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Argue, don’t walk out

This is hardly the time for levity, but watching delegates at the Durban anti-racism review conference walk out while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad served up his version of Zionist history, I couldn’t help thinking of Laurel and Hardy: “Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.”

The Geneva U.N. gathering is an event of high seriousness. It coincides with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and Hitler’s birthday. It has been heading for disaster for months with western states and Jewish groups at loggerheads over strategy. It appears to have been derailed by a publicity-seeking, not especially powerful politician, desperately campaigning for re-election. And meanwhile, the millions whose lives are utterly blighted by racial discrimination, violence and hatred are relegated to a footnote.

Some who stayed in their seats clapped and cheered. In whose interests? Did the anti-Israel rhetoric at the 2001 Durban anti-racism conference alleviate the plight of the Palestinians one iota? No. The last eight years have seen a gross deterioration in their position. Did the attempt to brand Zionism a form of racism bring closer an end to the aggressive settlement policy on the West Bank? No. It continued apace. And with Israel’s new rightwing-dominated government, that policy looks likely to intensify. The Palestinians, who deserve a complete and immediate end to occupation and all the repressive policies and human rights abuses that go with it, lost out then and will lose out again.

Jewish groups have long been agonising over what stance to take. Bitter accusations of appeasement and betrayal have been flying around between self-styled individual champions of Jewish and Israeli honour, and Jewish defence organisations unable to make up their minds about fighting expected anti-semitism from inside the tent, or avoiding the taint of appearing powerless to prevent it by remaining outside.

A mess, and doomed, it may well be. But the boycotts by the U.S., Canada, Israel, Italy and others only hand a kind of victory on a plate to those who want to hijack the conference for their own, narrow political purposes. Since when has the U.N. been a children’s tea party? It can’t help for powerful countries to give the impression that they cannot make the arguments that need to be made against Mr. Ahmadinejad and his ilk. And these arguments need to be addressed to a wider world audience. And in whose interests is it for Israel to be playing the victim? Israel too is perfectly capable of making its arguments. What on earth will withdrawing its ambassador from Switzerland achieve? When the dust settles, it will be easy for other states to ask: “Why should we entertain the likes of a far-right racist like your foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman?”’

(Antony Lerman is the former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.)

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