Columnist Michael Kelly wrote this week in the Washington Post that the World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, "lived down to expectations, producing a draft resolution filled with what [U.S. Secretary of State Colin] Powell properly called 'hateful language' that singled out 'only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse.'"
After Israel and the United States walked out of Durban, attempts continued by Canada, South Africa and several European countries to water down the anti-Israel language of conference resolutions.
Meanwhile, commentators in the international media began to debate whether Israel and the U.S. were correct to pull out of the conference and whether they should have sent high-level delegations. Some editorials and commentaries offered strong support for Israel and Zionism, while others balanced this with criticism against Israel's policies towards the Palestinians.
"It had been obvious from the outset that anti-Semitic Israel-bashing would be high on the Durban agenda."
Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
"Zionism is not racism. It is a defensive ideology that seeks to protect a threatened people. And there is not a scintilla of evidence that Jews as a people have ever espoused or condoned racism throughout their long history."
Richard Gwyn, Toronto Star
"There is enough racism for the UN to tackle without letting the success of the entire conference be based on resolving an irreparable relationship between two peoples whose views are so disparate, resolution seems impossible."
Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press
"The United States and Israel were right to walk out of the world racism conference in Durban, South Africa, after it degenerated into an anti-Semitic pep rally."
Denver Post
" [The United States] will continue to reject an Arab-Muslim extremist viewpoint that would target Israel as racist. To characterize Judaism as a race instead of a religion is in itself racist propaganda."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Israel does not get off scot-free
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and an outspoken critic of Israel's West Bank policies, defends Israel against racism charges by saying "Anyone visiting Israel is immediately struck by the fact that it is one of the most multiethnic societies in the world. It is, to be sure, a state for those who have accepted Judaism? The fact is that whatever your racial background, you can convert to Judaism and be accepted with full rights in Israel." But despite these words, Lerner also reminds readers that some of Israel's actions are deplorable.
"In its treatment of Palestinians, Israel has engaged in activities that are morally unacceptable -- violations of fundamental human rights -- and deserve to be criticized? But to single out Israel for special focus, as the Durban conference has done, is totally out of proportion to the realities of the world today."
Michael Lerner, New York Times (registration required)
"The US and Israel, but especially the US, should not be let off scot-free. Their joint walkout, less than halfway through the proceedings, casts doubt on their good faith in attending at all. Israel's decision to leave, after finding itself repeatedly pilloried as a "racist" state, is the more understandable. But for the US to walk out so soon, applying its considerable clout to negative, rather than positive, affect even before negotiations on the final communiqué were complete, smacks of cynical pandering to the folks back home."
The Independent
"The Israelis may not be vulnerable to the charge of racism, but are certainly vulnerable to the charge of apartheid. The aggressive maintenance of their settlements in the West Bank, which are the cause of suppurating collisions with the Palestinian world, such as it is, day after day, cannot be defended. They are arrant ventures in a kind of Israeli irredentism that fractures arrangements and accommodations, after wars and diplomacy dating back to 1948."
William F. Buckley Jr.
"No, it is not anti-Semitic to condemn Israel, not anti-Semitic to protest (even without the occupation) against a democracy in which nearly a million of the population, Israeli Arabs who hold Israeli passports, live within the 1967 borders and are treated as second-class citizens. A very simple truth has emerged out of the debacle of the Durban conference: that you don't fight racism with more racism, and, unfortunately, as the conference revealed, the 'Zionism is racism' doctrine is fostering a climate of increased racial prejudice."
Linda Grant, The Guardian
In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King
In its editorial commenting on the "twisted racism" of the Durban conference, the Boston Globe turned to the words of someone who undoubtedly is considered one of the greatest fighters against racism of all times. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. And what is anti-Zionism? It is the denial to the Jew of the fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord to all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews because they are Jews. In short it is anti-Semitism.''
"When the meaning of words is perverted, as it was in Durban by those who want to define Zionism as racism, the first victims are the peoples who would most benefit from a concerted international struggle against racism."
Boston Globe
"The conference might have been more productive if Colin Powell, America's first black secretary of state, had been in Durban, negotiating language in the proceedings' documents. The U.S. delegation might still have walked out, but the gesture would have carried greater significance."
Philadelphia Inquirer
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