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Durban revisited
On February 16-17 2009, according to the AFP report, some 120 lawmakers from 40 countries met in London to warn that the upcoming world conference on racism to be held in Geneva from April 20 – 24 must be ‘no repeat of the last’ and to draw up a ‘London Declaration on Combating Anti-Semitism’. Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch Brown, predicting a rise in anti-Semitic attacks across Europe in the wake of the recent Gaza conflict, referred to the controversial UN World Conference against Racism, held from 31 August to 8 September 2001 in Durban, South Africa as a ‘disgraceful event’. It had ended in acrimony and accusations of anti-Semitism after the Israeli and US delegations walked out. The London Declaration took a ‘no-nonsense line on the forthcoming Durban Review Conference’, calling for ‘the establishment of an international task-force of Internet specialists to measure racism and anti-Semitism online and propose international responses’. It also ‘called for the exposure and isolation of governments and politicians engaging in hate against Jews, and urged the European Union to address the issue of combating anti-Semitism’, warning that the world must ‘not be witness or party to another gathering like Durban’.
There was little chance of a repeat of the earlier event, if only because, as a result of ongoing concerns over ‘anti-Israel and anti-Western bias’, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands joined the US, Israel, Canada and Italy in boycotting these Geneva talks altogether, while the UK sent a delegation but no senior official. With European foreign ministers conferring almost daily on its draft final declaration in the run-up, it is hard to see how such bias could have emerged, since by this time they were well on the way to removing all references to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the document no longer singled out the state of Israel explicitly for accusations of racial discrimination.
The times have changed significantly in other ways. The intervening years have seen a gathering hostility towards the UN, although recently, Obama has hinted that he might be willing to bring the US back into the Human Rights Council. Moreover, foundations which financed the attendance of various NGOs at the World Conference on Racism have had their charitable status threatened by pro-Israel lobby groups if they repeat the gesture. At any rate, less than three weeks before the event, the office of the new High Commissioner on Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, summoned remaining Palestine-focused NGO participants to inform them that all side events mentioning Palestine and Israel had now been banned. The response of human rights and justice NGOs under the auspices of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, was to organise before the summit began their own Israel Review Conference, United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation: Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People, to give themselves a platform.
There was more disappointment to come. After a brief flurry of excitement in the blogosphere when it was thought that the US might after all attend the event, last minute negotiations failed and their absence was confirmed ‘with regret’ by Robert Wood, state department spokesman, who said Washington remained unhappy that the final text still reaffirmed the controversial declaration of the 2001 Durban meeting. While Barbara Lee, chairwoman of the US congressional black caucus, complained that Washington’s decision was ‘inconsistent with the administration’s policy of engaging with those we agree with and those we disagree with’, Pillay commented:
‘I am shocked and deeply disappointed by the US decision not to attend a conference that aims to combat racism, xenophobia, racial discrimination and other forms of intolerance worldwide. A handful of states have permitted one or two issues to dominate their approach to this issue.’
Others now had to be content with Pillay’s extraordinary press briefing on the preceding Friday, April 17, when the UN High Commissioner still clearly believed that she had saved the day and secured a full house by excluding Palestinian concerns from the entire agenda. She said:
‘In particular I would like to highlight the role of Palestine, which for the purpose of reaching consensus and advancing the agenda of racism decided to sacrifice their own issues which are important to them. So therefore you will not find a reference to the Middle East in this document.’
She must have been devastated when members of the international community one after the other duly pulled out once they had secured everything they could, the rest remaining only in order to make their protest at the inevitably inflammatory speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, the sole major world leader to accept an invitation to address the forum.
This too seems to have been well coordinated to cast the Geneva process in the least authoritative light. The BBC’s Imogen Foulkes in Geneva had reported that many UN member states ‘don’t feel they should be present’ in case Ahmadinejad again described the Holocaust ‘as a myth’. What he did do, by pronouncing Israel a racist state from its inception, was to repeat the original provocation of Durban I. At some point in that parallel series of multiple haggling sessions, a majority of member states were calling for the reinstituting of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which in 1975 equated Zionism with racism (and was rescinded in 1991). This premise is among the top priority targets for the OSCE-led campaign which dates from that event, against the rise of what it refers to as a ‘new’ or ‘political Anti-Semitism’, which has sought to make various criticisms of the Israeli state unutterable in Europe through the extension beyond incitement to violence of ‘hate speech’ legislation. Ahmadinejad’s defiance on this score has probably discredited the argument far more effectively than his opponents could ever have hoped to have done.
Barbara Lee’s point is an interesting one- why all the grandstanding? Why not join in and just beg to differ? It might be tempting to put this down to a tit-for-tat language of diplomacy so esoteric that it defies normal human behaviour: as we shall see, this logic was well to the fore at Durban II. Yet, clearly something else is at stake. In the intervening years since Durban I, its critics have gone to huge lengths to rule this allegation out of bounds, building on the stance taken by the American and Israeli delegations who walked out in order to try to alter the terms of the international debate on Israel and Palestine. Admittedly, it was always going to be an uphill task, defending the Israeli state against a background of ongoing extreme violence in the Occupied Territories, land theft, the Wall, the settlements, the protracted military occupation, then the blockade, and the recent attack on Gaza, not to mention the treatment of the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Arab or Palestinian. But it was vital to defend this major ally in the ‘war on terror’ which began only days after Durban I ended.
A careful, initially low-key, but major campaign was mounted. It was only in 2005 when European Jews for a Just Peace (EJJP) - a federation of Jewish peace organisations in ten European countries - first noticed the adoption by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) of a new, and from their point of view, highly problematic ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism’. This draft formulation has since faded somewhat into the background literature, but it was enthusiastically espoused in the report published by former Europe Minister Denis MacShane’s ‘All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry against Antisemitism’ in 2006, which gives us a brief account of its gestation at a forum held in Berlin in July 2002 to address ‘the rise in antisemitism in the OSCE region’:
‘This was the start of an ongoing programme of work, including follow-up events and conferences, culminating in the Berlin Declaration of 2004 in which participating governments unanimously condemned without reservation all manifestations of antisemitism and all other forms of intolerance, incitement, harassment and violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief. They also declared that international developments or political issues, including those in Israel or elsewhere, never justify antisemitism…’ (para 268)
A fuller account of how exactly the ‘Working Definition’ and its adoption, first by the EUMC and then by the OSCE in its programmes for combating ‘hate crimes’, was intended to address the ‘trickiest’ question, namely ‘is anti-Zionism antisemitism?’, is given in a paper by two of its original architects, Dina Porat, head of the Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies and of the Stephen Roth Institute, both at Tel Aviv University, and Kenneth S. Stern, the American Jewish Committee’s specialist on antisemitism. Suffice it to say that this OSCE-initiated campaign to frame an ‘international working definition of anti-Semitism’ was designed first and foremost to curb criticism of the actions of Israel as those of a racist, Zionist state. It began with a call for gathering and monitoring data on what was claimed to be a rise in Europe of a ‘new’ or ‘left anti-Semitic discourse’, and soon enough, newspaper accounts soon became familiar reporting that such evidence was being found.
The boycott of Durban II accompanied by the heightened rhetoric - the former Canadian attorney-general, Irwin Cotler, attending the London meeting, warned against ‘a new sophisticated, globalising, virulent … anti-Semitism, reminiscent of the atmospherics of the 1930’s, and without parallel or precedent since the end of the Second World War’ - suggests that the international community, far from working for a decrease in hostilities arising from their foreign policy in the Middle East, is poised to escalate this campaign. One conclusion we can draw from the boycott drama in Geneva is that this well-resourced programme in many OSCE countries including the UK, has not so far silenced this strategic political debate.
But the international community received substantial help from their Islamic opponents. A group of Islamic countries under the aegis of the Organisation of Islamic States responded to this extension of the notion of anti-Semitic ‘hate speech’, to demand a little criminalisation process of their own, namely that their call for, ‘firm action against negative stereotyping of religions and defamation of religious personalities, holy books, scriptures and symbols’ should be included in the final Geneva document. They could depend upon it that this would provoke such keepers of the flame of the European Enlightenment as the editor of ‘Die Welt’ who republished those very unfunny Danish cartoons because, ‘It is at the core of our culture that the most sacred things can be subject to criticism, laughter and satire.’
Just as the US and Israeli walk-out in Durban I rather effectively deflected attention away from the Palestinian plight, so these latest rows over defending free speech swivel the heads of observers and onlookers firmly away from the barrage of accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ to which any human rights NGO or academic is now almost routinely subjected if they suggest that Israel has violated human rights in the Occupied Territories, to the row over whether it is permitted to mock a person’s religion, and accusations of Islamophobia. President Ahmadinejad’s speech was the icing on the cake, giving Alan Dershowitz the chance to lead the pack in writing off the entire Durban process: ‘Durban is a dirty word’. In March in the New Humanist, Ian Williams was still hopeful that reason would prevail and that ‘international ethics’ could be raised ‘above tribalist or religious exceptionalism’, concluding Hatefest, with an attempt at a sensible balance: ‘Subjecting Islam to the same sceptical standards as any other religion is not Islamophobia, any more than applying universal human rights standards to Israel is anti-Semitism.’ But it was not to be.
What are they afraid of?
If you think there is something slightly odd about comparing the rise of an increasingly-scrutinised ‘new anti-Semitism’ in Europe today with its 1930s predecessor, or the defence of one of the most befriended military powers in the world with that of the hapless and defenceless victims of European fascism, nothing will become clearer by googling the ‘Durban Conference on Racism’. Far from encountering a cascade of racist and anti-Semitic invective hurled at Israel and her allies, you will find page after page of ‘international response’ from the outriders of neo-conservative foreign policy, pro-Israeli lobbying groups and such veteran UN-haters as John Bolton and Anne Bayevsky, warning Obama off any reversal of the US boycott which, various newspapers predicted, would have put the US and Israel on a ‘collision course’. Melanie Phillips provides a typical example in the Jewish Chronicle: “It is the UN and the architects of Durban II who are the racists and murderous bigots. Denounce this sick farce and pull out now.”
So what did happen in Durban I and what are they afraid of ? Not surprisingly, Navanethem Pillay and Anne Bayevsky, of EYEontheUNAlert-Durban Watch, disagree. But the reasons for their disagreement are interesting. It seems that Pillay took the furore at face value, concluding that, ‘the concerns expressed by Canada and Israel that the review conference will become a platform for denigrating Israel must be assuaged.’ Her account of Durban I seizes on one regular characteristic of the critics’ case. This invariably blurs the distinction between the UN conference proper and the far less formal NGO advisory forums, attended by self-selected, non-elected groups, with the important role of monitoring what state representatives are up to, but outside the deliberative structures of the formal decision-making conference. Here again, detractors dwell on what was said on the fringes: defenders point to the final document. Those who defend Durban I rejoice in the dialogic political culture of the UN process. They remind us that all too few international forums are held that are governed by principles of equality and fairness amongst nations. The World Conference against Racism is one of very few. This, they say was democracy at its best, where no country could defy international consensus with the use of a veto power, or could flex its economic muscles to bend the will of the international community.
No one disputes that Durban I was a platform for anti-Israeli sentiment. Setting aside the assumption that any criticism of Israeli behaviour towards the Palestinians, or discussion of Israel's many breaches of UN resolutions, is ipso facto anti-Semitism, the South African conference seems to have featured much unsavoury and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric, both inside the conference and in the streets around the NGO Forum. You do not take the lid off the can of this kind of toxic, longstanding conflict and give it a global platform and a voice for the first time ever, without the noise of shrill extremists who have been and indeed remain quite powerless, asserting themselves. But whether this amounted to an international incitement to violence or whether it was a useful opportunity to let off steam, albeit in pathetic and objectionable ways, we will never know. It served its purpose, triggering a concerted campaign to curb any influence of international human rights and justice NGOs on world public opinion, a campaign which has indeed had some effect in introducing a debilitating preoccupation with a spurious notion of ‘balance’ into their work.
But Pillay’s efforts to assure Israelis and UN member states that the controversy caused by ‘the anti-Semitic behavior of some non-governmental organizations at the sidelines of the conference’ at Durban I would not happen again, is met with scorn by Anne Bayevsky as a ‘revisionist account’. Pillay claims that the member states had elevated the conference’s outcome above ‘the hatred and hostility that took place on the periphery’. Bayevsky has no time for this:
‘At meetings of the governmental drafting committee at Durban I, I watched as virtually every clause on anti-Semitism was deleted. And how did participating states "elevate" the outcome, after the U.S. and Israel made their opposition plain? The European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference cut a deal: Mention of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust could stay in - but with a condemnation of Israeli racism.’
What for Pillay is a balanced final document, is for Bayevsky, and for the member states as we now know, a step too far. For defenders of the Durban process:
‘The paragraph pairing and condemning Islamophobia and anti-Semitism would appear entirely reasonable to most, and article 58 declares tersely but effectively, "We must always remember the Holocaust."’
For its detractors, a Durban Review Conference pledged to implement Durban 1’s Declaration and Programme of Action (the DDAP), is too close a reminder of its two contiguous clauses, one lamenting ‘the emergence of racial and violent movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities’ and the other articulating concern ‘about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation.’ What the members states who boycotted the event beforehand seem to have wanted was to erase this provocation from history.
Various claims are made about the DDAP that disappear into the ether the closer that you get to the text. The claim that Israel is singled out for criticism is again mystifying to the uninitiated in this regard:
‘The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action focused on concerns of African descendents, Aboriginal people, the Dalit ("untouchables"), Roma, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and many more. Condemning slavery and human trafficking, it called for reparations. It demanded action on the underlying causes of racism: poverty, war, and global inequality. Among these many issues, it also condemned discrimination against Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation… Out of its 180 pages, only 250 words address concerns of Israel or Palestine, all of which scrupulously respect Jews and Israel.’
But what they fail to see - the complaint that lurks under the vast amount of noise and heat generated in the row – was not missed by President Ahmadinejad. Again, Anne Bayevsky is starkly illuminating:
‘For decades, the UN has tried to label Israel as racist, to tie it to the mast of apartheid South Africa, and to sink it with the same moral indignation, and economic and political isolation. In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution equating Zionism with racism… By contrast, the Durban II draft doesn't mention Sudan, and the final version will be no different. On December 9, Pillay reminded a reporter that the High Commissioner's office had "set up [a] commission of inquiry, but did not find a Sudanese genocidal policy, but rather 'genocidal intent' committed by a few individuals."’
It is the fact that Israel is singled out as a racist state, a state that is racist in its original conception and inception – Zionism is after all first and foremost a political philosophy of statehood – that causes all the furore, and never more so than when it is compared to a predecessor that has figured prominently in the not so distant past of the Durban process, the apartheid state of South Africa.
To understand ‘Durban’, you have to remember this past lurking not so far below its surface. You have to read the full ‘anti-imperialist’ text of UN Resolution 3379 passed in 1975 at the height of the Cold War and rescinded in 1991 at its end, including its condemnation of the ‘unholy alliance between South African racism and zionism’, and remember that as recently as 1974, a motion proposing to expel South Africa from the UN was only blocked by the veto of France, Britain and the United States of America, all key trade associates of South Africa at the time. In 1977, a voluntary UN arms embargo of South Africa became mandatory with the passing of United Nations Security Council Resolution 418. In 1978 and again in 1983 it was at the World Conference Against Racism that the United Nations condemned South Africa and that a significant divestment movement began, pressuring investors to disinvest from South African companies or companies that did business with South Africa, which led to the isolation and ultimately the demise of the apartheid state.
The use of the concept of apartheid in the Israeli-Palestinian context is a misfit. If there is an oppressed majority it is outside Israel and in the womb of time, although there exist more than a few points of comparison as the veteran ANC activist and former South African minister of intelligence reminded a campaign audience at a South African ‘Israel Apartheid’ week recently. Yet it is the success of this worldwide anti-apartheid campaign of boycott, disinvestment, and diplomatic isolation that haunts the World Conference Against Racism for Israel and her allies. Hence the focus of the London Conference on ‘the exposure and isolation of governments and politicians engaging in hate against Jews’. Hence the reaction when Israel is criticised not for anything particular it has done or failed to do, but for a racist logic in the nature of the Zionist state manifestly and inexorably working itself out through its treatment of its ethnic minorities and its neighbours. Hence the wailing at the threat of ‘isolation’ among the nation-states – an isolation which the OSCE campaign against ‘Antisemitic discourse’ urges us to equate with the treatment of Jewish people at the hands of European fascism.
This was what was so ironic and indeed poignant when Navi Pillay, a Durban native, asked by the city’s mayor in the run-up to Durban II to rescue the town’s name, prefaced her remarks to Israel and the world at large with a reminder that could not have been less reassuring to those we are talking about, “I grew up in Durban, South Africa, under a system of apartheid that institutionalized racial discrimination, denying equal rights of citizenship to all those who were not white… But South Africa’s experience shows that with political will and a commitment to act, discrimination, inequality and intolerance can be overcome.”
There is another great irony here. For once one begins to think about the logic of the nation-state, Israel promptly ceases to be an isolated case. Quite the reverse. Israel’s peculiarly Zionist inspiration was late and unique to that nation-building offensive. (They all have their philosophies of state formation and ongoing state ‘cohesion’.) But the type of nation-state, with the monocultural and ethnonationalist underpinnings that all too easily lay it open to accusations of racism, underpinnings to which it always tends to revert under adverse conditions like the ones that are shaping up today – is no different in essentials from the modern militarised European nation-state which was its inspiration. You only have to look at EU migration policies.
It would have been a very good time in world history, as western powers decline relatively to the rest, to revisit this central challenge of the Durban process, and ask ourselves more profoundly how we can move forward beyond this logic so that different people, races and religions can learn to co-habit, side by side. Unfortunately, the power of the international community today is only destructive, vastly destructive in many ways, when it comes to these issues. The victims include, not only the good standing of the UN but free speech, academic freedom, multiculturalism, human rights, international law, and many many lives lost and more tragedy to come. What we should learn from Durban II is that in the fight against enemy images, racism and xenophobia, we must do without the presence of the international community. We only have each other to turn to now.