Critics say upcoming U.N. Durban commemoration whitewashes antisemitic 2001 conference

"The Israeli mission to the United Nations and other critics have pushed back against an upcoming UN commemoration of the 2001 Durban conference against racism, an event that critics see as a landmark in contemporary discrimination against Jews.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, on Tuesday called for a boycott of the event. ‘Do not legitimize this toxic legacy,’ he said. ‘There is nothing to celebrate about 25 years of antisemitism and incitement against Israel.’

The UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, brought together thousands of representative from around the world to establish an agreed-upon agenda for combating racism.

The conference was marred by antisemitism and extremist rhetoric against Israel, especially at an NGO forum held in parallel to the governmental conference...

Critics have said that singling out Israel alone in a landmark declaration about racism associates Israel with racism and recasts the conflict as racial, not political.

Anne Bayefsky, the director of New York’s Touro Institute on Human Rights and the president of the Human Rights Voices advocacy group, said, ‘The Durban Declaration claims that Palestinians are ‘victims’ of Israeli racism.’

‘Israel is the only named country, the sole identifiably racist country on earth,’ Bayefsky, who attended the 2001 Durban conference, said in an interview. ‘Durban spins the cause of Palestinians into a racial one, pitting non-Jews against allegedly racist Jews, in the name of combating racism.’...

Danon told The Times of Israel earlier this month that the Israeli mission to the UN is pushing countries to boycott ‘this circus.’

‘I hope them to remind them what happened 25 years ago and why it should not be celebrated, and I hope that many countries will not take part this year,’ Danon said.

Some countries have said they will not participate, while others will send a low-level diplomat instead of a more prominent representative, Danon said.

‘The headline is to fight hate and to fight incitement, but the content is all about promoting hate and promoting incitement against Israel,’ he said. ‘It’s actually hypocritical, and maybe we got used to it at the UN, but when it comes to the Durban Conference, it’s a symbol of that.’

A petition asking world leaders to withdraw from the conference has garnered more than 10,000 signatures.

Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League have also opposed the commemoration and urged states to boycott.

Bayefsky said the commemoration will ‘deny what actually happened at Durban, misrepresent it and then repeat it. Not just to whitewash the despicable reality of UN-driven antisemitism, but also to embrace the messaging.’..."