The Flap Over Durban II: Anything but the Facts, Ma’am

By Ian Williams


	The new United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, South African judge Navanetham Pillay (l) arrives with Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, the Nigerian president of the U.N. Human Rights Council, on the opening day of its autumn session, Sept. 8, 2008, in Geneva. Pillay urged countries planning to boycott Durban II to reconsider their position, saying an “all-or-nothing” attitude was not the right approach (AFP photo/Fabrice Coffrini).

“SAYS THE ANT to the elephant, who are you shoving?” goes the line in the old Gospel song about Noah’s Ark. It came to mind with newspaper reports that Israel and the U.S. were on a “collision course,” since the Obama administration was attending preliminary meetings on “Durban II,” despite Israeli appeals to boycott it. Confusingly happening in Geneva, Durban II is the follow-up this April to the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” held in Durban, South Africa eight years ago.

Typically, rabid pro-Israel writer Melanie Phillips declared in the British Jewish Chronicle, “It is the U.N. and the architects of Durban II who are the racists and murderous bigots. Denounce this sick farce, and pull out now.” Her emotional tirade epitomizes many others whose pre-emptive boycott calls upon deep wellsprings of emotion—but not much in the way of logic. The boycotters evoke distorted memories of Durban I, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in a way that implicitly, and indeed often very explicitly, imputes “anti-Semitism” to anyone who challenges their version of the past and future Durbans.

Among this year’s overlapping circles of boycott advocates, there is a group—personified by John Bolton or Anne Bayefsky—who have never, ever, seen a good U.N. conference or resolution, and for whom this is just another chance to burn the blue flag. They’ve already opposed all of those other conventions, from Landmines to Nuclear Test Bans to Child Soldiers. Indeed, a good rule of thumb is that if there are any hopeful humanitarian developments on the world scene, then they are against them. Then there are the more specifically diehard pro-Israel supporters like Phillips—and we are not talking about the Peace Now types—and yet another community of sundry Islamophobes. Common to almost all of them is a conviction that any criticism of Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians is ipso facto anti-Semitism.

The Israeli government has been frantically lobbying around the world to get governments to boycott the conference. The point is not to attend and fight the good fight against alleged anti-Semites, but to stay away. There is a good reason for that, to which we shall return later.

Phillips splenetically described the event as a “hatefest” which, she charges, “is shaping up to be a vicious and racist onslaught against the human rights of the Jewish people. Its draft declaration singles out Israel for vilification. It accuses it of committing ‘apartheid,’ a ‘crime against humanity’ and ‘a form of genocide.’ It says the Palestinians are the victims of Israeli oppression, implies that Zionism itself is racism, and calls for the end of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and (as in Durban I) for the ‘right of return’ for Palestinians, which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.”

Sadly for Phillips, her catalogue of the draft declaration’s alleged racist imputations against Israel actually lists substantial and provable charges. Israeli critics of government policy frequently use the term “apartheid” without being attacked hysterically. The South Africans, hosts of Durban I, have a detailed knowledge of history’s most elaborately articulated system of racism. It is true they may be somewhat prejudiced, since Israel was a major collaborator of the former apartheid regime in sanctions busting and arms development, including, on some evidence, assisting the racist regime to develop nuclear weapons. Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and the other human rights icons of our age have compared Israel’s behavior with the former apartheid regime, and it will be a foolhardy critic who calls them anti-Semitic. Indeed, even apartheid did not have segregated roads, the West Bank settlers’ contribution to modern racism.

Moreover, the resolutions that admitted Israel to the United Nations enshrined the “right to return” for Palestinians, and Israel accepted them as a condition of membership. In any case, it is certainly less exceptionably racist than a “right to return” for Jews whose connections to the land are far more tenuous, unless we are to accept the exclusive purity of Jewish bloodlines in the first instance, and a reputed land grant from Yahweh to Moses three thousand years ago.

Not one country now hosts an embassy in Jerusalem—because the city is universally regarded as occupied. The International Court of Justice has ruled that the separation wall is illegal and in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The United Nations, and every country in the world, accepts that the settlements are illegal and in violation of the Conventions. It is difficult to see how a 40-year occupation of the Palestinians against their will and in defiance of U.N. decisions is not “oppression,” even before one examines the reports of international governmental and NGO observers. Just check out what the U.S. State Department has to say to about it.

The assumption that Israel represents Jews everywhere always was a stretch, but even more so now when so many prominent community leaders such as Sir Gerard Kaufman MP have recoiled in horror from the identification. “My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza,” he told the British House of Commons during Operation Cast Lead. “The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.”

The Durban I That Counted

Even the more temperate critics of Durban conflate the “NGO Forum” at Durban I with the actual governmental conference—the one that counted.

Israel, Canada and the U.S. used the excuse of the former to walk out of the latter. As one may judge from the intemperance of Phillips’ language, there was no monopoly of vituperation on either side. Indeed, the pro-Israel groups walked out of Durban I because the NGO Forum would not include its somewhat provocative paragraph, “We are concerned with the prevalence of anti-Zionism and attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel through wildly inaccurate charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, as a virulent contemporary form of anti-Semitism leading to firebombing of synagogues, armed assaults against Jews, incitements to killing, and the murder of innocent Jews, for their support for the existence of the State of Israel, the assertion of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people and the attempts, through the State of Israel, to preserve their cultural and religious identity.”

More objective observers would admit that the “inaccuracy” of those charges was, to say the least, moot, while the language begs some very controversial questions. To be fair, some of the NGOs clearly were over the top and did the Palestinians no great service with their inflamed rhetoric, but Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, refused to pass on the NGO report to the part of the conference that mattered, the meeting of governments.

The Europeans and others who stayed and fought in Durban I secured a much more balanced final report, which, in Article 58, for example, declared tersely but effectively “We must always remember the Holocaust.” Equally, the paragraph pairing and condemning Islamophobia and anti-Semitism seems entirely reasonable—although the usual suspects might consider it provocative.

It would be refreshing to hear from any of the Durban boycott advocates that Israel had ever, ever, violated human rights in the territories it occupies. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty still get the same frenetic objections to their coverage of Israel, even though they certainly have not spared any of Israel’s enemies. Ironically, Israel supporters share this tactic for avoiding the substance of charges with their most vociferous opponents, who point to Washington’s free pass for Israel as a reason why the Human Rights Commission should not pillory Iran, Cuba, Libya, Syria and Sudan.

A Misguided Attempt

This year yet another rallying cry for the boycotters has been the misguided attempt by Islamic states to condemn “projecting negative, insulting and derogatory images of religions and religious personalities” and to introduce “a code of ethical conduct” for the media. These admittedly pernicious resolutions have also appeared at the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, however, and have not provoked any walkouts, although they have produced mass abstentions.

European nations have threatened to boycott the conference if such Islamic resolutions on freedom of expression and defamation of religions are even permitted on the agenda. However, one senses that this is a desperate attempt to find substantial reason to bow to Israeli and, previously, U.S. pressure to boycott the conference. Of course the real reason for the vociferous and hysterical opposition to Durban II is not that it silences theological debate, nor is it in defense of freedom of speech.

Freedom of Speech?

Some of these piously preaching governments happen to lock up people who question the Holocaust, which is hardly freedom of expression as the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution understands it. Some of the boycotters welcome overtly Islamophobic Dutch MP Geert Wilders, even as they call for Holocaust denier David Irving to be silenced.

In the broader human rights field at the U.N., the Islamic states and their allies in the Third World often provide some very easy targets. When the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was under discussion, the NGOs, delegates and others who met to consider how to commemorate the event unanimously agreed that there should be no attempt to rewrite it. Any revision would be much weaker. But in the era of Abu Ghraib and Gaza, it is not only Third World regimes who would backslide on the Declaration.

In fact, one cannot help but suspect that some of the inflamed rhetoric from Muslim delegations about Israel is intended to cover up the reality that none of their governments dare challenge the U.S. or Israel in any substantial way. It would indeed be better if they were to lay off some of the specifics and name calling and simply let the Declaration stand for itself, since it cannot but reaffirm definitions of racism in a way that indicts Israeli actions.

Indeed, the final draft, which drops specific mention of Israel, and the demands to oppose disrespect for all religions may well allow the Obama administration’s realists to get the U.S. to Geneva. It has already called the bluff of Israel and its supporters, who are now shouting that because the review conference refers to the Durban document whose progress it is reviewing, it is unacceptable.

The real reason they oppose this conference, of course, is precisely because its conclusions, even if they never once mention Israel or the Palestinians, can only indict the day-to-day reality of the occupation, which is manifestly racist in both concept and application. The rest of their windy rhetoric and name-calling is just intended to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and entirely unconvincing argument.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and has a blog at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>.