Making sense of the World Conference against Racism battle of discourses
A critique of Zionist reflections
Preface
A fortnight ago I published an article about a Zionist webinar where the panelists reflected on an ideological defeat that they suffered at the 2001 Durban world conference against racism (WCAR). This article picks up where that one left off. It summarises 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. I also provide a critical perspective on the Zionist views by subjecting their claim about an ‘antisemitic hate fest’ to scrutiny.
The defeat that the Zionists suffered was reflected in a majority-supported conference resolution 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 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delegations withdrew in reaction to these protests and when it became clear that they could not get the resolution rescinded.
The resolution referred to international law as the basis of its demands. I concluded the earlier article by observing that the panelists shared the assumption that Jewish people are under attack from antisemites who use international law as a pretext to accuse Israel of violating standards that no other nation is held accountable to. In response, Israel passes its own laws and lobbies for laws in its allies’ countries, that further criminalise dissent about its policies towards the Palestinian people. In effect, Israel utilises national laws in Israel, North America and Western Europe as weapons in its war against the international solidarity movement, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign as well as resistance internal to historic Palestine. When Israel identifies alleged antisemites weaponising international law it is in fact projecting its own intentional practices, namely weaponisation of national laws to suppress Palestinian rights.
Intense barbarism and antisemitism
A large portion of the initial input to the webinar was from international human rights lawyer Irwin Cottler and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Felice Gaer, who were asked to speak first by Howard Sackstein, the moderator.
Cottler and Gaier explained that there were two forums that made up the conference: the non-governmental organisation (NGO) forum, which convened from 28 August to 01 September 2001, and the actual conference that included governmental representatives, which convened from 31 August to 07 September 2001 (also referred to as the intergovernmental forum, where anti-Zionist ideology was also articulated).
The experience of the panel members was mainly in the context of the NGO forum, which had been organised by the South African Non-governmental Organisation Coalition (SANGOCO) and at its opening was addressed by Fidel Castro for two hours. There were 6 000 delegates attending the NGO forum. A contingent of European Jewish Zionist Youth Movements also attended this forum, and their experiences were captured in ‘The Durban Diaries’, a report produced by the American Jewish Congress (AJC) after the conference: this provides an insider account of what it felt like to be a liberal Zionist European Jew at the NGO forum.
The atmosphere in the NGO forum encountered by Cottler and Gaer, as well as the other panelists (judging from their inputs) and also as described in the Durban Diaries, was apocalyptic. The webinar panelists characterised the forum as an ‘Orwellian happening’. The dictionary definition of Orwellian is ‘characteristic of the dehumanised authoritarian society described in his (Orwell’s) novel 1984’. A similar impression is created from the telling of the experiences of the European Zionist youth groups.
None of the speakers on the panel addressed the question of Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights, which appeared to be the focal point of the most vociferous if not the majority of the NGO forum participants. The panel noted that China, Cuba and Russia, although committing human rights abuses, were not held to the same standards as Israel was. Therefore, they concluded, there was visceral hatred against only one state, namely Israel, and the Jewish people, expressed as the need to dismantle Israeli apartheid. But, they said, the protestors denied that their protest was antisemitic. The panel recalled that in 1975 the United Nations (UN) had declared Zionism a form of racism, but that this declaration had been rescinded. The Durban conference, they said, was a tipping point back to that status, and Sackstein called this ‘almost a blood libel’. At the NGO forum Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, was identified as racist, leading then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to declare the conference as the low point in the history of the Jewish people. What was on display, the panelists said, was antirationality akin to the savagery of Lord of the Flies. (One interpretation of William Golding’s novel is that there is a savage within each of us and it emerges under certain conditions, enacting barbarism).
Within this context the panelists moved to focus on specific incidents of antisemitic behaviour as the evidence for this barbarism.
A pamphlet was distributed at the conference that proclaimed that Hitler did not finish his job in exterminating the Jews. According to The Durban Diaries the pamphlet was authored by Yousuf Deedat, an influential member of the Durban Muslim Community and self-proclaimed friend of Osama bin Laden whom the Johannesburg Sunday Times reported had contributed $3 million to the Islamic Propagation Centre International — the centre was reported to be the headquarters from which the Deedats propagated Islam.
A second example of antisemitism was a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, handed to Cottler who also encountered chanting that Jews did not belong to the human race. It is unclear who handed out the protocols and did the chanting but another panelist, Mary Kluk (then president of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies [SAJBoD] and director of the Durban Holocaust Centre) thought that it was mostly ‘imported people’ and not originated by locals. The Durban Diaries claimed that the Protocols were distributed at the stand of the Arab Lawyers Union.
Third, another panelist Mark Pozniak referred to as antisemitic the proliferation of T-shirts on imperialism and colonialism, denouncing Zionism as racism, and worn by many at the student summit. He reported that he saw the lobby outside the student summit venue transformed ‘into hatred’. There were two people arguing in Hebrew, one not on his side.
Fourth, the panel implied that the very language used in the NGO Forum was antisemitic: using the words ‘genocide’, ‘apartheid’, ‘colonial’ and Nazi-type accusations against Israel.
Fifth, allegedly a senior member of an NGO physically attacked Tamar Lazarus, another panelist, and past-President of the Womens International Zionist Organisation (WIZO).
Sixth, there was offending language that interpellated the Palestinians as victims of racism and Israelis as perpetrators.
Seventh, the Durban Diaries noted that swastikas were painted on to a wall at the conference, threatening letters sent to members of Durban’s Jewish community and pictures distributed depicting Jews with hooked noses and bloodstained mouths.
The Durban Diaries described that there was constant hostility to the delegations representing Jewish Zionist youth movements whenever anti-Zionist groups and individuals encountered them, adversarially challenging all their basic assumptions. The latter’s refusal to normalise the Zionist presence at the forum was experienced as antisemitic.
The Durban Diaries also describes a meeting between the European Zionist Jewish youth movements and Louis Michel, then Belgian minister of foreign affairs, at which they presented examples of the antisemitic material referred to above and he promised to make a strong public statement condemning these. He is reported as also saying that the actions of the Israeli government (the Sharon administration) fostered antisemitism. The Diaries text is critical of this statement because it regards antisemitism and racism as a disease in itself and not contiguous causally with other events. This statement is interesting because it is congruent with the earlier notion of antisemitism being a seed that was spawned by the events at the Durban conference (as reflected in the poster advertising the webinar). It is also consistent with the Zionist definition of the timelessness of both the Jewish ethnos and of antisemitism. The view of the text in the Diaries is that it is dangerous to think that ‘a chain of causalities can rationally explain antisemitism’.
As recounted in the Durban Diaries the above experiences had a profound and disorientating effect on the European Zionist Jewish participants, also acknowledged by the panelists who were also present at the NGO forum. The forum ended on 01 September. A week later, at the conclusion of the intergovernmental forum, the panellists said that they still in a state of shock.
Balance of forces
Sackstein, as moderator, posed the question to the panelists, ‘what went wrong?’ There are two aspects to this question. First, who organised the expressions of anti-Zionism and antisemitism? And, second, why was the Zionist Jewish contingent ill prepared for the onslaught?
Not understanding anti-Zionist forces
The panel had very little to say about the organisation of the expressions of anti-Zionism at the NGO forum.
Lazarus commented that ‘it was very well organised’ and while there was a festive atmosphere outside ‘we were fighting for our lives.’
There was a sense amongst panelists that the events at the NGO forum were orchestrated from outside — the Atul Beit Foundation from Tehran was referred to — and local South Africans were said to have been naively swept up in the festive atmosphere. (Although internet searches failed to reveal a Foundation with this name, it should be noted that the Durban conference was preceded by four regional conferences — the one held at Tehran during February 2001 was referred to by one of the panelists as the worst indictment of Israel as a racist, apartheid state). Gaer emphasiszed the
organisation of the anti-Zionist solidarity by both outside influences as well as within South Africa — Pozniak mentioned Mercia Andrews, then head of SANGOCO, the host NGO organising the NGO forum. (Andrews is currently an active participant in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Cape Town, and the South African BDS Coalition).
Panelist David Harris opined that Durban showed the mutations of an antisemitism link between jihadists and the far left, who see Israel as an expression of Jewish power and attribute conspiracy to explain how Israel could have arisen. Barely three days after the conclusion of the intergovernmental forum, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon took place, on 11 September. The juxtaposition of the conference with 9/11 by the panelists, clearly implied the importance of the stated linkage between jihadists and the far left — there was reference to the latter possibly being used by the former and a noting that if in power jihadists would turn first on the leftists and destroy them.
There was thus very little if any substantive response to Sackstein’s initial question about what went awry. Instead of an analysis panelists tended to repeat the point about the irrationality of their political opponents. Sackstein succumbed to the same tendency of emphasizing the irrationality of their opponents, saying that by referring to Israeli apartheid the accusers of Israel deny the victimhood of the victims of South African apartheid.
Complacency and unpreparedness
The panelists reflected a little bit more substantively on why they were so unprepared for what happened.
First, they said, the US had for some time been pushing against having reparations and Zionism on the agenda. The Zionists involved in attending the conference therefore expected that it would be different — presumably from the Tehran conference earlier that year — in that each state would be focusing on its own issue. So they came to the conference with false expectations.
Panelist Tova Herzl — the then Israeli ambassador to South Africa — explained that Israel focused entirely on the intergovernmental forum and neglected the NGO Forum. And so was unprepared for what happened there.
Herzl also explained that in terms of UN protocols regional groups would provide drafts for themes, issues and resolutions to be put at UN-sponsored conferences. Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights during 2001) was convenor of the intergovernmental forum. Robinson together with Nkosazana Dhlamini-Zuma (then South Africa’s Foreign Minister) decided that the final language of resolutions and agreements would be left to the intergovernmental plenaries rather than finalising textual content prior to the plenaries. However, events in the NGO Forum and on the street converged with what was presented to the intergovernmental forum — the effect was traumatic. So the process of producing the text was not effectively managed by the elites, who were outflanked by the street and the NGO forum.
As Israel had decided to participate at less than ministerial level the Israeli representative were unable to address their concerns to local South African government ministers. So there were no senior Israeli ministers on the ground, who would have been able to directly contact their South African counterparts and demand their intervention.
The panelists agreed that the Zionist Jewish attendees at the conference were in a state of disarray. One panelist, Mark Pozniak, explained that they fought back with the help of the Israeli embassy and worked at the Durban Jewish club day and night to produce materials and disseminate these. Lazarus noted that Christian Zionists provided much needed support (see Annexure 1 for the current network of Christian Zionists in South Africa).
Notwithstanding embassy support to the Zionist participants at the NGO forum, it was said that the South African Jewish community was critical of the Israeli embassy for insufficient support for them as a community. Herzl said that this was the first time she had heard this. She explained that it was Israel’s foreign ministry that was in charge of its relations with the WCAR, and not the embassy. So there was weak leadership from the Israeli state, manifesting in poor communication to the South African Jewish community.
Herzl also explained that the decision to walk out of the conference was made depending on the way the issues played out. The US and Israeli delegations walked out of the intergovernmental forum as a matter of principle. The walk out signified a defeat for both Israel and the US.
Salvaging the remains
According to (then) ambassador Herzl the governments of Canada, Australia, European nations and South Africa came together to salvage the situation through the crafting of a resolution acceptable to all parties. The South Africa state ideological apparatuses (mainly through its foreign affairs department) together with the media communication system played a key role in formulating a resolution that satisfied the Europeans and the Israelis. Herzl said that the closing resolution pleased Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister. She also said that the South African government realised that it had distressed the local Jewish community and went out of its way to assuage their feelings — in 2002 then South African deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad addressed the annual South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) conference, and his text came close to an apology (see Annexure 2 for the SAZF affiliates network).
The struggle — Quo Vadis?
The panelists agreed that the anti-Zionist critiques expressed at the Durban conference — viewed by them as irrational antisemitism — metastasized[1] and appeared also in the discourse of individual international NGO forums. Mainstream NGOs like Human Rights Watch (HRW) had, they said, become the enablers of this anti-Zionist/antisemitic discourse. They perceived the then recent HRW report characterising Israel as an apartheid state as an example of this.
They noted that the UN Human Rights Council (UN HRC) had also focused one-sidedly on Israel’s alleged violations of human rights. An example that was given in this regard was that the HRC enquiry into the human rights situation in Israel proper and in the occupied Palestinian territories made no reference to Hamas and its violations. The challenge was to improve the process of selecting office bearers to the UN HRC.
The panelists reflected on two strategic responses to counter the growing support for the BDS movement, according to them a manifestation of irrational antisemitism: first, to be well prepared for international conferences and to organise huge numbers of Zionists to attend these; and, second, to proactively respond to the challenge of intersectionality by developing a new framework language that emphasises the struggles of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement,[2] the Rohingya[3] and Uighur Muslim[4] struggles against genocide as well as other global struggles against xenophobia.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development took place in Johannesburg during September 2002. There was a huge Israeli student delegation present as they had learnt the lesson from the WCAR in Durban. There were limited demonstrations against Israel, and the text of resolutions was finalised prior to the conference. They also held events to showcase Israeli’s diversity. The panelists thought that this ensured that it was reasonable for Israel to attend the summit.
As an example of Israel taking the initiative to project a positive developmental image they referred to the Israeli Defence Force teams that were sent to Mexico to assist that state during a volcano eruption disaster in 2015.
The 2001 WCAR was not the last such event. So-called Durban 2 and 3 conferences were held respectively in 2009 and 2011.
Ten countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the US and the Czech Republic) boycotted the 2009 conference, which reviewed the 2001 conference, and 14 boycotted (the above ten plus Austria, Bulgaria, France and the United Kingdom) the 2011 conference.
The position of the boycotters as explained by the panelists was not to allow antisemites to control the agenda. The fourth review of the Durban conference was due on 21 September 2021, almost three weeks after the webinar. The panelists generally agreed that they could not fix the Durban process and had therefore to disconnect from it. Disconnection meant to boycott attending the fourth review and to set up counter events. Recently panelist Ahmed Shaheed had been at the forefront of a Canadian conference to combat antisemitism.
The panelists agreed that while Jews alone could not defeat antisemitism they could play a role in mobilising globally to unmask and expose anti-Zionism as antisemitism. At the time of the webinar 12 nations had agreed to boycott the fourth review conference, and 19 more were being targeted to follow suit. In the event 38 nations boycotted the 21 September 2021 review. These were Albania, Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, the UK, the US and Uruguay. The European Union also did not participate or speak at the commemoration.
Asked by Sackstein about where South Africa stood in relation to the Durban process Pozniak opined that it was an uphill struggle to get the South African state onside. They tackled it bit by bit. The reality was that Israel is a political football and an easy target in South Africa. He said that the SAJBoD fights antisemitism in the streets, through the courts and engages with government in an attempt to influence them.
The webinar thought that the way forward was to see themselves as the guardians of civilisation, the veneer of which was being stripped away by the new antisemitism. Panelist David Harris, chief executive officer of the AJC for 32 years, mentioned that in the US 52 per cent of all racist incidents manifest as antisemitism. He also said that although only two per cent of the population, Jewish US citizens are the targets of 30 per cent of all racist incidents. They had to struggle to rule out racism, and disconnect from the Durban process. It was imperative that all countries adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, as this was the principled basis for fighting racism. Zionists should not allow their opponents to get away with contraventions of the IHRA definitions and examples. Panelist Shaheed, in addition, emphasised that they should engage with the youth globally.
Conclusion — Antisemitism and anti-Zionism
The Zionist view of their anti-Zionist opponents is that they express an antisemitic animus which has no basis in reason.
It is important to look for the evidence behind this claim of widespread antisemitism at the 2001 Durban conference.
Looking through the evidence that they present for this requires parsing out anti-Israel political discourse in order to isolate the events at which Jews qua Jews were othered.
The only evidence produced by the panelists was the Hitler Handbill pamphlet. In addition they also claimed the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Furthermore the AJC’s ‘Durban Diaries’ refers to painted swastikas, threatening letters to members of Durban’s Jewish community and pictures of Jews represented as in the Nazi Julius Streicher’s newsletter, Der Stuermer: but neither at the webinar discussion nor in the ‘Durban Diaries’ were pictures presented as evidence of these incidents.
The panelists insinuated that these antisemitic events and anecdotes were linked with the organisers of the NGO forum. They specifically referred to an alliance between the ’far left and jihadists’. But precisely which organisations represented this alliance was not spelt out. The panelists associated the antisemitism of the WCAR, which ended on 08 September 2001 with the attacks on the World Trade Centre (New York) and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. The panelists also referred to further antisemitic verbiage about Jews being behind the violent and destructive events of 11 September.
The AJC’s “Durban Diaries” specifically identifies the IPCI and the Arab Lawyers Union, as well as Yousouf Deedat (referred to earlier). Yet there is nothing on the IPCI website nor through an internet search on Yousouf Deedat to indicate animus towards Jews. Nor is there evidence of Deedat’s links with jihadists — in 2017 Deedat was reported as cleared of charges of domestic violence as well as of terrorism (in connection with distributing Islamic State (ISIS) -related Islamic pamphlets at a school in Durban), meaning that his sympathies with Osama bin Laden remain hearsay. In 2020 Deedat was assassinated outside the Verulam magistrate’s court, for reasons unknown.
An internet search also did not reveal a website for the Arab Lawyers Union, but did locate a brief reference to the Union being located in Cairo.
The Zionist association of the anti-Zionism displayed at the WCAR with the attacks on 11 September is unsubstantiated. But there is evidence of Israeli intelligence officials being active in the US who were detained on the same day subsequently deported to Israel. Investigative journalist David Sheen, writing in The Gray Zone, demonstrated that these were likely not part of the conspiracy. There is also reasonable doubt about the official narrative explaining the events of 11 September. Within this context the questions about possible Israeli intelligence involvement are legitimate rather than an expression of antisemitic tropes.
It was not only Zionists who referred to antisemitic incidents at the Durban 2001 conference: a social justice activist from Independent Jewish Voices Canada identified the antisemitic actions of ‘a few marginal NGOs’ which participated in Durban. He said that the government of Israel had responded to these incidents by branding the entire WCAR as an ‘antisemitic hatefest’.
An internet search for a statement by SANGOCO with respect to the antisemitic incidents referred to above revealed nothing. Besides the need for an in-principle response there is a sound strategic reason for responding, namely to contest the Zionist narratives that eventually became dominant in the media. A similar situation arose in 2015 and 2016 on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, when protests organised by the then NGO BDS South Africa degenerated into antisemitic calls. The NGO was criticised — including critics from within the solidarity movement — for not taking a public principled stand dissociating itself from these calls and rejecting them outright. Palestine solidarity critics of BDS South Africa were also involved in the cancellation of the BDS franchise to BDS South Africa, through lobbying the Boycott National Committee (in Israel/Palestine).[5] (BDS South Africa has since morphed into Africa for Palestine).
Notwithstanding the need for a principled stand against antisemitism as a form of racism, Zionists have clearly weaponised the term in order to delegitimise criticism of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians, which violate their rights. Harris’ claim about the disproportionate incidence of racism against Jews in the US (compared with other minorities) is based on two surveys undertaken by the AJC during 2020, and are commented on and analysed in one of my earlier articles.
That article observed that the meaning of antisemitism in the US ideological state apparatuses’ discourses includes anti-Zionism as a new form of antisemitism that targets the legitimacy of the state of Israel allegedly through using classical antisemitic canards and tropes. The article also noted that the articulation of the dominant discourse around antisemitism does not explain the codes that link critique of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinian people with classical anti-Jewish canards and tropes. Particularly, this discourse avoids explanation of how one should interpret what it claims are antisemitic canards (e.g. statements about ‘Jewish money’, ‘Jewish influence’ and ‘overemphasising the holocaust’) when these can be shown to be true. The IHRA definition is what underlies the meaning of ‘support for antisemitism’ which is explored in these surveys, although a quarter of US adults (according to the AJC survey) did not understand what antisemitism meant; the AJC surveys also reported that despite between 75 and 97 per cent of Jewish US adults having no experience of antisemitism in the past five years, 88 per cent of the same demographic noted that antisemitism was a problem and 82 per cent that it had become worse over the past five years. Consequently the AJC surveys results raise more questions than they answer. Finally, the article noted, the surveys also included loaded questions about BDS. It is reasonable to question whether the AJC survey was designed tendentiously, i.e. to demonstrate an increase in antisemitism through an increase in anti-Zionist practices through BDS.
I will return to the question of the incidence of antisemitism in the US in a future article. At this stage I can report that based on extensive research of media reports between 2018 and 2021 incidents of antisemitism in the US have emerged from individuals with an ethno-nationalist motivation (white survival and supremacy) and also in the case of New York from a largely black and marginalised working class neighbourhood targeted at orthodox Jews. But there was no evidence of systematic antisemitism from either the BLM movement or the Palestine solidarity formations, including BDS-affiliated organisations, in the US. I will refer to the historical facts on which I base this conclusion in that future article.
However, for Zionists the empirical facts are of no concern, because for them antisemitism is like a virus. Linked to this is the Zionist search to identify malevolent people and states as the drivers of the antisemitic waves. Iran fulfils the function of the ‘evil empire’ in the Zionist lexicon.
This Zionist ideological perspective is the lense through which Zionists and the state of Israel have managed to build a consensus with economic and political elites in Western Europe, the UK and North America, who share these assumptions. They have been far less successful elsewhere in Latin America and Africa — few if any of these countries boycotted the fourth review of the Durban conference and there are no African states that have signed up to the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
The Zionists badly underestimated the strength of and extent of support for the ideological critique mounted at the NGO forum at the 2001 conference. In reaction to their defeat at Durban Zionists mounted a counter offensive claiming that the entire conference was about Israel and Jews. In fact the tone and theme of the NGO forum was the critique of imperial globalisation, within the context of which the critique of Zionism and Israel was one issue. In addition there were work stayaways and protest marches organised by the Congress of South African Trade Unions against the African National Congress government’s anti-worker policies. There were also militant mass marches protesting the status of those who remained landless in South Africa as well as elsewhere. In short the NGO forum forged linkages between individual national struggles and global US imperialism. Within this process there was uneven support for an anti-imperialist front on the one hand and a narrower focus on demanding equal racial opportunity within privatised economic processes in individual countries (this for example was the approach taken by the US Black Leadership Forum).
Since the conference the critique of Israel as a racist, colonial and apartheid state has grown persistently, as the BDS movement has spread around the world and developed concentrated power particularly in Western Europe, the UK and North America, where ironically the strongest and bureaucratically most powerful pro-Zionist ideological state apparatuses are located. The development of the global BDS movement reflects mobilisation and organisation by activists on the ground and the engaging in struggles with Zionists particularly around the meaning of antisemitism. I devoted an entire article to examining specific ideological struggles in Austria, the UK and South Africa, contesting the meaning of the German genocide of the Jews — for Zionists a clear coding of antisemitism and for their antagonists a legitimate questioning and interrogation of a historical event. In a further article in this series I detailed ideological struggles in the UK and Germany over the meaning of antisemitism where the genocide did not form part of the content but other examples of the IHRA were used to identify and target alleged antisemites.
Despite the strategies devised for the state of Israel by the Reut Institute over the last ten years, currently Israel still acknowledges that the BDS movement remains an existential threat. Israel’s weakness is in countering the human rights strategy that lies at the heart of the BDS movement. By persisting with the myth of a barbaric antisemitism underlying anti-Zionism Israel misses seeing the considerable organisational practices that went on between formations in Israel/Palestine and SANGOCO and its constituent groupings.
The Plan and Strategy to combat Racism, which led to the WCAR, was launched by the South African government in 2000, and it identified a role of SANGOCO in promoting this strategy. The plan referred to the need for adjustments to the World Economic Order as well as reparations for the descendants of the victims of slavery and colonialism. The conference, to be held under the auspices of the UN, was one outcome of this plan. The full story of the organising for the conference, involving the bringing together of representatives of major sporting bodies, churches, women, labour, youth and other civic organisations in South Africa, as well as SANGOCO’s engagement with Palestinian civil society organisations and other global NGO coalitions remains to be told. But therein lies the true source of the strength of the international Palestine solidarity movement and its watershed moment of September 2001.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 12 February 2023.
[1] The 20th Century Chambers dictionary defines metastasize as ‘to pass to another part of the body, as a tumour’. For Zionists criticism of and protest against Israel is a manifestation of a deeper cancer, antisemitism, which spreads in the manner that toxic cells of the body infect healthy cells.
[2] I will in a future article examine the links between the BLM movement, the Zionist formations as well as the BDS movement.
[3] A dominant western consensus is that the Burmese are committing genocide against the Rohingya Muslims. An alternative view is that the ‘genocide’ discourse has been manufactured as part of the US strategy to encircle China.
[4] An academic dissertation from Canada details the dispossession and oppression of the Uighur Muslims by the Chinese government. However, an independent investigative report shows that in the US the Uyghur American Association, an affiliate of the World Uyghur Congress (a recipient of millions of dollars from the National Endowment for Democracy), is part of a network of US state and right wing groups that are fomenting a violent conflict in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
[5] I know about this process as a participant-observer, but that is another story for another occasion …..
Annexure 1 — South African Christian Zionist network
Annexure 2 — SAZF affiliates network
Reference list — SA Christian Zionist network
Africa Israel Initiative, Accessed in 2021 Website. Available at: www.africa-israel.org
Bridges for Peace, Accessed in 2021 Website. Available at: www.bridgesforpeace.com
Impact for Christ Ministeries, Accessed in 2021. Website. Available at: www.impactforchristsa.com
ICCC, Accessed in 2021 Global Network of Believers in the Workplace. Available at: www. http//.iccc.net
Institute for Christian Leadership and Development, Accessed in 2021 Website. Available at: www.icld.co.za
International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, Accessed in 2021 Website. Available at: www.icej.org.za
SAFISA, Accessed in 2021 South Africa Friends of Israel Network. Available at: www.safisa.co.za
Vuka Africa, Accessed in 2021 Website. Available at: www.vukaafricafoundation.co.za
Reference list — SAZF affiliates network
Bnei Akiva (Zionist youth), accessed in 2023. Available at: https://bnei.co.za
Betar (Zionist Youth), Accessed in 2023. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/BetarSA
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Embassy of Israel in South Africa, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://www.embassypages.com
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Israel Centre, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://israelcentre.co.za/aliyah
Israel United Appeal, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://iuaucf.org.za/wp/index.php/iua
Jewish Agency for Israel, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://www.jewishagency.org
Jewish National Fund South Africa, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://www.jnfsa.co.za
Maccabi South Africa, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://maccabi.co.za/site
Magen Dovid Adom in South Africa, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://magendavidadomsa.wordpress.com/about
Netzer, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://www.netzer.org.za/our-ideology
SA Jewish Board of Deputies, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://www.sajbd.org
SA Jewish Board of Education, accessed in 2023.Available at: https://kingdavid.org.za/sabje
SA Union of Jewish Students (Zionist Youth), accessed in 2023. Available at: https://www.saujs.co.za
SA Union of Progressive Judaism, accessed in 2023. Available at: https://saupj.org.za
Telfed, Accessed in 2023. Available at: https://www.telfed.org.il
Union of Orthodox Synagogues, accessed in 2023. Available at: http://www.uos.co.za
WIZO South Africa, Accessed in 2021 Who’s Who. Available at: http://www.wizo.co.za
