Updates from AIJAC

Racist Anti-Racism at Durban

September 3, 2001
Number 09/01 #01

Sorry to keep dwelling on the Durban issue, but the results of the NGO forum accompanying the official government conference on Sunday were as bad as anyone expected or worse. Moreover, the atmosphere, according toe Jewish participants was openly antisemitic, including hate literature, intimidation and shouting down of Jewish delegates, and efforts to minimise the Holocaust, and redefine antisemitism to mean Israel's treatment of Palestinians. All of this has been insufficiently reported in the press.

Below is the statement of the Jewish Caucus following their walkout from the NGO forum after the Caucus refused to even adopted the Caucus's idea of a statement opposing antisemitism and calling for educational measures to counter it. Following this are editorials on Durban from the Jerusalem Post, Ha'aretz and American publications The Washington Post and The New Republic.

Statement of the Jewish Caucus on the NGO Process and Concluding Document

World Conference against Racism
Durban, South Africa September 1, 2001

Jewish non-governmental organizations came to a World Conference Against Racism after decades of commitment and involvement in the human rights movement and the fight against racism in communities all over the world. We have carried our efforts to the hospitals, to the schools, to the poor, to the needy of every race, creed and colour. In our work, we have also been ever mindful of those in need as survivors of the Holocaust and their children, who bear the awful memories of hell on earth. But we have been sustained and nourished in our charitable acts and activism by the reality of a Jewish homeland in Israel that is watchful of the rise of neo-Nazism and antisemitism in all its forms, that is a sanctuary both physically and spiritually for the Jewish people.

We came to Durban as part of a community struggling to resist the consequences of racism. We leave as victims of an assault on the very principles for which they have stood all their lives. This Conference Against Racism became a Conference For Racism. It took the vision of universal human rights standards applicable to all races, nationalities, and religions in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and excluded the Jew. It took the vision of the equality of all nations large and small in the words of the United Nations Charter and barred the state of Israel.

Therefore, with profound sadness, the Jewish caucus rejects the text of the NGO Final Document in its present form. We must object both because of process and content.

Process

From the beginning of this process, there has been a constant attempt to silence our voices and appropriate our victimization.

Furthermore, there has been a steady stream of individual incidents of people from our caucus being threatened, verbally abused and harassed for no other reason than that they are Jewish and stood up for the rights of the Jewish people. The overall impression and effect was to make us feel unwelcome and unwanted.

The grounds of this conference have been an arena of antisemitism, a stadium of hatred. We have seen the continuous circulation of virulent antisemitic hate propaganda - Jews with hooked noses, blood dripping from fangs, with pots of money surrounding the victims, distributed on the grounds of this NGO Forum in officially-sanctioned booths of participants. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with other traditional antisemitic literature, is on sale at this conference. Antisemitic material that violates international human rights standards as hate propaganda is freely distributed.

The organizers of this conference have done nothing to prevent this dissemination. By this failure, they have shirked their responsibility. Indeed, some of the organizers have actively participated in it.

Individual Jewish participants here were harassed and intimidated. At the rally yesterday, there was a poster saying "Hitler should have finished the job". At another rally during the conference, a person shouted "kill the Jews".

Within the Conference grounds, clothing is freely distributed with the official NGO World Conference logo inciting hatred and violence towards the Jewish state. Marches and chants have gone on almost continuously throughout the Conference of an antisemitic nature, equating Zionism, the Jewish assertion of the right to self determination with racism.

There have been consistent attempts not only to shut us up, but appropriate our voice. The word "antisemitism" which was coined in the 19th century by William Marr of Germany to describe his opposition to Jews and Judaism, and has consistently been used ever since as meaning hatred of Jews, is now - in this document - taken away from us and said to mean something altogether different. This redefinition of antisemitism is an attempt, like Holocaust denial and Holocaust minimization, to deny our victimization.

Substance

The NGO declaration accuses Israel of the worst crimes known to humanity, a new form of apartheid (paragraph 80), colonialism (paragraph 80), war crimes (paragraph 80), racist crimes against humanity (paragraph 98), genocide (paragraph 80), and ethnic cleansing (paragraph 80), massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law (paragraph 99). Israel is called a racist state (Paragraph 82). The text calls for the reinstitution of the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism (paragraph 161), a resolution Secretary General Kofi Annan called "lamentable". He said: "Its negative resonance even today is difficult to overestimate." The declaration further asserts a Palestinian right of return to Israel and condemns the Israeli Law of Return as part of the Apartheid regime in Israel (Paragraph 161).

The Jewish caucus says that all of these components of the declaration, singly and together are designed to delegitimize and have the effect, if accepted, of delegitimizing the State of Israel as a Jewish state and to deny to the Jewish people alone amongst the peoples of the world their right to self determination, and, in consequence, the right to preserve their religious and cultural identity. These accusations, singly and together, form a new antisemitism, directed against Jews around the world, and are, themselves, a form of racism, incitement to hatred and violence.

The accusations made against Israel are accusations made against the state and not individuals. They are a form of collective accusation of guilt, rather than individual accusations of crime. The Jewish community is well familiar with collective accusations of guilt, having been told for centuries that the Jewish community, as a community, killed Jesus Christ. The accusations made against the Jewish state of colonialism, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, ethnic cleansing and acts of apartheid are of the same nature, blaming a whole community for the most heinous crimes.

Palestinians are at war with Israel. They have walked away from the negotiating table, and have chosen to pursue this war at this Conference. They are asking this Conference to deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Their attempts are both direct and indirect. Wild, unsubstantiated accusations against the State of Israel for the worst crimes known to international law are indirect attempts to delegitimize and deny the right to exist of the Jewish state.

It is, of course, legitimate to criticise specific Israeli practices and policies in the context of a global survey, country by country, of such practices and policies. However, when Israel, virtually alone, is the target of such criticism, the targeting becomes political rather than principled. Selective criticism directed to Israel when far worse offender countries are ignored is a form of discrimination against both Israel and the Jewish people.

The Jewish community is a survivor community, the remnants of the attempted extinction of the whole Jewish people in the Holocaust. To accuse falsely the Jewish state of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, the very crimes inflicted on the Jewish community not that long ago, is to mock and ridicule their suffering. The charges themselves are hurtful, a trivialization of the victimization the Jewish community has suffered.

Criticism of a wrong policy or practice should be commensurate with the wrong inflicted. Insofar as any Israeli policy or practice is racist, that policy or practice should be criticised in terms that are specific to the wrong. The rhetoric used against Israel in the declaration is totally disproportionate to whatever acts may have been committed. Any wrongs that have been inflicted are wildly inflated to justify the starting position of the critics, that the State of Israel should not exist.

The Jewish caucus does not take the position that criticism of policies and practices of Israel are beyond bounds. There are many legitimate criticisms that can be made and are being made every day within Israel of government policies and practices. However, just as not every criticism is illegitimate, not every criticism is legitimate. Some criticism is beyond the pale, criticism directed not at what Israel is doing wrong, but to the fact that Israel exists. The charges in the declaration of colonialism, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, acts of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the characterization of Israel as a racist state, the assertion of a claimed Palestinian right of return and a call for a repeal of the Israeli Law of Return are all of this nature. They are an incitement to hatred and violence, the evidence that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They are the continuation of the war against Israel by other means, in disrespect for the purpose of this conference, the foundations of the United Nations, human rights standards and vocabulary, and the true victims of the awful crimes of which Israel is falsely accused.

Now we are faced with a vote where majority rules. However, human rights can not be compromised by the tyranny of the majority. We reject any vote that votes away our human rights. We had hoped that people with whom we have had common cause in their struggle for rights would have sided with us when are rights are threatened and trampled as they have been here. We welcome and thank those who have. We express our profound disappointment and dismay to those who have not.

Jew-hatred in Durban

Jerusalem Post Editorial

September, 03 2001

Among the milder signs held up in vicious anti-Israel protests in Durban, South Africa, this weekend was one depicting Israeli tanks and Palestinian protesters under the headline "David and Goliath." The ironic result of the UN's World Conference on Racism should be to remind the world how little reality has changed: Israel is still David opposite the Arab world's Goliath.

A statement adopted yesterday by some 3,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) declared that Israel is a "racist apartheid state" and guilty of "war crimes, acts of genocide, and ethnic cleansing." The draft statement expected to be adopted by a vote of governments this week is no better, branding Zionism as "based on racial superiority."

Against this background, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's announcement that "the comparison of Zionism to racism is dead" rings empty, to say the least. The other ironic result of the conference - whose full name is World Conference on Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance - is to demonstrate just how alive and potent anti-Semitism is, in that it can be spread with impunity by formal international bodies.

Not satisfied with their attempt to rob Israel of any shred of legitimacy, the NGOs even deleted clauses that opposed anti-Semitism. This move at least had the merit of accuracy - why bother condemning hatred of the Jewish people when the blatant objective is to fan such hatred? As Alan Baker, the Foreign Ministry's legal adviser put it, "They have succeeded in turning the conference into a circus for Israel-bashing... it's inciting hatred."

The UN's orgy of hatred and intolerance has gone so far that even UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who also chairs the conference, declared her solidarity with the Jewish people after the Arab Lawyers' Union distributed a book of anti-Semitic cartoons. In a backhanded way, the statements by Robinson and Annan show that some progress may have been made since the 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution - at least this time UN leaders are somewhat embarrassed.

The UN conference, after all, has allowed Jew-hatred - let's drop the confusing euphemism for a moment - to gush beyond a genteel game of differentiating between hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel. The UN has once again laid bare the canard that it is possible to deny the right of the Jewish people to self-determination without being accused of Jew-hatred. To make such a distinction is as absurd as saying that Italy should be wiped off the map and then pretending that this says nothing about one's feelings toward Italians.

In this context, the decision of the United States and Israel to greatly downgrade their delegations was the correct one. The dilemma in such circumstances is always whether to have people there to attempt to influence and respond, but there comes a point when it is more important not to add legitimacy to obscene statements and beliefs.

Just as it is a mistake to accord meetings of Holocaust deniers the respect of engaging them in debate, the proper place of democratic governments is outside of the conference hall in Durban. It is understandable that democracies would not want to be seen walking away from the legitimate cause of combating racism, xenophobia, and intolerance in the world. But what could be a greater manifestation of these hateful phenomenon than the attempt to deny Israel's right to exist?

The Durban conference brings the Arab-Israeli conflict back to its raw elements: a vast Arab world opposite tiny Israel, whose real crime is taking up one small corner of what is considered "Arab" territory. The conference could have championed a "two-state solution" to the Palestinian predicament, thereby supporting self-determination for both Israel and the Palestinians. Instead, by choosing to equate Zionism with racism and genocide and endorsing the "right of return" for every Palestinian, the UN conference turns the clock back to before Oslo and pulls the rug out from under any conceivable peace process.

If Western delegations fail in their attempts to save the UN conference from its hijacking by the Arab bloc - as seems all but certain - the appropriate response would be a mass walkout. Nor should Western nations be alone. Decent nations from around the world, including the many African, Latin American, and Asian countries that want to combat hatred rather than incite it, must choose between standing up for tolerance and peace, or encouraging the unquenchable hatred of the Arab Goliath.

Ha’aretz Editorial Monday, September 03, 2001

Good intentions turned sour

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is largely responsible for the resounding failure of the World Conference Against Racism currently underway in South Africa. In the months of preparation leading up to the conference, Annan, along with UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, allowed a determined group of Muslim countries to set a very twisted agenda and formulate a stilted final draft resolution.

Numerous countries in Africa, Asia and even Europe agreed with enthusiasm or indifference to the destruction of the stated goal of the conference, originally intended to advance tolerance among peoples. It was a sorely missed opportunity and the damage will be felt for a long time to come.

Annan's opening speech on Friday fell into the same trap as the rest of the conference. Annan termed the Holocaust the "ultimate abomination", but then linked this, most infuriatingly, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "We cannot expect Palestinians to accept this as a reason why the wrongs done to them - displacement, occupation, blockade and now extra-judicial killings - should be ignored, whatever label one uses to describe them."

These statements by Annan obscure the contribution of the Palestinians to the continuing slaughter and grant a license to the continuation of murderous acts of terror against Israelis.

When the head of the United Nations seems to draw something of a parallel between the Holocaust and the Middle East conflict in this manner, it is hardly surprising to see Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat exploit this supportive stage to launch a sharp attack that, in fact, negates the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

Arafat described Israel's actions as a "colonial, racist plot" intended to secure control over holy Christian and Muslim sites. He did not refrain from repeating absurd allegations, such as Israel's supposed "use of uranium," to support his accusations.

Israeli and U.S. representatives, along with some from Europe, made a few pathetic attempts to moderate the proposed anti-Israel resolutions that were submitted at the conference. Meanwhile, as expected, the human rights forum of non-governmental organizations that convened in Durban alongside the World Conference Against Racism made its dismal contribution to hatred and intolerance with an extreme declaration that branded Israel a "racist apartheid state" and called for the establishment of a UN commission to prosecute war crimes allegedly being committed by Israelis.

In this heated atmosphere, and at a time in which the streets of Durban have been taken over by anti-Israeli demonstrators, it is difficult to imagine that the decisions of the UN conference will be implemented in any substantial way.

The Palestinians and their supporters have succeeded in finding a forum in which to isolate and lash out at Israel, but it is clear that their success does not advance the chances of dialogue and discussion on ending the conflict.

Israel must muster all its strength to fight against the attempts to turn the state into a pariah and to raise doubts about its legitimate right to exist. Israel must show every honest person in the world that this conference, which was intended to fight against racism, has turned into a stage for rabid, uninhibited, unwavering anti-Semitism, just like in the dark days of the past.

Show of Farce

The New Republic

Issue date 09.10.01

The U.N. World Conference Against Racism, being held this week in Durban, South Africa, is an illuminating spectacle. Not for what it will accomplish--which is absolutely nothing--but for what it has already clarified, both at home and abroad. A few years ago, optimists thought the United Nations, and the gaggle of nongovernmental organizations that cluster around it, was finally realizing that democracy in Israel did not constitute a threat to human dignity and that rampant dictatorship in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East did. The optimists were wrong; the United Nations and its acolytes are as morally obtuse today as they were the day the Berlin Wall fell. And in their denunciations of the Bush administration's admirable decision not to send Secretary of State Colin Powell to this charade, more than a few American liberals have shown that they, too, remain frozen in amber.

Truth be told, the world does not need an anti-racism conference. Aids, corruption, debt, and illiteracy all constitute greater burdens on the world's poor. But if anti-racism is to have any value at all, it must at least be viewed as a subset of the larger issue of human rights. In Durban, however, anti-racism is actually a bludgeon against human rights. At a planning session in Geneva last month, representatives from the nongovernmental organizations attending the conference approved a declaration resolving that Israel--the only country in the Middle East where citizens freely choose their leaders--is "an apartheid, racist, and fascist state." And--despite the presence in Durban of such freedom-loving countries as Sudan, Iran, China, and Zimbabwe--Israel is the only one singled out for abuse by the conference's organizers. Not only will the human rights records of these execrable regimes be exempt from examination; many of them intend to use the conference to claim "reparations" from the United States. Third World dictatorships have long used America's real and imagined deeds as an excuse to lock up, loot, and even murder their citizens. Now they're using them as an excuse to shake down the United States. No one who knows anything about Africa's postcolonial history can imagine that sending guilt checks to its thuggish and corrupt regimes will help the continent's suffering masses one bit.

In fact, the agenda of the Durban conference is barely distinguishable from that of the first heady Third World rally, the 1955 Bandung Conference. All the recent talk about a "New Middle East" and an "African renaissance"--about the new post-cold-war respect for democracy and human rights--turns out to be just that: talk. Left to their own devices, the despotisms that litter Asia, Africa, and the Middle East quickly revert to the old pathologies, blaming others for predicaments of their own devising. Tellingly, the exceptions to this pattern--the regimes that offer their people more than just historical resentment--are also the ones that want little to do with the forthcoming show of farce in Durban. The president of democratic Senegal, for instance, calls reparations "absurd" and "insulting," while democratic India has opposed the resolution castigating the Jewish state.

Alas, many liberals seem to think that the United States must attend international conferences as a matter of principle--no matter what principles those conferences actually propound. Democratic Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia speculates that the Bush administration is snubbing the conference because the White House is "just full of latent racists." Jesse Jackson complains that Powell's decision not to attend represents "a huge step backward toward isolationism." Michael McClintock of Human Rights Watch gleans in the abstention evidence of "a larger trend toward unilateralism and not being bound by international fora and treaties."

But there are greater sins than unilateralism, and cooperating with other nations in the name of hatred happens to be one of them--a point strangely lost on much of the American human rights industry. If anything, Durban reminds us that the "international community" liberals love so much still amounts to little more than the sum of its parts, many of them brutal regimes that rule without the consent of those they govern. When it furthers the cause of peace, freedom, or justice, the United States has an obligation to stand with the international community. But standing apart from that community when its conclaves pollute public discourse--as the conference in South Africa is doing this week--should not be cause for self-flagellation. It should be a point of pride.

Noise in Durban

THE WASHINGTON POST Wednesday, August 29, 2001

In theory, one of the useful roles of the United Nations ought to be to focus global attention and spur action on specific issues, ranging from the alleviation of poverty to the protection of fundamental human rights. Sometimes it has done this, as in the adoption of conventions on torture and refugees, but in recent years it has mostly tried and failed. Practical targets too often have been replaced by grandiose themes. The trend has been toward the convocation of big, expensive, windy conferences about overly broad issues, such as women's rights or social justice or "habitat," that end with vague declarations and next to no follow-up. Until now these meetings have been offensive mostly for their puffery, but now one approaches that threatens to do major harm to the United Nations as well as to the cause it claims to espouse.

The grandly named World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, in Durban, South Africa, beginning on Friday, has highlighted one of the world's most serious and intractable problems - and through cynical and irresponsible diplomacy, threatens to make it worse.

Preparatory meetings have raised some important issues, such as the continuing discrimination by caste in South Asia and the treatment of refugees and other migrants in Europe, but no concrete change or action is likely to be endorsed.

There probably will be an extensive debate about the need for apologies and some form of restitution for slavery, but the result seems likely to be a weak general statement that will do little to resolve the issue for countries where it has importance, such as the United States. Nations happy to criticize the United States manage to shield their own records of racism from any scrutiny.

Meanwhile, if Arab and Islamic governments have their way, the final declaration will contain harsh passages that single out one country, Israel, for condemnation, label its Zionist ideology as racist, and denigrate the importance of the Holocaust. Arab recipients of U.S. aid, such as Egypt, have persisted in this campaign - which is itself racist - despite repeated public warnings from the Bush administration of a U.S. boycott of Durban. On Monday the State Department went halfway toward delivering on that threat, announcing that Secretary of State Colin Powell would not lead the U.S. delegation (we think he is right not to go) and that the administration had not yet committed itself to any representation.

It is not hard to imagine what comes next: The Arab states insist on their reprehensible agenda, to the cost of their relations with the United States; the Bush administration boycotts the conference, triggering protests from domestic civil rights advocates as well as foreign governments fretting about U.S. "unilateralism"; the United Nations adopts another resolution that in effect equates Zionism with racism, reopening a debilitating wound that it thought it had closed years ago and further endangering its fragile rapprochement with the U.S. Congress.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, among others, is working hard for a better outcome. To succeed, he must ensure that Durban will be a conference about racism, not Israel. The Bush administration could help by pledging to attend and engage with such a conference; the United States gains nothing by staging a total boycott. But no one should expect much in the way of practical benefit - not for India's lowest castes, not for immigrant workers in Saudi Arabia, not for the reputation of the United Nations.

Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune