“Durban was the restarting of the Zionism is Racism campaign. It was the blueprint for accusing Israel of genocide and starvation and war crimes,” Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
Monday marks 25 years since the “Durban” Conference, officially the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in South Africa from August 31 to September 8, 2001.
Over 12,000 representatives came together to forge a common strategy against discrimination.
However, ironically, the conference has become synonymous with discrimination of the anti-Zionist kind, and is considered by many the birthplace of modern anti-Israel rhetoric.
Preceding the conference was the NGO Forum, which had over 7,000 participants gather to create a pre-planned and coordinated anti-Israel strategy. It was here that the intentional use of words such as “genocide,” “war crimes,” and “apartheid” entered the scene.
UN Resolution 3379 equated Zionism with racism
Six months before Durban, a preparatory conference had taken place in Tehran, although the Islamic Republic of Iran had refused to grant permission to Israeli and Jewish organizations.
In their absence, the delegates drafted a summary document accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” of implementing “a new kind of apartheid” and “a crime against humanity,” and saying Zionism was “based on race superiority” – a document that formed the basis for the NGO declaration at the main conference in Durban.
Ahead of Durban, Secretary of State Colin Powell warned the UN officials that the US would not participate if the agenda was used to restart the Zionism is racism campaign.
The UN high commissioner at the time, Mary Robinson, promised them that this would not happen, but when they arrived, they found no change. The US and Israel ultimately walked out of the conference.
The final NGO declaration called for the restoration of UN Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism and demanded the application of all measures used against apartheid South Africa to Israel.
Steinberg told the Post that Durban was the restarting of the Zionism is Racism campaign that had been run 26 years earlier in 1975 by the Soviet Union and the Arab League.
The language itself can actually be traced back to 1948, and the use of the term Nakba and “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what Germans did to the Jews.” However, this did not gain so much traction outside of Palestinian spheres.
The difference at Durban, Steinberg continued, was that it became legitimate, mostly due to the commandeering of non-governmental organizations under the label of human rights.
“And that has been the engine that has driven the demonization of Israel and language like genocide, starvation, deliberate killing of children, war crimes,” Steinberg told the Post.
Steinberg said the specific strategies developed during Durban have been refined and expanded over the last 25 years, and that NGOs keep coming back to the same language and the same processes that were first used at Durban.
“At the Durban NGO forum there was no debate – they adopted a plan of action naming Israel specifically and repeatedly as a genocidal state, committing war crimes, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and then they established mechanisms for the complete isolation of Israel. Nothing there was incidental or accidental.”
Durban is also where the BDS movement began, and where the International Criminal Court was chosen as the appropriate body to label Israel as the “world’s biggest violator of international law,” Steinberg continued.
Implementation of strategy
Steinberg said the first time NGOs rolled out the new strategy was six months after the Durban conference with the Jenin Massacre myth.
In April 2002, multiple international media outlets and NGOs spread unverified claims that the Israeli military deliberately killed hundreds of civilians during the Battle of Jenin. Rumors claimed 500 people had been massacred and buried in mass graves.
Amnesty International and Christian Aid were instrumental in spreading the rumor.
However, subsequent investigations by human rights organizations (including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) found no evidence of a massacre.
“It was obviously a lie, but it got a lot of traction. Journalists picked it up. NGOs spoke of Israeli war crimes, and they repeated that all the way through the last 25 years,” said Steinberg.
“Durban was a blueprint which went beyond calling Zionism racism, but added genocide, starvation, war crimes, and all those other elements.”
The same thing has happened time and time again, he continued.
“Every single time there was a military clash or a terrorist clash, and Israel responded – the 2006 Lebanon war, the 2008-2009 first Gaza war, Operation Cast Lead, the Goldstone Report, Operation Protective Edge – all those mechanisms were trotted out.
“The condemnation of Israel, the fact-finding commissions, the NGO reports, social media.
“Then, when October 7 started, they had already practiced all of the elements of the Durban strategy. It just exploded in a much greater magnitude, but it was all there in all of the years before.”
Launching NGO Monitor
In response to what he was seeing and the bastardization of the role of NGOs, Steinberg launched NGO Monitor.
“Having watched this process take place and expressing my concerns and seeing the amount of power and influence of NGOs, and how the UN went along with it, I thought I could do a project and document the political role of NGOs, and particularly the manipulation of the language of human rights and the mechanisms of human rights,” he told the Post.
“I thought, ‘I can do that for a few years as an academic, write a couple of articles, maybe a book, and have some graduate students.’
“It was supposed to be a three-year project at a university, and it turned into NGO Monitor, because the deeper that I dug in understanding the NGO industry, and I began to see it as an industry, the more I realized how much power and influence they have, and how little attention was being paid.
“There are huge amounts of money going into these organizations which have no accountability, no democratic frameworks; all of their decisions are made in secret, behind closed doors.”
Antisemitism at Durban
Another key part of the Durban conference, aside from the targeting of Israel, was the shocking and overt displays of antisemitism.
At the forum, NGOs sold copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Pamphlets were also distributed showing Hitler’s photograph with text reading: “What if I had won? The good thing is there would have been no Israel and no Palestinian’s [sic] bloodshed.”
There were multiple reported examples of Holocaust revisionism and Jewish members being told: “Blood was on their hands.”
Holocaust survivor and US Congressman Tom Lantos called the Durban Conference “the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”
Former minister of justice and attorney-general of Canada Irwin Cotler said, “If 9/11 was the Kristallnacht of terror, then Durban was the Mein Kampf.”
There was one notable outcome of this Jew-hatred: the gradual writing of what’s now called the Working Definition of Antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
In the immediate aftermath of Durban, Steinberg said many Jewish leaders came together and discussed the urgency of developing a modern definition of antisemitism to reflect what they saw at the forum.
The definition was first published in 2005 by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia. It was then officially adopted by the IHRA in 2016.