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This is a guest essay by Simone Rodan, a senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In September 2001, friends of mine traveled to South Africa for the “United Nations World Conference Against Racism.” They were young European Jews, and they went to Durban because they believed its cause was theirs.
The promise was extraordinary: a worldwide gathering against racism in a country that had only just defeated apartheid. There would be discussions of slavery and its legacy, of discrimination against migrants, of the persecution of minorities.
Alongside the government delegations, thousands of people from hundreds of NGOs would meet at a parallel forum. This obviously included Jewish student organizations. As children of the generation that had survived the Holocaust in Europe, my friends expected to find people with whom they shared a common fight.
What they found was very different.
Twenty-five years later, the United Nations is preparing to commemorate the declaration adopted there, at a meeting in New York on September 28th. But before another round of speeches about Durban’s achievements, I wish those attending would remember what my friends experienced.
The place to start is Joëlle Fiss’s “Durban Diaries.” Joëlle, then president of the European Union of Jewish Students, who had kept a diary throughout the conference, describes the students setting up their stand: a two-meter wooden table, some pamphlets about antisemitism, an Israeli flag. She writes about how they had wanted to show that friendship with Israel and a commitment to fighting racism could perfectly well go hand in hand. But little did they know that this was not how others saw it.
A Swedish human-rights activist asked Joëlle how she dared raise antisemitism while Palestinians were dying. Joëlle explained that she was European, that she did not always agree with Israel’s leaders, but that she had come to discuss racism. “Murderer,” the woman replied.
That was only the beginning. A crowd gathered. “Israel is committing genocide!” someone shouted. Then: “You should not be allowed to have a stand! You Jews, you have become racists!” There was fear, for the first time amongst the Jewish participants.
Around them circulated pamphlets praising Hitler, caricatures of bloodthirsty Jews, copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” When one NGO asked that the Arab Lawyers Union lose its accreditation over its antisemitic material, the forum’s steering committee replied: “Sorry, we cannot do anything. This brochure is a political expression.”
At 9:50 p.m., Joëlle recorded that the NGO assembly endorsed the right of victims to define their own discrimination. Ten minutes later, a delegate moved to delete the Jewish caucus’s paragraph on antisemitism. That paragraph addressed attacks on Jews and synagogues, and the accusations used to delegitimize Israel’s existence.
“I am against antisemitism, but I am also against the genocide against the Palestinians,” the delegate said. Thirty-nine voted to remove the paragraph. Three voted to keep it.
Everything is in that “but.” Opposing antisemitism became conditional on acknowledging and rejecting Israel’s inherent racism and genocidal nature. The right of victims to define their own discrimination had lasted exactly 10 minutes. The only way for Jews to be heard was if their testimony did not interfere with a verdict against Israel that had already been reached.
The NGO forum’s final declaration branded Israel a racist apartheid state guilty of genocide and called for its complete isolation. Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, declined to recommend it to the governmental conference. And on September 3rd, the United States and Israel walked out.
I have read Joëlle’s diary many times. For Durban’s 20th anniversary, I decided to republish it for the American Jewish Committee. I strongly believed then and now that Durban’s significance does not lie in the presence of antisemites at an anti-racism conference but in the willingness of everyone else to accommodate them, to bend towards them — and in the language that made the accommodation so incredibly easy.
Durban represented a sea change. It marked, in a sense, the beginning of the corruption that would plague our institutions, our language for the decades to come.
The French historian Pierre-André Taguieff was among the first to analyze what happened at Durban. Traditional European antisemites, he noted, had accused Jews of cosmopolitanism: of being foreign, incapable of belonging to the nation. Now Jews were accused of embodying the West itself, including its racism, its nationalism, and its colonial ambitions. They had been “Westernized,” even “Aryanized,” and turned into a kind of “super-white man.”
“The figure of the persecuted Jew,” Taguieff observed, “remains the paradigm of persecuted humanity.” Others could claim that place for themselves while assigning Jews the role of their own persecutors. At Durban, the comparison of the Jewish state to the Nazis made this very apparent.
I saw exactly the same thing happen in Geneva in 2009, at the Durban Review Conference. By then I had worked for France’s ambassador for human rights and had seen from the inside how badly things had slid. Unsurprisingly to me, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took the podium. The Holocaust-denying Iranian president used an anti-racism gathering to attack Israel, describing its very creation as having taken place on the pretext of Jewish suffering.
Students from the French Union of Jewish Students decided once again to demonstrate courageously. They brought rainbow wigs and red clown noses. They interrupted his speech, shouting “Racist!” and threw the noses toward him. Security removed them and Ahmadinejad kept speaking. But the message was clear, and it was probably the best description of the world we had entered: a world of masquerade and clowns.
Once again, the final text was welcomed as a diplomatic achievement. But a cleaned-up resolution could not erase everything that had happened. Rhetorical violence was out in the open, while the final written statement kept a relative appearance of respectable political language.
Beneath these failures lay very different visions about the world and about the purpose of human rights. The Universal Declaration had allowed citizens all over the world to challenge their own rulers, defend minorities, and condemn abuses committed by their allies. The distance between those principles and political reality was often enormous. Still, there was a standard against which failure could be measured.
Pierre-André Taguieff describes what happened in Durban as the “de-universalization” of anti-racism. Universal values came to be treated as an expression of Western domination, while movements opposing the West were welcomed as forces of liberation. Judgment increasingly depended on which camp a government or movement belonged to. How it treated actual people became secondary.
The UN Human Rights Council, created in 2006 to replace a discredited commission, made Israel the only country in the world with a permanent agenda item of its own. That has been just one of the stains the world has so easily lived with.
After October 7th, everything we saw in Durban back then has only taken a different dimension. Addressing an international audience on the morning of October 7th in an English press release, Hamas issued a press release in which it invoked colonialism, apartheid, international law, and genocide. Much of the activist world already understood Israel through those terms. They allowed Hamas to present itself as a liberation movement even after the massacre of civilians, in the eyes of too many people.
Of course, that does not make everyone who uses those terms necessarily a supporter of Hamas. But it does expose the consequences of a worldview in which one side’s violence can always be explained by its oppression, while the other side’s claims are always considered dangerously suspicious. Universal human rights should have made the murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians impossible to excuse. Yet this is not what we have witnessed.
I would have liked us to repair the institutions that allowed this confusion to take hold. That would have meant confronting governments and organizations we preferred to accommodate. It would have meant accepting an argument, a diplomatic incident, perhaps the collapse of a conference. It would have meant walking away, many times. Yet, somehow protecting multilateralism always took precedence over protecting its purpose — not realizing that its very purpose was sliding away.
A few days after the Durban conference ended, the planes struck New York and Washington. Looking back, I associate both events with the end of an illusion I had grown up with in postwar Europe. I had believed that we had learned enough from our history to know what needed defending and what should be named.
Twenty-five years later, the loss of confidence is profound. Authoritarian leaders have learned that the vocabulary of human rights can be borrowed as easily as it can be ignored. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he claimed to be stopping a genocide in the Donbas and he called Ukrainians Nazis. He and others like him have every reason to rejoice over the war the West fights among itself and with the rest of the world over Israel.
Every time an international institution, whether the International Criminal Court or the UN Human Rights Council, stretches its universal principles to apply it specifically to Israel, it means the institutions meant to fight against ruthlessness lose more credibility.
I still care about what those institutions were created to do. That is why another commemoration without an honest reckoning is so utterly dispiriting. On September 28th, I would like everyone to either boycott the event or at least for someone at the podium to speak about the Jewish students who went to Durban to fight racism, and about what their treatment should have taught us.
My friends believed in that fight. I went into human-rights work because I believed in it too. In Geneva, the students with the red noses were trying to defend what the conference itself was mocking. That message should have been heard loudly and clearly. Instead, they were escorted out of the room.
