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Jewish World Review Feb. 17, 2009 / 23 Shevat 5769 Obama's Durban gambit By Caroline B. Glick
Some might argue that no Israeli interest is served by openly condemning the White House. But when the White House is participating in a process that legitimizes and so advances the war against the Jewish state, such condemnation is not only richly deserved but required
The Durban II conference was announced in the summer of 2007. Its stated
purpose is to review the implementation of the declaration adopted at the
UN's anti-Israel hate fest that took place in Durban, South Africa the week
before the September 11, 2001 attacks against America.
At Durban, both the UN-sponsored NGO conclave and the UN's governmental
conference passed declarations denouncing Israel as a racist state. The NGO
conference called for a coordinated international campaign aimed at
delegitimizing Israel and the right of the Jewish people to
self-determination, and belittling the Holocaust. The NGO conference also
called for curbs on freedom of expression throughout the world in order to
prevent critical discussion of Islam. As far as the world's leading NGOs —
including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — were concerned,
critical discussions of Islam are inherently racist.
In defending US participation in the Durban II planning sessions, Gordon
Duguid, the State Department's spokesman argued, "If you are not engaged,
you don't have a voice."
He continued, "We wanted to put forward our view and see if there is some
way we can make the document [which sets the agenda and dictates the outcome
of the Durban II conference] a better document than it appears it is going
to be."
While this seems like a noble goal, both the State Department and the Obama
White House ought to know that there is absolutely no chance that they can
accomplish it. This is the case for two reasons.
First, since the stated purpose of the Durban II conference is to oversee
the implementation of the first Durban conference's decisions, and since
those decisions include the anti-Israel assertion that Israel is a racist
state, it is clear that the Durban II conference is inherently, and
necessarily anti-Israel.
The second reason that both the State Department and the White House must
realize that they are powerless to affect the conference's agenda is because
that agenda was already set in previous planning sessions chaired by the
likes of Libya, Cuba, Iran and Pakistan. And that agenda includes multiple
assertions of the basic illegitimacy of the Jewish people's right to
self-determination. The conference agenda also largely adopted the language
of the 2001 NGO conference that called for the criminalization of critical
discussion of Islam as a form of hate speech and racism. That is, the 2009
conference's agenda is not only openly anti-Israel, it is also openly
pro-tyranny and so, seemingly antithetical to US interests.
Beyond all that, assuming that the Obama administration truly wishes to
change the agenda, the fact is that the US is powerless to do so. As was the
case in 2001, so too, today, the Islamic bloc, supported by the Third World
bloc, has an automatic voting majority. Beyond chipping away at the margins,
the US has no ability whatsoever to change the conference's agenda or
expected outcome.
Since it came into office a month ago, every single Middle East policy the
Obama administration has announced has been antithetical to Israel's
national security interests. From President Barack Obama's intense desire to
appease Iran's mullahs in open discussions; to his stated commitment to
establishing a Palestinian state as quickly as possible despite the
Palestinians' open rejection of Israel's right to exist and support for
terrorism; to his expressed support for the so-called Saudi peace plan which
would require Israel to commit national suicide by contracting to within
indefensible borders and accepting millions of hostile, foreign born Arabs
as citizens and residents of the rump Jewish state; to his decision to end
US sanctions against Syria and return the US ambassador to Damascus; to his
plan to withdraw US forces from Iraq and so give Iran an arc of
uninterrupted control extending from Iran to Lebanon, every single concrete
policy Obama has enunciated harms Israel.
At the same time, none of the policies that Obama has adopted can be
construed as directed against Israel. In and of themselves, none can be
viewed as expressing specific hostility towards Israel. Rather they are
expressions of naiveté, or ignorance, or — at worst — deliberate denial of
the nature of the problems of the Arab and Islamic world on the part of
Obama and his advisors.
The same cannot be said of the administration's decision to send its
delegation to the Durban II planning session this past week in Geneva.
Unlike every other Obama policy, this policy is a hostile act against
Israel. This is true first of all because the decision was announced in the
face of repeated Israeli requests that the US join Israel and Canada in
boycotting the Durban II conference.
Some could chalk up the US's rejection of Israel's urgent entreaties as an
honest difference of opinion. But what lies behind Israel's requests for a
US boycott is not a partisan agenda, but a clearheaded acknowledgement that
the Durban II conference is inherently devoted to the delegitimization and
destruction of the Jewish state. And by joining in the planning sessions,
the US has become a full participant in legitimizing and so advancing this
overtly anti-Jewish agenda.
On Thursday, Professor Anne Bayefsky, the senior editor of the EyeontheUN
website demonstrated that by participating in the planning sessions the US
is accepting the conference's anti-Israel agenda. Bayefsky reported that at
the planning session in Geneva on Thursday, the Palestinian delegation
proposed that a paragraph be added to the conference's agenda. Their draft,
"calls for implementation of …the advisory opinion of the ICJ [International
Court of Justice] on the wall, [i.e., Israel's security fence], and the
international protection of Palestinian people throughout the occupied
Palestinian territory."
The American delegation raised no objection to the Palestinian draft.
Issued in 2004, the ICJ's advisory opinion on Israel's security fence
claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense against Palestinian
terrorism. At the time, both the US and Israel rejected the ICJ's authority
to issue an opinion on the subject.
On Thursday, by not objecting to this Palestinian draft, not only did the US
effectively accept the ICJ's authority, for practical purposes it granted
the anti-Israel claim that Jews may be murdered with impunity.
This assertion aligns naturally with the language already in the Durban II
agenda which calls Israel's Law of Return a racist law. This law, which
grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew who wishes to live here, is
the embodiment of Jewish peoplehood and the vehicle through which the Jewish
people have built our nation-state. In alleging that the Law of Return is
racist, the Durban II conference asserts that the Jews are not a people and
we have no right to self-determination in our homeland. And Thursday, by
participating in the process of demonizing Israel and its people, the US
lent its own credibility to this bigoted campaign.
Obama's spokesmen and defenders claim that by participating in the planning
sessions in Geneva, the administration is doing nothing more than attempting
to prevent the conference from being the anti-Jewish diplomatic pogrom it
was in 2001. If they are unsuccessful, they will boycott the conference. No
harm done.
But this claim rings hollow.
As Bayefsky and others argued this week, by entering into the Durban
preparatory process, the US has done two things. First, it has made it all
but impossible for European states like France, England, the Czech Republic
and the Netherlands, which were all considering boycotting the conference
from doing so. They cannot afford to be seen as more opposed to its
anti-Israel and anti-freedom agenda than Israel's closest ally and the
world's greatest democracy. So just by participating in the planning
sessions the US has legitimized a clearly bigoted, morally illegitimate
process, making it impossible for Europe to disengage.
Second, through its behavior at the Geneva planning sessions this week, the
US has demonstrated that State Department protestations aside, the
administration has no interest in changing the agenda in any serious way.
The US delegation's decision to accept the Palestinian draft, as well its
silence in the face of Iran's rejection of a clause in the conference
declaration that mentioned the Holocaust, show the US did not join the
planning session to change the tenor of the conference. The US is
participating in the planning sessions because it wishes to participate in
the conference.
The Durban II conference, like its predecessor is part and parcel of a
campaign to coordinate the diplomatic and legal war against the Jewish
state. By walking out of the 2001 Durban conference, and refusing to
participate, support or finance any aspect of this UN-sponsored campaign
until last Saturday, for seven years the US made clear that it opposed this
war and believed its aim of destroying Israel is unacceptable.
By embracing the Durban campaign now, it is possible that the Obama
administration will water down some of the most noxious language in
conference's draft declaration. But this doesn't balance out the harm US
participation will cause to Israel, or to the Jewish people. By
participating in the conference, the US today is effectively giving American
support to the war against the Jewish state.
The open hostility towards Israel expressed by the Obama administration's
decision to participate in the Durban process should be a red flag for both
the Israeli government and for Israel's supporters in the US. Both Israel
and its Jewish and non-Jewish supporters must openly condemn the
administration's move and demand that it reverse its decision immediately.
For the past two years, the American Jewish Committee has been instrumental
in convincing the American Jewish community to reject repeated Israeli
requests that they call for a US boycott of Durban II. To secure US
participation over Israel's objections, the AJC even went so far as to sign
a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking her not to boycott the
conference.
In return for the AJC's labors, its senior operative Felice Gaer is now a
member of the US delegation in Geneva. Happily ensconced in the Swiss
conference room where the Holocaust is denied, the Jewish people's right to
self-determination is reviled, and Israel's right to defend itself is
rejected, Gaer now sits silently all the while using the fact of her
membership in the US delegation as proof that the Obama administration is
serious about protecting Israel at Durban II.
Whatever the AJC may have gained for its support for Durban II, Israel and
its supporters have clearly been harmed.
Some might argue that no Israeli interest is served by openly condemning the
White House. But when the White House is participating in a process that
legitimizes and so advances the war against the Jewish state, such
condemnation is not only richly deserved but required. It is the
administration, not Israel that threw down the gauntlet. If Israel and its
supporters refrain from vigorously criticizing this move, we guarantee its
repetition.
Comment by clicking here.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.
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