THE PLANK APRIL 20, 2009
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Geneva, SwitzerlandWhen I walked in the door of the Israel Review Conference, I expected to find manic, kaffiyah-clad activists burning Israeli flags and chanting "Death to the Jews." The gathering, entitled “United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation: Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People,” was sponsored by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee. Being the main anti-Israel event planned for the weekend of the Durban Review Conference, I assumed I would find the same rabid activity that I read about during the first Durban conference.Instead, in the basement of a run-down hotel in a quiet Geneva neighborhood, I found a tame gathering of about 150 academics, intellectuals, and stern-faced activists. The majority of the crowd was white, over 50, with graying hair, sensible glasses, and corduroy jackets. No mohawks, Che shirts, or button-laden messenger bags. And not one kaffiyah (not even one of those trendy pastel-colored ones from Urban Outfitters). There was no sloganeering, chanting, or hate-filled rhetoric. Instead, there were laborious panels debating the minutiae of international law as it related to the Palestinian plight. The sessions were on such technical topics as "Examining the Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel" and "Civil torts claims and related mechanisms in US courts," led by professors and graduate students from obscure universities, human rights lawyers, and a "Swiss feminist economist." To be honest, coping with jet-lag while listening to two academics debate the difference between Bantustans and cantons, I definitely had trouble staying awake. Is this really the best they could do?To be sure, the table outside the meeting room was filled with the usual anti-Israel paraphernalia, such as "Free Palestine" stickers, the charter of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (one of the conference's co-sponsors), postcards with maps of Israeli settlements, and flyers advocating a boycott of beauty products from Israeli company Ahava. I kept myself awake during the sessions by reading zines filled with articles about Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Israeli army refuseniks ("Israel's real heroes"), and three French and Canadian Jews who have asked that their grandparents names be removed from Yad Vasshem. Israel's holocaust memorial, since Israel's treatment of the Palestinians "disqualifies Israel to be the center of the memory of the harm done to Jews." One pamphlet, "The truth about Gaza," claims to debunk the "myth" that Israel "tries to minimize civilian casualties" by saying that "Israel has the most technologically advanced weaponry in the world." (No connection is made to the fact, as noted in an entry elsewhere on the page, that "Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth.") But beneath the veneer of dry academic debates, there were actually some interesting discussions going on. One such discussion was whether to use analogies to Nazism or words like "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" in advocating for the Palestinian cause. Some activists argued that using such language would alienate more moderate people. Joseph Schechla, the Cairo-based coordinator of Habitat International Coalition, advocated using "the language of 'crime'" rather than genocide, which could lead to smaller-scale trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. “Putting people in prison and getting reparations for victims would be plenty enough to get results,” he said. But shortly after, an Iranian professor stood up and declared, "All of us believe that the Israeli regime is … committed genocide … Israel must be tried and punished." Do these tame discussions bode well for the tenor of the rest of the conference? As the first day of the conference came to an end, a group of Iranian men in dark suits sketchily slipped into the back of the conference, surveying those in attendance. All of them were wearing white baseball caps that read, "Imam Khomeini: Israel must be wiped away." --Zvika Krieger
7 comments
"There was no sloganeering, chanting, or hate-filled rhetoric. Instead, there were laborious panels debating the minutiae of international law as it related to the Palestinian plight. The sessions were on such technical topics as "Examining the Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel" "
Is this supposed to make it alright to single out Israel as a uniquely evil country?
The t "technical title" of the discussion panel assumes that Israel is an Apartheid society. Where there any discussion groups of Iranian suppression of dissent, or the killing of and jailing of union members and women for "the crime of adultery?"
Where there any demonstration against Mugabe, against Sudan or for the liberation of Tibet?
Why is Israel being singled out?
This is what you ought to be writing about and not about some nutty “grandchildren” of Holocaust victims. Who are these people? How do you know they are who they say they are? I know a child of a Holocaust survivor who was Stalinist and is still a Stalinist and hates Israel with a Stalinist passion.
People like that are best ignored.
- jacksondyer
April 20, 2009 at 10:51am
"There was no sloganeering, chanting, or hate-filled rhetoric. Instead, there were laborious panels debating the minutiae of international law as it related to the Palestinian plight. The sessions were on such technical topics as "Examining the Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel" "
Is this supposed to make it alright to single out Israel as a uniquely evil country?
The t "technical title" of the discussion panel assumes that Israel is an Apartheid society. Where there any discussion groups of Iranian suppression of dissent, or the killing of and jailing of union members and women for "the crime of adultery?"
Where there any demonstration against Mugabe, against Sudan or for the liberation of Tibet?
Why is Israel being singled out?
This is what you ought to be writing about and not about some nutty “grandchildren” of Holocaust victims. Who are these people? How do you know they are who they say they are? I know a child of a Holocaust survivor who was Stalinist and is still a Stalinist and hates Israel with a Stalinist passion.
People like that are best ignored.
- jacksondyer
April 20, 2009 at 10:54am
"I expected to find manic, kaffiyah-clad activists burning Israeli flags and chanting "Death to the Jews.""
And then preconceptions met reality. Surprisingly, it turns out Krieger's readings did not accurately represent what he could expect.
"There was no sloganeering, chanting, or hate-filled rhetoric. [..] Is this really the best they could do?"
Ah yes - damned if they do, damned if they don't.
And of course "postcards with maps of Israeli settlements" and "articles about Israeli war crimes in Gaza [and] Israeli army refuseniks" are sure signs of the presence of not just opponents of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, but anti-semites.
The interesting thing is that when I started reading Zvika's blog posts, I was outraged about Lybia hosting these events, and deeply sceptical about the whole Durban II thing after last time's fiasco with its rampant anti-semitism. But like with Darby on education, Kirchik on South-Africa and now Toro on Venezuela, TNR has sent out a blogger who actually manages to turn me *against* the case he is making, and to which I had been wholly sympathetic at the outset, by an almost caricatural treatment of the subject.
- jobeek2
April 20, 2009 at 9:13pm
"Is this supposed to make it alright to single out Israel as a uniquely evil country?"
But Jackson, Israel IS a uniquely evil country. It is a majority European nation that believes that it has the moral right to remain a majority European nation.
I'm feeling sick and tired.
It is sickening to see my compatriots on the traditionalist right so blinded by their animus toward Jews that they make common cause with "anti-racist" activists who want to turn Israel into Zimbabwe or the new South Africa.
It is tiresome to have to explain to my fellow Zionists that Gentiles of European descent also ought to have the right to continue to exist as a distinct people.
- gurdjieff66
April 21, 2009 at 11:48am
"Is this supposed to make it alright to single out Israel as a uniquely evil country?"
But Jackson, Israel IS a uniquely evil country. It is a majority European nation that believes that it has the moral right to remain a majority European nation.
I'm feeling sick and tired.
It is sickening to see my compatriots on the traditionalist right so blinded by their animus toward Jews that they make common cause with "anti-racist" activists who want to turn Israel into Zimbabwe or the new South Africa.
It is tiresome to have to explain to my fellow Zionists that Gentiles of European descent also ought to have the right to continue to exist as a distinct people.
- gurdjieff66
April 21, 2009 at 11:48am
To illustrate the point I made in my article yesterday -- about how the dynamics of Durban I have been
- Anonymous
April 24, 2009 at 2:02pm
gurdjieff66- Israel is not European and does not want to remain European. It is Jewish and wants to remain in its historical, Middle Eastern home.
- tomasitokc
April 25, 2009 at 5:20pm