Duban talks could fail in most basic function

By Linda Grant

LONDON: It's a familiar charge. The Israeli army bulldozes houses, tears up centuries-old olive groves, expands settlements. Its trigger-happy troops aim their rifles at children armed with stones. International protest is dismissed with contempt by both the politicians and the outraged population as just the usual anti-Semitism.

Israel, to many of its citizens, ought to be a Teflon state, the Holocaust making any outrage excusable. But they are wrong, morally wrong. No, it is not anti-semitic to condemn Israel, not anti-semitic to protest, just for starters (even without the occupation) against a democracy in which nearly a million of the population, Israeli Arabs who live within the 1967 borders, are treated as second-class citizens. Not anti-semitic to be outraged at the tribal racist cry at football matches when a rightwing section of the crowd shouts "Death to the Arabs".

But while you don't have to be anti-semitic to criticize Israel, adhering to the belief that Zionism is racist does not necessarily absolve you from being virulently racist. Jews who have been active in movements such as Peace Now and Gush Shalom, who have engaged in what we hoped would be constructive debate about finding a just settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, have already come across some of the anti-Jewish racism which has been pervading the Durban racism conference all week.

On Thursday, before the main conference even started, members of organizations such as the UK based Holocaust Education Trust, which does anti-racist work in British schools, reported harassment from pro-Palestinian delegates; on Friday, a press conference held to address the concerns of Jewish members of NGOs was broken up by pro- Palestinian demonstrators. On the same day, ANC MP Pallo Jordan described the disruption of a discussion on anti-Semitism in which he was taking part as "disgraceful". On Saturday, Mary Robinson was booed in a meeting in which she spoke of the Holocaust.

Iran has objected to the conference dealing with anti-Semitism at all, on the grounds that it is "not a contemporary form of racism" -- that is, it doesn't exist, which may be news to the terrified Iranian Jews whom I met there in 1997, huddled behind the locked gates of their synagogue. Or my own family, when, at the stone-setting ceremony for my mother at a cemetery in Bournemouth on the English south coast last year, the prayers were drowned out by a gang of teenage boys. Throughout the conference the ground is littered with leaflets depicting the crudest, Nazi-era cartoons of Jews with hook noses and bloody talons, clutching money.

The argument that Zionism is racist is a box with a lot of things in it. It argues that there is racism among Israelis (who you would think would know better); that the right of return for all Jews is inherently discriminatory. Some of these debates need to be held as part of discussions about the nature of Israel's role in the Middle East, and its relationship to a future Palestinian state. They go to the heart of Israel's right to exist and whether a bi-national state is the only valid solution.

Others are racist in their nature. Holocaust denial has been enthusiastically adopted by some because once you remove this essential raison d'etre behind the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the Jews have no right to call themselves victims. Or if there was genocide against the Jews, that persecution was no worse than the current occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

The gullible are falling for anti-semitic canards, such as a belief that the Jewish notion of the Jews as the chosen people means a doctrine of racial superiority or exclusive rights to religious salvation. It doesn't. The "secret document" which contains the "truth" about the chosen people is the Old Testament, where God enters into a covenant with both Abraham and Moses, in which the Jews are "chosen" to be the vehicle to spread the word about monotheism. They do not receive salvation in return; this is a Christian, not a Jewish concept.

A very simple truth has emerged out of the debacle of the Durban conference: that you don't fight racism with more racism, and, unfortunately, as the conference revealed, the "Zionism is racist" doctrine is fostering a climate of increased racial prejudice.

You have to ask how the disgraceful treatment of Jewish (and not just Israeli) delegates at the conference, the breaking up of meetings or the hate literature has practically aided the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in any way -- or whether it has tarnished and partially discredited their cause.

The apologists for this behavior should also confront the reality that it has only reinforced and hardened the opinions of those who consider that criticism of Israel is based on hatred of Jews. If, as a result of the conference, attacks increase on Jews in the Diaspora and Israelis refuse to examine their own actions, the conference will have spectacularly failed to achieve its most basic function. It will have increased racism and not reduced it.

-- Guardian News Service