Durban II update: NGOs plan Israel-related parallel events
The absence of an official NGO Forum at the Durban Review Conference has led politicized NGOs to take their anti-Israel message to the streets of Geneva with a slew of parallel events set to take place before and during the conference.
Pro-Israel activists set to do battle at Durban II, Michael J. Jordan, JTA, April 6, 2009
Palestinian supporters will hold another large street demonstration and brainstorm ways to strengthen their Israel-is-apartheid movement. But this time around Jewish groups are, among other things, sponsoring a pro-Israel rally, co-sponsoring a human-rights event that will feature Martin Luther King III and others, and organizing a Holocaust commemoration just outside the gates of the bucolic U.N. compound in Geneva…
Presumably drawing TV cameras will be a major anti-Israel demonstration — especially with the “International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network” a highly visible co-sponsor — and a “Warsaw to Gaza” event that links Israelis to Nazis.
Meanwhile, where Durban I was a milestone that launched a campaign against Israel similar to what aimed to dismantle Apartheid South Africa — the ongoing “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement” — Durban II will take the campaign one step further. One organizer says leading legal minds — including several from apartheid-era South Africa — will huddle to figure out how to make the apartheid charge stick against Israel.
“Apartheid is already defined as a crime against humanity, but there’s not a lot of experience in taking it to court,” says Ingrid Gassner Jaradat, director of the Bethlehem-based BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. “If you strengthen the legal argument, educate and raise awareness, you also strengthen the efforts to prosecute this as a war crime.”…On April 20, Swiss Jewish groups will host a Holocaust commemoration that features Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, and others…
Moreover, some 40 human-rights groups will sponsor a “Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy” to showcase Burmese, Cuban, Iranian and Egyptian dissidents; Jewish groups will co-host a “Conference Against Racism, Discrimination and Persecution” — viewed by some as a virtual “alternative” to the actual Durban conference — and Jewish and Israel groups will put on an “Israel Wants Peace” rally– with Natan Sharansky, Alan Dershowitz, and Ethiopian and Bedouin Israelis.
“If the U.N. were really reflecting universal and moral values, these are the types of events they would run,” says Gerald Steinberg, executive director of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor. “And Israel wouldn’t have to go out of its way to show it’s not racist.”
