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Malicious accusations of genocide against Israel did not begin with the Hamas-Israel war. The 10/7 massacres were a catalyst in a conspiracy that began 25 years ago in South Africa – where NGO activists, hostile countries and UN officials coordinated in Durban, ending days before the 9/11 terror attacks. On Sept 28, the UN will convene a meeting in NY to mark the 25th anniversary of the Durban declaration.
The Durban conferences were designed to become a landmark in confronting racism, but instead, turned into “a hallmark of antisemitism and antizionism,” in the words of The World Jewish Congress. Participants created a set of false and vilifying charges against the world’s only Jewish state – apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide – a full generation before the war in Gaza.
These poisonous narratives have sparked an unprecedented, global firestorm of antisemitic attacks at schools, city councils, synagogues and even on sidewalks – all while demonizing Israel.
Singling out Israel
The UN’s World Conference Against Racism convened in Sept. 2001 alongside a separate forum for 7,000 NGO activists. Non-governmental organizations are nonprofit groups that operate independently of any governments to achieve their goals.
The outcome was set before the delegates arrived. The Islamic Republic of Iran chaired a preparatory meeting and refused entry to Israeli and Jewish organizations, despite assurances from the UN human rights chief. In their absence, the delegates produced a document accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and apartheid – describing Zionism as a doctrine based on racial superiority.
The Durban conference concluded with a declaration that condemned only one country: Israel. The text “recognized the right of refugees to return” – a demand for unlimited Palestinian immigration into Israel.
The chief historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center, Dr. Dina Porat, was part of the Israeli delegation. She asked the Belgian representative chairing the sessions how the conference had turned on Israel so quickly. He explained that most delegations came from countries once under colonial rule and wanted compensation for it – and that Spain, Portugal and Belgium would be the ones paying. Then he added: “The simple solution to this problem was to pick on Israel and the Jews.”
‘The Complete and Total Isolation of Israel’
Activists harassed Jewish participants at the parallel NGO Forum. Vendors sold the antisemitic Russian screed Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and activists handed out pamphlets with Hitler’s photo asking, “What if I had won?”
The Roma – Europe’s largest ethnic minority who also were targeted by the Nazis for extermination – walked out of the Forum and condemned the Declaration’s text as antisemitic. Then-U.S. Rep. and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos described the Durban Conference as “the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”
The NGO Forum released its own declaration that also invoked the “right of return” and called for the “complete and total isolation of Israel.” The Forum declared that Israel’s “brand of apartheid” included “acts of genocide and practices of ethnic cleansing.”
The declaration also demanded that the UN reinstate its 1975 Soviet-backed resolution branding Zionism a form of racism, which it had revoked in 1991. Zionism is the right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland.
The NGO Monitor, founded in response to the Durban conferences to track anti-Israel networks, labeled the campaign the “Durban Strategy.” The executive director of UN Watch, identified Durban as the institutional launch of Israel’s demonization as a racist state. Human rights activist and former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, who attended the conference, said Durban turned the language of human rights into cover for antisemitism at the UN. He called it the “tipping point for the laundering of antisemitism at the UN.”
Representatives of 1,500 organizations adopted the NGO Declaration as grounds for boycotts and sanctions against Israel. Its terms moved directly into mainstream headlines, endorsed by NGO leaders including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Both organizations have spent decades weaponizing the language of human rights against Israel. Amnesty went further in Dec. 2024, declaring Israel guilty of genocide in Gaza while acknowledging it had applied a looser standard of proof for intent than the International Court of Justice requires. Amnesty’s own Israel branch accused the international body of working toward a “predetermined outcome.”
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