Fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, my father, Chaim Herzog, then Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and later the country’s sixth president, stood before the U.N. General Assembly to respond to the infamous resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism.”

In front of a hostile hall, he affirmed: “Zionism is nothing more — and nothing less — than the Jewish people’s sense of origin and destination in the land linked eternally with its name.”

He declared that it was not Zionism or the State of Israel that stood on trial that day, but the United Nations itself.

And in one of the most stirring and enduring moments in the history of that body, he tore his copy of the resolution in two, right there at the podium.

He had felt, he later told me, that he was speaking not only as

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