Nothing to celebrate as Durban debacle turns 25

It has been 25 years since the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR), held in Durban, unleashed antisemitic vitriol as the aggressive anti-Israel lobby hijacked proceedings. 

As the United Nations gears up to commemorate the conference’s anniversary, the Jewish world looks back on it as the event that “introduced the demonisation of Jewry and Israel through the apartheid analogy”, according to South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) national director Wendy Kahn. 

At that gathering, Jewish delegates were harassed and required police protection, antisemitic writing – including grotesque Nazi-like caricatures and the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – was distributed, and huge marches proceeded. 

This hate fest normalised the delegitimisation of Israel, drove odious comparisons with apartheid South Africa, and sowed the seeds of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. 

Marc Pozniak a first-year student at the time, says that in a session on new forms of colonialism and imperialism, “there was wave after wave of people slamming Israel. Intimidated, I walked out. The hotel lobby had been transformed into a market of hatred. They were handing out anti-Israel T-shirts, tearing apart Israeli flags, and screaming.” 

Pozniak then joined the World Union of Jewish Students group. “I got attacked physically, they were going to flip the kombi we were travelling in. We handed out flowers and sang peace songs, behind a police cordon. A woman in a hijab spat at me, yelling that my flowers were drenched in the blood of Palestinian children. It was brutal.” 

Joëlle Fiss is a human rights researcher and member of the Geneva Parliament in Switzerland. Her Durban Diaries record her experiences as chair of the European Union of Jewish Students. “The conference took place at a tense time internationally, during the Second Intifada, and just days before 9/11. In Durban, Israel was already accused of committing genocide of the Palestinian people. Many participants, for example the Arab Lawyers Union and the [anti-Zionist haredi] sect Neturei Karta, promoted that message. The narrative spread across the conference like wildfire. 

“That I am still interviewed about this conference, 25 years later, shows how symbolic this event is, to understand the Jewish experience since 2001,” said Fiss. “Today, we recognise many things that happened there. For example, a narrative of genocide accusing Jews of the worst crimes against humanity. Fake information disseminated to people until they believed it. Peer pressure, where participants turned against us in the name of moral integrity or fear of being isolated.” 

Fiss says Jews around the world instinctively knew that Durban was an important moment. “Since 7 October 2023, I have realised that Durban affected me more than I thought. Aggressive protests that don’t aim to support the Palestinian people, but simply to wage hate against Israelis, bring me directly back to the conference, as if I’m in a flashback.” 

Yehuda Kay was the director of the SAJBD in 2001. He recalls how Jewish delegations were blocked from booking rooms, erecting information booths and barred from meetings. “It was vicious. Durban gave permission for rampant attacks against Jews. You didn’t have to be polite or diplomatic anymore. It was taken for granted that Israel is a racist, apartheid state in the nongovernmental organisation (NGO) world, and therefore it is the duty of anyone who holds liberal views to speak up against it, and against Jews.” 

In 2001, Mary Kluk, national vice-president of the SAJBD, was a new executive member of its KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) council. “We were completely ambushed as a community, as a people. We were so unprepared, floundering. Then we had to strategise and organise,” says Kluk. 

Kluk says the NGO forum “was more toxic and more hateful but less significant than the main event. I remember saying at our KZN council meeting the following Monday that I had a terrible sense of foreboding. On the Tuesday, 9/11 happened. It made hate feel even more real. Durban was the genesis of the world that we’re living in today.” 

Veteran anti-apartheid journalist living in Israel Benjamin Pogrund was asked by Israel’s ambassador to South Africa at the time to join the official Israeli delegation. “The most terrible resolutions came out of that conference. I felt I had to help in this fight. But we were betrayed by the UN on this one,” said Pogrund. “They assured us that those resolutions would be wiped out or watered down by the time the major conference came, and it didn’t happen.” Eventually, the US and Israel walked out. 

Pogrund says, “We haven’t paid enough heed to what was going on in the world, to the movements burrowing away and building up strength and which exploded after 7 October.” 

Milton Shain, emeritus professor of historical studies at the University of Cape Town and an antisemitism expert, traced the history of this, saying that after the 1967 Six-Day War, “the foundations were laid for a ‘settler colonialist’ paradigm that stamped Israel as both uniquely evil and an outpost of European [‘white’] colonialism. Such thinking soon informed the Soviet-driven 1975 UN Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism. Although overturned in 1991, this paradigm was vividly on display in Durban. It turned into an extension of the Arab-Israeli conflict and portrayed Israel and Zionism as racist. Jewish suffering and antisemitism were effectively ignored.” 

Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, says, “Durban was the first time Israel was considered an illegitimate, genocidal, and apartheid state on the international stage. In mainstream Western discourse today, we see Israel being accused of being the same genocidal apartheid war criminal, not an actor in a territorial conflict. Anti-Zionism as collective antisemitism against the Jewish State was born in Durban.” 

Pogrund says the conference “was one of the UN’s great failures. What has it got to celebrate? It was an enormous disappointment for South Africa because this conference on its own soil was meant to mark internationally the end of apartheid. But the anti-Israel stuff became the dominant theme.” 

Pozniak says, “The UN is at the lowest point of its legitimacy and credibility. Unless its intention is to commemorate just how wrong they got it, it’s a farce.” 

And Kay says, “I think it’s disgusting that the UN is memorialising one of the most traumatic events for Jews and Israelis.”