[Reader-list] Geneva Anti-Racism Conference: a viewpoint

[Paul D. Miller]

I just thought I'd pass this along.
Paul



What Credibility Is There in Geneva's All-White
Boycott?

The Iranian president's repugnant rhetoric doesn't give
Israel's sponsors the right to cry foul when it's
called racist

By Seumas Milne
The Guardian (UK)
April 23, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/23/un-race-conference-walkout-ahmadinejad

What do the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the
Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel have in
common? They are all either European or European-
settler states. And they all decided to boycott this
week's UN -conference against racism in Geneva - even
before Monday's incendiary speech by the Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which triggered a further
white-flight walkout by representatives of another 23
European states.

In international forums, it's almost unprecedented to
have such an -undiluted racial divide of whites-versus-
the-rest. And for that to happen in a global meeting
called to combat racial hatred doesn't exactly augur
well for future international understanding at a time
when the worst economic crisis since the war is ramping
up racism and xenophobia across the world.

Didn't Canada or Australia have anything to say about
the grim condition of their indigenous people, you
might wonder, or Italy and the Czech Republic about
violent attacks on Roma people? Didn't any of the
boycotters have a contribution to make about the
rampant Islamophobia, resurgence of anti-semitism and
scapegoating of migrants in their countries over the
last decade?

The dispute was mainly about Israel and western fears
that the conference would be used, like its torrid
predecessor in Durban at the height of the Palestinian
intifada in 2001, to denounce the Jewish state and
attack the west over colonialism and the slave trade.
In fact, although it was the only conflict mentioned in
the final Durban declaration, the reference was so mild
(recognising the Palestinian right to self-
determination alongside Israel's right to security)
that the then Israeli prime minister, -Shimon Peres,
called it "an accomplishment of the first order for
Israel".

In this week's Geneva statement, Israel isn't mentioned
at all. But the US bizarrely still used its
reaffirmation of the anodyne Durban declaration to
justify a boycott, to the anger of African American
politicians such as Jesse Jackson and Barbara Lee, who
chairs the US Congressional Black Caucus. In fact, like
the other boycotting governments, the US administration
had been intensely lobbied by rightwing pro-Israel
groups, who had insisted long in advance that the
conference would be a "hatefest".

Ahmadinejad's grandstanding played straight into that
agenda. The most poisonous phrases in the printed
version of his speech circulated by embassy officials
referred to the Nazi genocide as "ambiguous and
dubious" and claimed Zionist "penetration" of western
society was so deep that "nothing can be done against
their will". That a head of state of a country of
nearly 70 million people is still toying with Holocaust
denial and European antisemitic tropes straight out of
the Tsarist antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, is not only morally repugnant and
factually absurd. It's also damaging to the Palestinian
cause by association, weakens the international support
Iran needs to avert the threat of attack over its
nuclear programme, and bolsters Israel's claims that it
faces an existential threat.

But, perhaps as a result of an appeal by the UN
secretary general Ban Ki-moon, Ahmadinejad dropped
those provocations at the last minute. What in fact
triggered the walkout of European Union ambassadors was
his reference to Israel as a "totally racist regime",
established by the western powers who had made an
"entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish
suffering" and "in compensation for the dire
consequences of racism in Europe".

The rhetoric was certainly crude and inflammatory.
Britain's foreign secretary David Miliband called it
"hate-filled". But the truth is that throughout the
Arab, Muslim and wider developing worlds, the idea that
Israel is a racist state is largely uncontroversial.
The day after Ahmadinejad's appearance, the Palestinian
Authority foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, echoed the
charge in the conference hall, describing Israeli
occupation as "the ugliest face of racism". It's really
not good enough for Britain's ambassador to the UN in
Geneva, Peter Gooderham - who led the Ahmadinejad
walkout - to say of the charge of Israel's racism, "we
all know it when we see it and it's not that".

This is a state, after all, created by European
colonists, built on the ethnic cleansing of the
indigenous population, whose founding legal principles
guarantee the right of citizenship to any Jewish
migrant from anywhere in the world, while denying that
same right to Palestinians born there along with their
descendants. Of course, Israel is much else besides,
and the Jewish cultural and historical link with
Palestine is a -profound one.

But even those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens
face what the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert
last year called "deliberate and -insufferable"
discrimination by a state which defines itself by
ethnicity. For Palestinians in the occupied
territories, ruled by Israel for most of the state's
existence, where -ethnic segregation and extreme
-inequality is ruthlessly enforced, the situation is
far worse - even without the relentless military
assaults and killings. And Israel now has a far-right
-government whose foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
has said 90% of Israel's Arab citizens have "no place"
in the country, should be forcibly "transferred", and
only be allowed citizenship in exchange for an oath of
loyalty to Israel as a Zionist Jewish state.

But if Lieberman had turned up to speak at the Geneva
anti-racism conference, who believes that western
delegates and ambassadors would have staged a walkout?
Of course, there's a perfectly -reasonable argument to
be had about the nature of Israel's racism and whether
it should be compared to apartheid, for example. But
for western governments to hold up their hands in
horror when Israel is described as a racist state has
no global credibility whatever.

Israel's supporters often complain that, whatever its
faults, it is singled out for attack while the crimes
of other states and conflicts are ignored. To the
extent that that's true in forums such as the UN, it's
partly because Israel is seen as the unfinished
business of European colonialism, along with the Middle
East conflict's other special mix of multiple toxins.
The Geneva boycotters, fresh from standing behind
Israel's carnage in Gaza, are in denial about their own
racism - and their continuing role in the tragedy of
the Middle East.