Durban helped turn anti-Zionism into a global movement - opinion

This irrational fury against Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people masquerades behind the noble fight to eradicate race-based bigotry.

Remembering that conference, which negated years of Israeli attempts to compromise with Palestinians, provides a moral clarity about the conflict sadly lacking today.

It’s confusing. Sincere democratic critics offer thoughtful, patriotic reproaches of Israeli actions or leaders. But there are also satanic critics, violent evil enemies who wish to destroy the Jewish state. Durban became a Jew-hating jubilee that was so effective, it’s inspired millions of pathetic critics – driven by pathos, emotion – to hop along the legitimate anti-racist bandwagon, then vilify Israel, Zionism, and the Jews, unfairly.

Back then, most Americans mocked the absurd notion that Zionism, meaning Jewish nationalism, was racist. How tragic that today, this big Red-Green lie, uniting far-left radicals with Islamist jihadists, has seduced so many Americans.

Many pretend to be democratic critics, claiming it’s about what Israel does. But the hostility to the fact that Israel is, the obsessive Zio-trashing, and the distortions required to frame the nationalist clash between Israelis and Palestinians as a race-based conflict are downright devilish.

In 2001, the totalitarian anti-Zionism most Americans had long opposed, subordinating all other goals to the anti-Israel impulse, sabotaged yet another UN conference.

“Durban became the tipping point for the coalescence of a new, virulent, globalizing anti-Jewishness,” the Canadian parliamentarian and human rights activist Irwin Cotler lamented. The rhetoric there fused anti-Zionism with anti-Americanism, “laundered” through opposition to racism, Cotler noted.

The legendary Democratic congressman Tom Lantos called Durban “an anti-American, anti-Israeli circus,” often expressed in antisemitic terms – the trashing trifecta.

A Hungarian Holocaust refugee who became Congress’s human rights conscience, Lantos called Durban “the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”

Some delegates distributed a booklet caricaturing Jews with hook noses and fangs dripping blood. Seventeen thousand anti-Zionist protesters rallied, with some waving the banner “Hitler Was Right!” Other posters wished Hitler had “finished the job.”

Amid waves of Palestinian suicide bombings that destroyed the Oslo peace process and triggered Israeli army crackdowns, the conference showcased the Red-Green alliance’s global reach and anti-Zionist mania.

“Green” Islamist power hijacked the main UN conference, steering discussions away from the widespread problem of white-versus-black racism to denounce “the racist practices of Zionism” as “a new kind of apartheid.”

The parallel NGO forum celebrated “Red” – far-left – values, with leftist human rights organizations condemning racism, colonialism, and imperialism selectively. They found these afflictions only in the West, especially in Israel, the world’s favorite whipping boy.

The final NGO declaration launched the forum’s “Durban Strategy”: to reinstate the “Zionism is racism” resolution, boycott “Israel as an apartheid state,” and accuse the “Israeli racist system” of “acts of genocide” – in 2001.

The Palestinian firebrand Hanan Ashrawi inflamed these third-world leftist passions. Casting the Palestinians as virtuous victims facing violent victimizers, Ashrawi avowed: “in the struggle against oppression, injustice, racism, intolerance, colonialism, and exclusion, there can be no neutrality.”

The Zionism-racism charge and other categorical demonizations of Israel are accelerants. They infuriate, polarizing both sides. Which Palestinians would want to make peace with a supposedly racist, genocidal, settler-colonialist oppressor? And which Israelis would want to make peace with enemies who libel them so hysterically, while attacking them so violently?

Following this illiberal illogic, four years later, in July 2005, over 170 Palestinian organizations launched the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

In 2007, the Palestinian BDS National Committee ratified anti-normalization, rejecting even benign, peacemaking contacts with Israelis or Zionists.

Wrapping the Palestinian cause in the language of anti-racist and human rights cleverly manipulated many Americans reckoning with their legacy of racism. And it proved to be particularly resonant as the academic world went woke.

By racializing the conflict in ways the Durban revival of anti-racist anti-Zionism anticipated – worming into “wokeness” for ideological kinship, then leveraging social media to go viral – the Palestinian fight became every totalitarian progressive’s all-purpose calling card.

Harvard’s Task Force against Antisemitism emphasized an anomaly at Cambridge – and nationwide: “Never before in Harvard’s history did a conflict in a distant land, in which no American troops were serving, attract such attention.”

The Durban delirium’s anniversary exposes radical anti-Zionists’ con job – and the responsibility of constructive democratic critics to distance themselves from them.

There’s an anti-Israel feeding frenzy. Why else do city councils rush to make foreign policy only regarding Israel, and Senate candidates condemn campaign donations only from pro-Israel groups?

As Israel-bashing becomes trendy, it’s worth asking: how much of this satanic and pathetic pile-on is cheap virtue signaling, how much reflects tribal bonding, and how much reflects a manipulation by outside forces, systematically activating that ever-present, rarely dormant virus, antisemitism?