What credibility is there in Geneva's all-white boycott?Seumas Milne
The Guardian
Thursday 23 April 2009
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.
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