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- <text id=91TT2888>
- <title>
- Dec. 30, 1991: World Notes:United Nations
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Dec. 30, 1991 The Search For Mary
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 31
- World Notes
- UNITED NATIONS
- Freed of An Albatross
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Applause swept through the General Assembly hall as the vote
- flashed on the electronic tally board: 111 to 25. By that
- sweeping majority, the United Nations revoked the resolution
- equating Zionism with racism, eliminating Israel's main reason
- for resenting the world body. Said a jubilant Israeli Foreign
- Minister David Levy: "It ends a conspiracy to distort the
- truth."
- </p>
- <p> The resolution was devised in 1975 by the U.S.S.R. to win
- Arab fealty against the U.S. in the superpower struggle for
- dominance in the Middle East. But the end of the cold war and
- the eruption of the gulf war dramatically altered U.N. dynamics,
- and President Bush began lobbying for repeal. Washington also
- hoped that erasing the resolution would encourage Israeli
- reasonableness as Middle East peace talks got under way.
- </p>
- <p> The nay votes were cast mostly by Arab and Muslim states
- plus the communist countries of Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam.
- An Arab spokesman argued that repeal would only "whet the
- appetite of Israeli extremists' creeping annexation," and Saudi
- Arabia's U.N. Ambassador, Samir Shihabi, boycotted the session.
- Biggest winner: the U.N., freed of an albatross.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
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