Worst fears confirmed

We knew that the conference against racism in Durban would be transformed primarily into an occasion to demonize Israel. We also knew that it would be torn away from the hands of the struggle against racism and on behalf of civil rights to become an occasion for anti-Semitism. And that’s just what happened. I was there, and I must say that I never felt so hated and rejected in my entire life.

Even the least aggressive language of the initial versions of the final document bears witness only to the efforts of European mediation. That, and the strong stance assumed by the United States, failed to erase the atmosphere, the propaganda, the political escalation and the incredible contents of the NGO document calling Israel an apartheid state (!) and accusing it of the worst of all racist crimes. There is no way to ignore the fact that anti-Semitism (in a conference on racism) and the Shoah are only mentioned in the part of the official document that speaks of the Middle East (!) to be lumped with anti-Islamism.

The document on the fight against racism is an example of anti-Semitism without precedence since World War II. The picturesque idea that Israel and the Jews are an intrinsic part of that oppressive world that created racism is paradoxically shared by almost all of what is known as “civil society.” As they felt the conference being wrenched from out of their hands by Arab activists, the Africans, Asians, ethnic groups and native peoples had to pay for their own legitimacy by adhering to a new type of Palestinian propaganda, supported by all Arab countries, in the NGOs and official delegations.

Anti-Semitism flew through the air like poisoned pollen and hovered over everyone. Delegates with a Jewish name wore their security IDs backwards. Jews with yarmulkes were attacked on the streets of Durban and even Johannesburg. Copies of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” the most classic of the anti-Semitic libels, were distributed during (at least) two demonstrations. The Jewish delegates of the U.N. were physically prevented from speaking. At times, they were even kept from entering the numerous meetings where the disgraceful document comparing Zionism to racism and Israel was defined as an “apartheid state” were discussed.

The physical threat to Jews (not to Israelis) accompanied the entire U.N. Conference against Racism. The Jewish Club of Durban, a white building where Jews in the area met at lunchtime for a meal and some friendly talk, was under constant protection against threats. There was a poisoned atmosphere unlike any that those born after the Second World War had ever experienced until this incongruous Conference against Racism.

But physical threats were not the only leit motif of those who felt superior to the variegated demands coming from former slaves of Sudan and Mauritania, the Mayans, the Dalit (the untouchables) and the Tibetans. Generally speaking, the ideological anti-Semitism that rose its ugly head at the conference was a detonation, a black cloud covering all the other demands and protests.

And that’s why we can say that the conference failed. The outcome is a theoretical definition of modern anti-Semitism that has been building up in “civil society” since the Cold War. It is a natural appendage of the anti-Israeli ideology in favor of the Third World that has accompanied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has two basic axioms, de-legitimization of both Zionism and the Shoah.

The Jews are the only people in the world today who are denied the right to a homeland in the country of their ancestors, something the U.N. with its unequivocal verdict on the Shoah decided in 1947 with a partition refused by the Arabs. The international refusal of Israel’s basic legal existence is expressed with an escalation in terminology where the words “occupation,” “suffering” of the Palestinian people, the “racist” attitude of Israel, the unarguable right of Palestinian refugees and Israel’s “criminal” aggression have all become sub-sections of the negation of Israel’s right to exist. They are all a demonstration of its criminal nature.

The second issue is the Shoah and anti-Semitism. The Arab delegations’ dogged fight to mention the Shoah in the Middle East section of the official document instead of the general recommendations are a way of legitimizing anti-Semitic sentiment and comparisons (which is exactly the point) between the extermination of the Jews and the suffering of the Palestinians during the conflict. Words like “genocide” have become in common use. They were bandied about in a speech by Fidel Castro worthy of the darkest days of communism and are the politically-correct way of speaking of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They throw a neurotic light over Jews as international criminals, like whites in South Africa’s apartheid. Never have such tones so unmindful of anti-Semitism been heard.

Let’s take a look at things as they stand. First, Jews who believed blindly in the idea of supporting civil society against dictatorships, of the left against right-wing racism, of the good Third World against the West, harbinger of racism and anti-Semitism must now examine their conscience.

Second, after so much European backtracking on the question of eternal memory, betrayed by historical revisionism and comparisons to the Holocaust – a document for which Europe desperately interceded – avoided mentioning anti-Semitism or the Shoah in all the recommendations of the struggle against racism. Isn’t that wonderful? After only 50 years, memory has been thrown to the wolves, or rather the Middle East.

And finally, this allows a series of dangerous word games on the term anti-Semitism. The old excuse is that Arabs can’t be anti-Semitic since they too are Semites. History speaks for itself: they most certainly can. And how! As Martin Luther King put it: “Let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops. … When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews. …”