In/Out Basket:
Israel and Durban
The Sept. 11 atrocities and the brutal U.S. war on Afghanistan
have
completely overshadowed the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in
Durban in early September. (See Rick Salutin's column on the topic, which
we reprint in this issue.) The most controversial aspect of the conference
(really two conferences-of governments and NGO's) was the attacks on Israel
and Zionism as racist.
I was ambivalent both about some of the discourse on Israel
at the
conference, and the objections to it. The references to Israel that sparked
so much outrage were, I felt, of three kinds. To start with, there were
some statements that were clearly antisemitic. According to Issam Mansour,
writing in The People's Voice, "some delegates put foward antisemitic
positions, even denying the Holocaust." Using Israel as a pretext for
anti-Jewish racism is what Asma Agbarieh rightly denounced in her article
in Challenge (reprinted in this issue).
There were also statements that I felt were not antisemitic
as such, but
were still clearly false, or at least exaggerated, such as the passage
in
the original draft document describing Zionism as "an ideology of racial
superiority." The idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel/Palestine does not
necessarily require a belief in racial superiority. As Moshe Machover-an
Israeli anti-Zionist-once put it, Zionism is not reducible to racism.
(Before Israel's founding, there were even some Zionists--albeit a small
minority--who were opposed to a Jewish state, but supported a binational
Jewish- Arab state.)
However, it is justified to describe Israel as an "apartheid
state"-however
extreme this may sound to some-given Israel's occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza. This has been discussed at great length in our pages. But the
accusation of institutionalized racism also applies in Israel proper,
within the "Green Line." To take just one example: over 90% of the land
in
(pre-1967) Israel is controlled by the Jewish National Fund. This land
is
defined as being for the benefit of Jews only, which means that non-Jews,
particularly Arabs, are denied the right to live on it. It's safe to say
that any Western country with such practices would be denounced as racist,
even if the country in question were democratic in the sense of having
a free press and multiparty system (as does Israel).
Because of this, I was disheartened by Canada's response
to the final, more moderate, declaration of the conference. This final
statement did not
attack Zionism as such, or invoke analogies to apartheid, but simply
expressed concern for the plight of the Palestinians under occupation,
recognizing their right to self-determination, as well as "the right to
security for all states in the region, including Israel." Yet Hedy Fry,
as
head of the Canadian delegation, "disassociated" Canada from all passages
in the text relating to the Middle East, even going so far as to say that
it was "inappropriate to address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in this
forum"! It seems that Fry's goal was not to combat "anti-Israel" statements
that were antisemitic, or simply exaggerated, but to prevent the issue
of
Israeli racism from being brought up at all.