The UN Durban Antiracist Process: Projecting Racism Onto Israel

The third review of the World Conference against Racism convenes this September in New York. The 2001 Durban conference should have been focused on advancing the fight against racism, but a campaign to substitute the struggle against Zionism for the recently won struggle against apartheid elbowed its way to the top of the agenda. This centering of Israel as the universal symbol of racism threatened a principle that had seemed obvious since Nazism: that opposition to antisemitism and opposition to racism were aspects of the same struggle. Portraying oppressors with a Jewish face was nothing new, even on the left. At Durban, however, antisemitism surged back into the universe of the possible for a cohort of young human rights activists and intellectuals who would go on to shape the thinking of a generation.