Durban is South Africa’s third most populous city. Situated on the Indian Ocean, it is the country’s busiest port and home to some of its loveliest beaches.
But for many, Durban has become synonymous with something entirely different, and far more sinister. Twenty-five years ago at this time, it hosted two major gatherings under the umbrella of the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism.
One was the official governmental conference, attended by virtually every UN member state – at least until the United States and Israel withdrew because of a concerted effort to turn the conference into an anti-Israel, antizionist onslaught.
As Secretary of State Colin Powell said on September 3, 2001: “I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of ‘Zionism equals racism;’ or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world – Israel – for censure and abuse.”
While it was unfortunate that more countries did not join Washington and Jerusalem in leaving, some of those that remained, notably the European Union members, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, fought to prevent the worst language from being incorporated into the final text. Perhaps ironically, precisely because they needed to justify their decision to stay rather than walk out, they had to show some results.
But they also fell into a familiar negotiating trap in UN settings: anti-Israel antagonists propose extreme language in the knowledge that “compromise” with the Europeans will eventually follow, yet still emerge with enough intact to claim victory.
The other gathering, the nongovernmental forum, attracted about 3,000 NGOs and roughly 8,000 participants. And this is where some of the darkest rhetoric about Jews and the Jewish state came roaring back to life.
Jewish delegates came in good faith, as longtime combatants against racism in their own countries and through regional and global bodies like the UN. They also sought to ensure that antisemitism was neither neglected nor downplayed by a conference purportedly dedicated to combating racism.
They were in for a rude awakening.
Hatred of Israel dominated the proceedings, relegating to the sidelines other human rights activists who had come to draw attention to their urgent priorities in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Small in number, Jewish delegates were hounded, harassed, intimidated, threatened, and isolated.
They encountered copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery from the tsarist era that has caused incalculable damage to the Jewish people since its first appearance in 1903.
They faced posters and T-shirts emblazoned with the words “What if Hitler had won?” The answer: “Israel would not exist.”
They heard Israel accused of an extraordinary catalogue of crimes – from apartheid to ethnic cleansing, from racism to war crimes.
And they faced incessant calls to boycott, sanction, divest from, delegitimise, and isolate Israel.
Joëlle Fiss, who attended the NGO Forum as part of the European Union of Jewish Students group, wrote of the climate of fear: “We don’t even go to the bar or the bathroom alone anymore.”
Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the United States Congress and another attendee, commented: “It was the most unabashed display of anti-Jewish hate that I have seen since that period [referring to the Holocaust].”
Irwin Cotler, a distinguished human rights lawyer and former Canadian Minister of Justice, described the atmosphere as “a festival of hate.”
And Anne Bayefsky, a professor of international law, noted: “I feel besieged. There’s antisemitism and hate literature at the World Racism Conference … Some of the Jewish delegates are hiding their accreditation badge.”
Needless to say, Durban was not the first example of such Jew-hatred fused with Israel-hatred, far from it. But it came ten years after the UN was thought to have turned a corner when, led by the United States, it rescinded the libellous “Zionism is racism” resolution, which had been adopted by the General Assembly in 1975. That helps explain Powell’s fury.
Moreover, Durban should be regarded as a watershed, whose reverberations echo to this day.
First, it came within months of strenuous efforts of President Bill Clinton, working with Israel’s left-of-centre prime minister, Ehud Barak, to reach a two-state deal with the Palestinian Authority. To no avail, as it turned out. That was irrelevant to the Durban crowd because they made clear that a two-state solution was not their goal. The end of Israel was.
Second, Durban revealed that, for the mob, Jews and Zionists were one and the same and, therefore, all legitimate targets. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. And invoking the Protocols or Hitler’s Final Solution was deemed an appropriate response.
Third, whereas the 1975 UN resolution could ultimately be dismissed as a Soviet-Arab concoction, born at the height of the Cold War, Durban took a different tack, wrapping the assault on Israel in the language of human rights and political progressivism – a pattern very much with us today.
Fourth, the current strategies and tactics of the anti-Israel forces, including the BDS movement and the concept of “intersectionality,” were all put on display in the South African coastal city.
Fifth, blame cannot be limited to those marching in the streets or chanting in the halls. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who oversaw the Durban process, should have seen the writing on the wall during the regional preparatory conferences. She didn’t. The Ford Foundation funded some of the most extreme groups participating in the NGO Forum, something for which it later apologised. And the South African government, determined to portray the conference it hosted as an unqualified success, largely looked the other way.
But the story of Durban, painful and enduring as it may be, has at least one hopeful side.
In 2001, only two countries withdrew from the governmental conference. When Durban II convened in 2009 to review the state of affairs, ten countries stayed away. Two years later, at Durban III, 14 countries were absent. And at Durban IV, in 2021, 38 countries refused to show up.
For those seeking to understand where we are today, going back 25 years to the infamous, game-changing World Conference Against Racism in Durban would be a good place to start.
David Harris is executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism (ISGAP). He was invited by the White House to serve as an official US delegate to the Durban governmental conference in 2001
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