ashkenazi or Mizrahi share of Israel’s Jewish population is published in it.
Do scholars place Israel among Herrenvolk regimes like apartheid South Africa?
Sammy Smooha’s 1997 article in Israel Studies classes Israel as an “ethnic democracy”, which he proposes as a fourth type of democracy. He distinguishes it from Herrenvolk democracy, a democracy restricted to a ruling people, on the ground that citizenship extends to all and the minority is not excluded from its benefits. The peer-reviewed article is a typology, not a measurement.
Smooha’s definition reads: “Ethnic democracy is a system that combines the extension of civil and political rights to individuals and some collective rights to minorities, with institutionalization of majority control over the state.” He describes the type as operating through two contradictory principles: “the democratic principle”, making for equal rights and equal treatment, and “the ethnic principle”, making for “a homogenous nation-state and privileging the ethnic majority.” He also separates the type from liberal democracy, because the state recognizes ethnic differences, and from consociational democracy, because the state is not ethnically neutral and the minority shares no power.
The named dissent is Oren Yiftachel, who in September 1999 published “‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine” in Constellations, volume 6, issue 3. Yiftachel classes Israel/Palestine as an “ethnocracy”, a regime type he places as neither democratic nor authoritarian. His own footnote 15 records that the term had appeared earlier in work by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan and by Ali Mazrui, so the application to Israel/Palestine is his and the word is not.
The dispute is dated well before either article. Smooha’s 1997 footnote 22 cites Yiftachel’s critique, “The Concept of ‘Ethnic Democracy’ and Its Applicability to the Case of Israel”, published in Ethnic and Racial Studies in 1993. Yiftachel’s footnote 37 cites Smooha’s 1997 article in turn. The two typologies therefore answer each other across at least six years of print. The question between them is whether majority control coexists with democracy or overrides it. A related reading of Israel as an ethnostate is set out in a separate report on the 1997 typology.
Neither text supplies the vocabulary at issue here. The word “ethnostate” appears in neither paper. Smooha places Israel outside the Herrenvolk type, the category closest to settler-minority rule, and Yiftachel’s comparator cases are states organized around one ethnic group, not around color.
Do far-right backers of Israel hold antisemitic views?
Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden’s 2022 study in Political Research Quarterly drew on experiments in an original survey of about 3,500 US adults. They found overt antisemitic attitudes rare on the political left and more common on the right, contrary to horseshoe theory. The concentration was highest among young adults on the far right, whom the survey oversampled.
A second measurement covers the constituency most often described as backing Israel from the religious right. Dennen and Djupe (2023, Social Science Quarterly) surveyed about 1,700 American adults shortly before the 2020 US election. On the published abstract, Christian nationalists endorsed more antisemitic tropes, which the authors attribute primarily to investment in the social dominance of Christians. The same study links Christian nationalism to greater belief in QAnon conspiracy theories.
Both findings are associations measured in single surveys, and the authors report them in correlational terms. The Dennen and Djupe figures come from the abstract, and the Hersh and Royden findings from the study’s published summary. Both rest on fieldwork from 2020 or shortly after. Neither study’s published summary reports a measure of support for Israel. As a result, the share of far-right respondents who both back Israel and endorse antisemitic tropes is not a published figure in either study.
What the two studies do establish is where measured antisemitic attitudes sit on the American ideological map: at the end of the spectrum where white-nationalist politics also sits. White-supremacist accounts of Zionism itself run through a separate body of material, including the conspiracy traced in the Zionist Occupation Government lineage, which casts Jews as controlling governments rather than as members of a ruling race.
Methodology and limitations
The evidence was assembled from four source types, each labeled where it appears. Primary and official records come first. These are the texts of UN General Assembly resolutions 3379 (XXX) and 46/86, with recorded votes from the verbatim records A/PV.2400 and A/46/PV.74. They also include three Israeli statutes and three releases of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
The Knesset labels its English translations of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and the Nation-State Basic Law unofficial; in both cases the Hebrew text governs. The Law of Return pages are scans from the series Laws of the State of Israel, marked neither official nor unofficial. The 1950 page is the text as enacted, and sections 4A and 4B are quoted as inserted in 1970. Word counts and zero-occurrence counts for the Human Dignity and Liberty text were taken from case-insensitive searches of the Knesset’s English text.
The Bureau’s 2026 figures are preliminary, based on the 2022 census, and run to 22 April 2026, while foreigner data relate to the end of 2025. From 2023 the series includes foreigners, so it is not continuous with earlier years. Survivor figures are 2025 estimates. Jewish populations outside Israel use a core definition drawn from the American Jewish Year Book 2023.
Peer-reviewed research makes up the second type. Smooha (1997) and Yiftachel (1999) are conceptual typologies; the only rates in Smooha’s article come from his own 1995 survey of 1,200 Arab citizens and are dated 1995. Dana (2024) is interpretive and contains no figures. Dennen and Djupe (2023) is cited from its abstract, and Hersh and Royden (2022) from its published summary. Both are survey associations, read correlationally. Gilman (1991) is a scholarly book of interpretive history. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021) is a scholarly declaration by signatories, quoted from its typeset English PDF.
Two points remain contested in the literature: whether Smooha’s or Yiftachel’s typology describes Israel, and where criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins. Both appear here as dated, named positions.
Conclusion
So do the two vocabularies meet? On the official record they met once, in a 1975 General Assembly determination that named racism, not white supremacy, and that the same Assembly revoked in 1991.
The rest of the record runs along a different axis. Israel’s Basic Laws name a people in clause 1(c) and use the word “race” zero times. The Law of Return admits by Jewish mother, conversion and religion, with no color test, and extends its right to non-Jewish relatives. Four in five of Israel’s Jews were born in Israel, and the survivors living there include people born in Morocco and Iraq. The race science Gilman reconstructs marked Jews as a distinct body rather than a white one. The scholarly dispute runs between “ethnic democracy” and “ethnocracy”, and neither side’s typology turns on color. Against that stands a measured conviction: half of Arab citizens surveyed in 1995 regarded Zionism as racist. Meanwhile, measured antisemitic attitudes in America are most concentrated on the far right.
What the phrase “white supremacy” adds is the question this record sharpens. Does it name the hierarchy that critics locate in clauses on peoplehood and settlement, or does it carry over a color line first drawn against Jews themselves? With measured hostility to Jews sitting where white-nationalist politics sits, which of those meanings a society hears in the phrase may shape what the phrase does once it is spoken.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the 1991 revocation require a two-thirds majority?
No. The verbatim record A/46/PV.74 shows that the General Assembly rejected, by 96 votes to 24 with 13 abstentions, Yemen’s motion that the decision require a two-thirds majority. The revocation then went to an ordinary recorded vote on draft A/46/L.47.
Which Jerusalem Declaration guidelines describe antisemitism involving Israel?
Guideline 7 lists, as on the face of it antisemitic, “Holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct or treating Jews, simply because they are Jewish, as agents of Israel.” Guideline 10 lists “Denying the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality.” Both sit in section B of the 2021 Declaration.
What status does Arabic have under the Nation-State Law?
Clause 4(a) of the Knesset’s 2018 text makes Hebrew “the language of the State”, and clause 4(b) gives Arabic “a special status in the State.” Clause 4(c) adds that nothing in the article “shall compromise the status given to the Arabic language in practice, before this basic-law came into force.”
Does the Law of Return’s definition of a Jew reach beyond immigration?
Yes, through the population register. The same 1970 amendment inserted section 3A(b) into the Population Registry Law, giving “Jew” “the same meaning as in section 4B” for any registration or document under that law. Section 3A(c) states that it does not affect registrations made before it came into force.
How many immigrants has Israel received since 1948?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted over 3.5 million immigrants since the State’s establishment, about 1.68 million (47.8%) of them since 1990, in its 2026 Independence Day release. About 21,000 arrived in the 11.75 months to 22 April 2026.
Which other states did Smooha class as ethnic democracies?
Smooha’s 1997 article names Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1972, Canada from 1867 to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Poland from 1918 to 1935, and Malaysia since the early 1970s. He describes Germany as bordering on the type.
Which states did Yiftachel group with Israel/Palestine as ethnocracies?
Yiftachel’s 1999 article in Constellations names Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Estonia, Latvia, Northern Ireland before 1972, and Serbia. He builds the category on settler-society formation, ethno-nationalist mobilization and the “ethnic logic” of capital.
How many immigrants from Ethiopia have arrived in recent years?
The Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1,080 immigrants from Ethiopia in 2020, 1,755 in 2021 and 1,680 in 2022, in its 2023 Sigd festival release. In the same release, women of Ethiopian origin had a total fertility rate of 2.68 in 2022, against 2.90 among Jews and Others.
Sources
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2023. The Population of Ethiopian Origin in Israel: Selected Data Published on the Occasion of the Sigd Festival 2023. Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2023/362/11_23_362e.pdf. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. On the Occasion of Holocaust Day, 2025. Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2025/124/11_25_124e.pdf. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026. Israel’s Independence Day 2026. Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2026/117/11_26_117e.pdf. Official record.
- Dana, Tariq, 2024. Notes on the ‘Exceptionalism’ of the Israeli Settler-Colonial Project. Middle East Critique, Routledge, pp. 165 to 172. DOI 10.1080/19436149.2024.2342733. Peer-reviewed.
- Dennen and Djupe, 2023. Are Christian Nationalists Antisemitic and Why? Social Science Quarterly 104(3), pp. 299 to 314. DOI 10.1111/ssqu.13248. Peer-reviewed (abstract-sourced).
- Gilman, Sander L., 1991. The Jew’s Body. Routledge. ISBN 9780415904599. Scholarly book.
- Hersh and Royden, 2022. Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum. Political Research Quarterly. DOI 10.1177/10659129221111081. Peer-reviewed (summary-sourced).
- Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, 2021. Definition and fifteen guidelines. Signatories’ typeset English PDF. https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/wp-content/uploads/JDA-English.pdf. Scholarly declaration.
- Knesset, 1950, amended 1970. Law of Return, 5710-1950, and Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), 5730-1970. English text in Laws of the State of Israel, published by the Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns1_return_eng.pdf and https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns7_return_eng.pdf. Official record.
- Knesset, 1992, amendments through 2022. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, 5752-1992. Unofficial English translation. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawLiberty.pdf. Official record.
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Unofficial English translation. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf. Official record.
- Smooha, Sammy, 1997. Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype. Israel Studies 2(2), Indiana University Press, pp. 198 to 241. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30246820. Peer-reviewed.
- United Nations General Assembly, 1975 and 1991. Resolution 3379 (XXX) and resolution 46/86, with recorded votes in the verbatim records A/PV.2400 and A/46/PV.74. United Nations. Official record.
- Yiftachel, Oren, 1999. “Ethnocracy”: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine. Constellations 6(3), pp. 364 to 390. DOI 10.1111/1467-8675.00151. Peer-reviewed.