Twenty-Five Years After Durban, Equating Zionism With Racism Has Entered the Mainstream

The 2001 Durban conference was meant to confront racism. Instead, it became, in the editorial’s telling, a turning point in the modern campaign to delegitimize Israel.

A draft document at the World Conference against Racism equated Zionism with racism and focused on Israel’s right to exist. The United States and Israel eventually walked out. Jewish participants encountered open antisemitism around the parallel NGO gathering, where Israel faced accusations of racism, apartheid and genocide.

The official United Nations conference stopped short of adopting that language. Attempts to insert the equation were defeated, and the final declaration condemned antisemitism. The NGO forum produced a different outcome, accusing Israel of being an “apartheid state,” referring to genocide and racist crimes, and calling for its international isolation. Antisemitic caricatures circulated outside the halls, while demonstrators carried signs praising Hitler.

The editorial argues that Durban’s lasting importance lies in how it recast older accusations. The Soviet Union and Arab states had long portrayed Zionism as racism and Israel as uniquely malevolent. Durban, it says, gave those ideas a new setting among NGOs, international law and human rights organizations.

South Africa’s recent experience with apartheid added force to that framing. The editorial says language associated with South Africa’s racist regime increasingly transferred to Israel, creating a strategy that became familiar over the following quarter-century. Accusations were paired with reports, legal terminology, boycott campaigns and the authority of organizations seen in the West as defenders of universal moral principles.