Losing a battle in the war of position
Zionist perspectives of the 2001 Durban conference
Preface
I indicated in an earlier article the significance of ideological struggle around the meaning of basic concepts of nation, citizen and state. This point is closely related to making sense of the struggle between the forces of Palestine liberation and those of the state of Israel, the coloniser.
In a second article I explored the dynamics of ideological struggle further, drawing on Louis Althusser’s notion of ideological state apparatuses. Significantly this enables us to theorise the Israeli state and its state politics and policies into the analysis of Zionist ideology.
I have recently reread Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s 1988 ‘Hegemony and Socialist Strategy’, which I understand (and find useful) as developing Antonio Gramsci’s and Althusser’s points further, emphasising the fact that what they call ‘discourses’ (rather than ideologies) are embedded in our social being and therefore form a syncretic unit with our societies.[1] Laclau and Mouffe use the term conjunctural analysis to mean attention to and analysis of the detail of historical moments, namely the detail and meaning of the contending discourses.[2] The significance of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s argument is that there is no direct relationship between the underlying (‘objective’) class interests of a movement (e.g. Zionism) and its self-consciousness as expressed through its ideology.[3] The implication of what they are saying is that it is the content and logic of these discourses that exerts impact on the ideological struggles in which different content and logic are marshalled by contending forces. This means that the political economy context is at best only a partial understanding of the dominant (or hegemonic) ideas of Zionism.
Understanding the historical conjuncture in which we find ourselves also requires listening to and hearing what the protagonists are saying. This understanding forms the basis for my analysing and writing about Zionist self-perception. In this article I focus on listening to and hearing what Zionists themselves recently said about a seminal battle of ideas between themselves and the international Palestine solidarity movement.
This article refers to a Zionist panel discussion held in September 2021, at which they reflected on the meaning of an intense ideological battle that they were subjected to at the 2001 World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa. The first part of the article provides an overview of the WCAR and the issues that arose from the perspective of the state of Israel and Zionist supporters. The second part of the article provides profiles of those participating in the panel discussion (webinar). This is useful in order to understand the conjuncture within which the expression by these individuals, of conventional Zionist tropes, has arisen. The article’s conclusion sums up the Zionist discourse vis-à-vis anti-Zionism in South Africa. This lays the basis for my follow-up article about the meaning of the alleged antisemitism at the 2001 WCAR as well as their reflections on the South African anti-apartheid struggle and prospects for Zionism in post-apartheid South Africa.
I will publish the follow up article shortly. It will provide a summary of the main points made by this panel of Zionists about the nature of the intense ideological struggle against Zionism that took place at the conference, their assessment of the balance of forces in that struggle as well as their strategic thinking about ideological struggle since the conference and looking forward. That article will also provide a critical perspective on the Zionist views.
Durban conference — anti-Jewish rhetoric?
At the WCAR a large, seemingly well organised and vociferous formation of non-governmental organisations in solidarity with the Palestinian people, confronted the state of Israel and its Zionist supporters. They called out the state of Israel as a racist, colonial and indeed an apartheid, project. The context for this was the limits of the Oslo Accords of the 1990s and the outbreak of the Second Intifada — the latter in part a response to the failure of the Oslo agreements to provide the certainty of a sovereign Palestinian state.
On 02 September 2021, to commemorate this 20th anniversary of the WCAR, the SA Jewish Report hosted a webinar discussion to reflect on what that conference meant from a Zionist perspective. The full recording of that webinar[4] discussion is available. From a Palestinian solidarity and Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement perspective it is useful to know what our opponents are thinking, and how they assess their advances and setbacks, as well as their identification of their weaknesses and their strengths. This article provides a context for that discussion. The next article provides an analysis of the key Zionist takeaways from that event as well as some critical comments from the perspective of the solidarity movement.
The global Palestine solidarity movement scored a significant victory at the 2001 WCAR, where it succeeded in getting a resolution passed that called for the end of foreign occupation of the Palestinian people, their right to self-determination, an independent Palestinian state, the right of refugees to return to their homes and recognition of the right of all states in the Middle East, including Israel, to security. The resolution reflected precepts of International Law expressed inter alia in various United Nations (UN) General Assembly resolutions over the years. In addition there were vociferous protests against Israel and Zionism was equated to racism. The United States (US) and Israeli delegations withdrew in reaction to these protests and when it became clear that they could not get the resolution rescinded.
According to the American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), the resolution was antisemitic because it singled out Israel for criticism and combined with hateful anti-Jewish rhetoric. This rhetoric was said to include dissemination of copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion[5] and criticism of Jews making too much of the holocaust. It is unclear from the AICE whether and how the dissemination of the Protocols was related to the people and organisations promoting the resolution. Given the congruence between the content of the resolution and the body of international law it is clear that the AICE’s interpretation of the antisemitism of this event is strongly based on its explicit criticism of Zionism as racism and its interrogation of the holocaust. Calling Zionism out as racist and questioning the holocaust are ipso facto antisemitic practices in terms of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) — the IHRA and JDA define, and give concrete examples of, antisemitism as seen through Zionist eyes.
Organisations like AICE do not suddenly appear from nowhere, but invariably are founded and funded to advance specific agendas, portray Israel as a developed, modern, democratic and liberal state, unfortunately under siege from Islamo-fascists. AICE was founded by Mitchell Bard in 1993 to strengthen US-Israel relations. Bard is a doctoral graduate from the University of California Los Angeles (1987) and a past editor of the Near East Report, a weekly newsletter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a well-known and powerful Israeli lobby group in the US, where he managed a $600 000 budget. He also lectures and consults on Israel and Zionism. In 2021 he was running AICE’s Jewish Virtual Library project, supported by 14 charitable foundations and family funds. Two of these, the Newton D. and Rochelle F. Becker Foundation and the Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust, are committed to Israel as a Jewish state and to advancing democratic values and peace in the Middle East. These are what could be termed liberal Zionist values, an effective articulation of which had been made by then liberal US Zionist Peter Beinart.
Having described in outline the main Zionist grievance about the WCAR I now turn to the individuals that constituted the Zionist panel that reflected on the WCAR some twenty years later. The panel consisted of 10 individuals nine of whom had participated in the WCAR in 2001.
Panelists’ political and ideological background
Howard Sackstein
Howard Sackstein is chairperson of the Board of Directors of the SA Jewish Report. A 2013 reddit post reported him as saying that he was the founder and vice-chairman of Jews for Social Justice (JSJ) (in South Africa), which
he identified as the Jewish anti-apartheid movement. According to a recent interview with Gary Lubner (also a JSJ leader at the time) JSJ represented a small minority of Jews who took a stand against South African apartheid — Lubner recalled that during the late-1980s the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBoD) as well as the South African Zionist Federation put pressure on Lubner and his colleagues (which included Sackstein) to desist from their anti-apartheid activism. Notwithstanding his anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, Sackstein’s later developed into an active supporter of Israeli apartheid. He worked for AIPAC in Washington DC after studying international conflict resolution at Harvard University. Sackstein claims that he led the only African National Congress (ANC) delegation ever to visit Israel and that he took Nelson Mandela to Brussels on behalf of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). This was en route to Mandela’s visit to the US shortly after his release, and where he apologised for referring (in an earlier meeting with Yasser Arafat) to Palestinians as living under colonialism. In an earlier article I described Mandela’s ambiguous statements about the status of Palestinians in Israel and his legitimising Zionism as Jewish nationalism. Sackstein’s practices vis-a-vis the new post-apartheid dispensation did not end with escorting Mandela to the Middle East and the US. His CV indicates that he spent six years at the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) (1994 to 2000) ending as executive director of the IEC and regarded himself as largely responsible for the 1999 South African general elections. In 2012 he opined that Israel’s human rights record towards occupied Palestinians was simply unacceptable to most enlightened people anywhere, including in Israel. His contradicting the Zionist dictum that Israel can do no wrong perhaps reflected that he was able to recognise an apartheid state given that he had a foot in the South African anti-apartheid movement.
In 2021 Sackstein’s LinkedIn profile identified him in the hospitality sector and also in the digital security space. For instance, he is a non-executive director of Saicom Voice Services (SAIC), Johannesburg. SAIC is a telecommunications service provider that had developed into a ‘cloud first software-driven solution company’, with branches in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. SAIC appeared to be a branch (or franchise) of a global SAIC (although there were no direct links confirming this), which included in its mission statement, ‘SAIC drives applied science and intersects it with policy and operations expertise to make a difference in national and global security matters’. SAIC’s clients included the US government’s military complex, its intelligence community, Federal Civilian Agencies, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, Military Health System and Veterans Health Administration. If Sackstein’s SAIC was indeed part of this intelligence complex it would reinforce his pro-Israel discourses and political practices (identified above).
Mary Kluk
By contrast with Sackstein, there is less information in the public domain about Mary Kluk, in 2021 National President of SAJBoD and also Director of the Durban Holocaust Centre. Kluk attended school at the Maris Stella Convent in Durban and studied at the University of KwaZulu Natal. Maris Stella is a Catholic school which emphasises the holistic development of girls and women, and includes community outreach projects for the benefit of the less privileged. This is relevant to understanding Kluk’s and Zionist involvement in community upliftment projects in South Africa. In 2021 Kluk was also the Vice President of the WJC, the Chair of the Africa Australia Jewish Congress and she headed the WJC Global Jewish Communal Security Committee. She was also vice-President of the African Jewish Congress (AJC). The AJC’s member countries are Bostwana, DRC, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Ahmed Shaheed
In 2021 Ahmed Shaheed was the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief. He is also Deputy Director of the Essex Human Rights Centre. Previously he had been Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Maldives. Prior to becoming Foreign Minister Mr Shaheed had played a significant role within the Maldives government moving the country from an autocratic to a liberal democratic order, based on a conception of human rights. In his role as Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Shaheed reported extensively and critically on the lack of human rights there. According to Ali Abunimah, writing in the Electronic Intifada, Shaheed was working closely with the Israeli lobby to stigmatise criticism of Israel and its policies towards Palestinians as antisemitic. In his report on antisemitism, presented to the UN General Assembly, Shaheed used the definition and examples of the IHRA as the yardstick for deciding whether or not an act or event was antisemitic. Shaheed is also a Senior Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, a think tank chaired by Irvin Cottler, described by Abunimah as one of the most prominent figures in Canada’s Israel lobby.
Wendy Khan
Wendy Kahn is the National Director of the SAJBoD. Her career began at Eskom after graduating from the Business School of the University of the Witwatersrand. She has been the National Director since 2006. Kahn has reportedly devoted her time equally to campaigns for greater inclusivity of all citizens in South Africa and at the same time challenged what she perceives as a hate-filled and antisemitic BDS campaign against Israel’s right to exist. In her directorship capacity she has over the years engaged in the public domain through statements about antisemitic protests against Israel (specific examples from 2015 at the University of the Witwatersrand).
Tamar Lazarus
Tamar Lazarus is a past President of the Womens International Zionist Organisation (WIZO). WIZO’s Mission Statement reads: ‘The Women’s International Zionist Organisation of South Africa is the premier Women’s Zionist Organisation in South Africa, empowering women to strengthen identification with the State of Israel through education and pragmatic commitment to their beneficiaries.’ According to its website, WIZO South Africa has branches in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria. WIZO South Africa reaches out to and supports women and children in need, both in Israel and in South Africa, and promotes Zionism and fosters a love for the Jewish state. In 2015 Lazarus wrote in the SA Jewish Report on WIZO’s role in providing shelter for battered women, whom were estimated then to be in about 200 000 families in Israel. She noted that both feminism and Zionism had been subjected to relentless attack through what is termed the ‘placard strategy’. Like Zionism, she said, feminism was deprived of its revolutionary content and its ideology undermined.
Mark Pozniak
Mark Pozniak was born in Houston Texas, grew up in Johannesburg South Africa and was educated at King David School Linksfield and the University of the Witwatersrand (Law). In 2021 he was National Vice-Chairman of the SAJBoD. Then he was also a council member of SAJBoD Gauteng, an Executive Committee Member of the WJC, and until 2018 was a Steering Committee member of the World Jewish Diplomatic Corp, the flagship project of the WJC that organises to ‘empower new generations of outstanding Jewish leaders’. He has explained that he has been involved in lobbying efforts both regionally in Africa and locally in South Africa, in defence of the state of Israel and the Jewish people as a whole. This involved spending time with the national leadership of the ANC Youth League as well as with members of the ruling party at senior government level.
Tova Herzl
Tova Herzl was Israeli Ambassador to South Africa during the 2001 WCAR in Durban. Prior to that she had been a Congressional liaison in Washington and then ambassador to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. During the webinar she said that following the WCAR Israel embarked on implementing development programmes in impoverished areas of South Africa and also through cultural exchanges because many South Africans had only seen Israelis on television handling guns. During the second intifada she lost a niece to a suicide bomber and experienced a coolness from South African officials instead of a reaching out with condolences. Notwithstanding the public criticism in South Africa of Israel as an apartheid state, Herzl noted that the official South African government position was support for Israel’s right to exist and for a two state solution, but they were not yet talking about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. She also said that after the WCAR the South African government realised just how damaging it was to have Israel referred to as an the apartheid state.
Irwin Cottler
Irwin Cottler is the International Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights,[6] an Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University, former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General, longtime Member of the Canadian Parliament and an international human rights lawyer. Cottler views anti-Zionism as the ‘new antisemitism’, because it singles out Israel for criticism against standards that no other country is held to, and masks the expression of traditional antisemitic tropes by claiming that these are anti-Zionist critiques only. According to Canadian Jewish News, born in Montreal, Canada, in 1940, after graduating in law from McGill university, Cottler studied law at Yale where he was a classmate of Alan Dershowitz, a well-known Zionist ideological watch dog.[7] The 83-year old Cottler has been involved in facilitating communication between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin that led to a peace accord between Egypt and Israel, as well as in significant human rights issues, including the launching of Canada’s first war crimes prosecution against Desire Nunyaneza for his role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide[8] and chaired the Inter Parliamentary Group of Justice for Sergei Magnitsky (a Russian lawyer allegedly killed in 2009 after uncovering fraud and theft by senior Russian officials).[9]
The Independent Jewish Voices of Canada (IJVC) is critical of Cottler’s appointment as Canada’s Special envoy on preserving holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism. This criticism arises from IJVC’s view that the IHRA weaponises the holocaust to suppress voices for Palestinian rights.
Felice Gaer
Felice Gaer directs the AJC’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for Advancement of Human Rights. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). (The CFR has been identified as a key institution in the implementation and reproduction of US imperialism across the globe — see the Annexure 1.) Between 2000 and 2019 Gaer was Vice Chairperson of the Committee Against Torture. From 2001 to 2012 she served the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom. She was Regents Professor at the University of California Los Angeles in 2010. The Jewish Theological Seminary awarded her Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, in 2018. She chaired the Steering Committee for the 50th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
David Harris
David Harris was (until 2022) the Chief Executive Officer of the AJC, a position he had held since 1990. He has been honoured more than 20 times by the governments of Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Moldova, Poland, Spain and Ukraine for his international efforts on behalf of the defence of human rights, advancement of the transatlantic partnership and dedication to the Jewish people. In the 1980s he advocated for Soviet Jewry, and in 1987 helped steer a rally on the National Mall that brought out 250 000 Jewish people from across the United States.
In 1990 he led a successful campaign to get the United Nations to reverse its 1975 decision that Zionism was racism. This process was facilitated by the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organisation under the leadership of Yasser Arafat recognised not only Israel’s right to exist but also to exist as a Jewish state, a point which I discussed in an earlier article regarding Israel’s ‘rights’. Under Harris the AJC established relations with Muslim and Arab countries long before Israel started to normalise its relationships with the same states. (In the case of the Balkans AJC engagement with Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovinia and Kosovo reinforced a dominant Western view of Serbia). In 2020 the AJC opposed the move by Israel to annex the West Bank but said it would also defend it if it became a fait accompli.
Conclusion
The Zionist perception of the WCAR was that it was an egregious expression of antisemitism. Therefore, in order to make sense of the Zionist response to the critique of Zionism and Israel that was projected and disseminated at the conference we have to be clear about what Zionists mean when speaking about antisemitism and how and why they identify certain events as antisemitic. The second article (referred to above) describes the formal Zionist definitions of antisemitism: the IHRA definition and the JDA. The fundamental Zionist assumption is Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish ethno-state. It follows from this that anti-Zionism, because it challenges that assumption and disputes that right, is a manifestation of antisemitism. This underlies the IHRA and JDA identifying criticism of Israel that is not directed against any other state as antisemitic. Neither the IHRA nor the JDA have defined, and clarified through examples, what is meant by acceptable criticism.[10]
The advertisement for the webinar proclaimed ‘How Durban spawned Global Antisemitism’. The dictionary definition of ‘spawn’ is that the spawn as noun means a mass of eggs; spawn as verb means ‘to produce or deposit spawn, to teem, to come forth as or like spawn’. The text of this advertisement implies that antisemitism spreads through the laying of eggs, and is therefore a natural process, and not one driven by social and state forces. This characterisation of antisemitism is congruent with the linguistic, ontological definition of antisemitism, referred to above (and with reference to Butler in footnote 10).
The panelists on the webinar all expressed a human rights discourse, as exemplified by the track records and practices of people like Cottler and Gaer above, but all participants could lay claim to credentials for a commitment to human rights. These rights are expressed as western liberal democratic rights and there is the assumption that these rights are under threat from authoritarian regimes including so-called Islamo-fascists. Thus, there is partiality to the notion that these rights need to be enforced by force of arms if necessary. Jeff Halper, in ‘War against the People’ (referred to also in my article on Israel’s agenda in Africa) argued that Israel engages in ‘security politics’ because it needs to maintain its global standing, occupation of Palestinian territories and preparedness. Therefore, it serves hegemons (both in the Global North and the Global South) with arms, security tactics and ‘framing’.
Framing is an important term. It refers to a ‘securitizing actor’ creating an object defined as a threat to its (the agent’s) existence, and thereby socially constructing the ‘threat’. The agent can justify moving the ‘threat’ out of the sphere of normal politics. The agent can then identify an ‘enemy’, linked to the ‘threat’, and declare an ‘emergency’ — often a permanent emergency — to deal with the enemy and the threat. Framing inverts the concept of human rights. It demonises authentic human rights activists as ‘terrorists’ or as people exploiting international human rights law to defeat ‘democracies’. Based on the above assumptions Israeli dismisses attempts to hold it accountable to international law as ‘lawfare’ (i.e. its enemies waging war against it through other means, in this case using the law as a weapon of war). (In fact this lawfare is precisely what Israel itself pratices …..).
Seen through this lense the WCAR protests and mobilisations represented the weaponization of international law to destroy Israel. The forthcoming article will describe this framing of the Zionist perceptions of the ideological challenge at the WCAR.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 09 February 2023
[1] Laclau’s and Mouffe’s book is a broad ranging and in-depth criticism of the classical Marxist notion that the structural position of the working class determines its ideological outlook.
[2] As is evident from my earlier articles, I refer extensively and intensively to evidence for the propositions and assertions that I make. The statement that ‘the devil is in the detail’ is apt because analysis presupposes an ability to weigh up evidence to support certain conceptual claims. I make no apology for the detailed content that I bring to each of my articles, because I am addressing a gap in many analyses of the situation in historic Palestine, not only from the Zionist perspective but often from the expressions of the Palestine international solidarity movement as well as from the resistance within.
[3] This does not mean that we should ignore investigating underlying economic and political interests of movements and focus only on their self-expressions. What an individual or social movement thinks about their roles is often at variance with what they do in their other discourses. In an earlier book review I raised the question of the underlying class interests of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) because it is unclear what their ideology envisions as a politically and economically free Palestine.
[4] Between the start of the 2020 lockdown and September 2021 the SA Jewish Report had reportedly hosted 118 webinars which had generated 1,5 million views.
[5] See my article about the alleged antisemitism of Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla, where his comments regarding Israel’s agenda in Africa were likened to tropes from the Protocols.
[6] The Wallenberg Centre’s mission statement includes opposing antisemitism and genocide and defending political prisoners. Unsurprisingly they appear to have taken a stand neither on incremental genocide of Palestinians by Israel nor on the rights of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails.
[7] Watch dog is a term applied by Jean Paul Sartre in his ‘A Plea for Intellectuals’ (page 252), to faux intellectuals who claim to be focused on universal truths but in practice support and defend powerful interest groups and political and economic elites in capitalist societies against the working classes and the rest of the population. Sartre took this word and its meaning from his colleague at the time, Paul Nizan. Dershowitz is known for his ad hominem attacks on prominent critics of Israel, including South African judge Richard Goldstone, the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the well-known Jewish critic of Zionism Norman Finkelstein. Recently investigative journalist Whitney Webb has linked Dershowitz to Jeffrey Epstein, who ran a sexual blackmail operation using minors and vulnerable young women to entice (and compromise) politicians (like Bill Clinton) and and economic elites (like Bill Gates and Prince Andrew).
[8] In an earlier article on Israel’s agenda in Africa, footnote 12 mentions an alternative view that there was not only a genocide by Hutus against Tutsis, but that there were mass spontaneous killings by both Tutsis and Hutus that arose from social breakdown and reflected more closely similar killings in events like the English, Greek, Chinese and Russian civil wars. If this was the case then the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda appears to have been weaponised to support Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front and its western backers against the Hutu formations and population. this would be a clear case of lawfare.
[9] For an alternate, and critical, view of Magnitsky, see Andrei Nekrasov’s film ‘The Magnitsky Act — Behind the Scenes’. For a summary of the critique of the claim that Russian officials killed Magnitsky to cover up their own crime, see this summary of the film.
[10] Zionist scholar Milton Shain gave as an example of exceptional criticism of Israel the global protests against its attack on Gaza in 2008 yet silence in the face of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s [NATO’s] bombing of Kosovo, Russia’s destruction of Grozny, millions of deaths in Central Africa and hundreds of thousands displaced from the Sri Lankan conflict. He claimed that fewer than 10 000 had been killed in the Arab Israeli conflict since World War Two. Shain implies antisemitic motives driving these concentrated anti-Israeli protests. This means an expression of the trope that Jews are a malevolent other.
The IHRA and JDA present examples of “unfair” criticism of Israel as “classical antisemitic tropes”, i.e. while not literally calling out Jews these examples carry anti-Jewish metaphors that Gentile societies developed and made hegemonic over the long exile of the Jewish people from their homeland.
Scholar Judith Butler has provided a useful clarification of the implied logic underlying the Zionist definition of antisemitism. She argued that the Zionist definition of antisemitism is based on a theory of communication in which the words ‘Israel’ and ‘Jew’ are synonymous, such that when the receiver of a message about Israel hears the word ‘Israel’ she will perforce hear the word ‘Jew’. This is the basis for the Zionist notion that one can be antisemitic in effect if not in intent.
Annexure 1 — Council for Foreign Relations
