Israel on Tuesday urged countries not to attend the United Nations’ 25th anniversary of the Durban Conference due to its legacy of antisemitism and targeting of the Jewish state.
The silver jubilee of the notorious 2001 conference in South Africa, which will be marked on September 28 at the United Nations in New York, despite the United States’ opposition, comes just over a week before the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
“It is incredibly ironic and particularly shameful that the 2001 Durban conference, which was the epicenter of virulent antisemitism unseen since the Holocaust, is celebrated by the UN as a commitment to fighting racism,” Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva Daniel Meron said at an event in Switzerland. “By celebrating Durban, the United Nations continues to convey the message that singling out Israel is standard UN playbook.”
The U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, descended into open antisemitism and harassment of Jewish participants, and a parallel NGO declaration branded Israel a “racist, apartheid state” and called for its international isolation, laying the groundwork for modern anti-Israel campaigns and the BDS movement.
“Today the vile libels that were hurled in Durban are not only heard at demonstrations, they are laundered by the United Nations,” the Israeli envoy said. “They are then harnessed to rationalize attacks on Jews and make Jewish communities feel unsafe in their hometowns and home countries,” he added.
“By celebrating Durban as the flagship of anti racism, the United Nations signals that racism against the Jewish people and the Jewish state is permissible. Governments that truly oppose racism should refuse to participate,” he said.
U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Jim Merz, who co-hosted Tuesday’s event, said that 25 years later, multilateral institutions still struggle to confront the corrupted legacy left by the South African conference.
“The distortions cultivated in Durban did not end in 2001... but have been replicated over the ensuing 25 years, including here in Geneva,” he said.
He noted that the United States voted against the United Nations General Assembly proposal two months ago to commemorate the 25th anniversary of an event which, he said, was hijacked and transformed into a platform for antisemitism and anti-Israel bigotry.
“Twenty-five years on, the lesson of Durban is not simply that a conference went badly wrong,” he said. “It is that multilateral institutions, left unchecked, can be captured by the very hatreds they were created to confront,” he said.
