Durban is a beautiful city on the eastern coast of South Africa, with warm sunny beaches, great weather all year round, and a holiday-like atmosphere.
I have nostalgic memories from my childhood riding on the red cable car on the Durban promenade, eating ice cream and swimming for hours in the Breakers.
Unfortunately, that was during the era of apartheid and, although I was too young to understand, it was a time of legalized and systematic racial segregation between white and black South Africans. All those luxuries afforded to me were denied to black South Africans, who were not allowed to swim with me on the same beach, sit alongside me at the ice cream parlor, or go for a ride on the cable car.
South Africa’s heinous apartheid system turned it into a pariah state, subject to international boycotts, divestments and sanctions, and apartheid became a universally condemned ideology. In 2001, seven years after the end of apartheid, a gathering came to Durban to misappropriate it against the Jewish state.
Historian Paul Johnson characterized antisemitism not simply as a form of racism, but an “intellectual disease... extremely infectious and massively destructive”.
It is the most ancient of hatreds that goes back to the very origins of the Jewish people. Abraham says he feels a “stranger” and “sojourner” amongst the Hittites of Canaan, humanizing the essence of being the earliest “other,” and his descendants, the Jewish people, have been historically placed against civilization through the virus of antisemitism and its numerous variants.
Anti-Judaism occurred from ancient Roman times when Jews peculiarly prayed to one God, as opposed to their rulers, who prayed to many. Christianity began as a sect of Judaism and then a separate religion, and the libel that the Jews killed Jesus became the next permutation, which lasts to this day among some Christians.
The Middle Ages began a period of false mythologizing against Jews, when the hatred manifested in fantasies about them poisoning Christian children, and then from the 14th century about them poisoning wells and spreading disease (reverberating in recent antisemitic conspiracy theories of Jews and Israel deliberately spreading the coronavirus disease in order to make money from vaccines).
Modern antisemitism perhaps began in France in 1894 where a Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely convicted of treason and wrongfully accused of providing secret military documents to the Germans.
This was followed in 1903 Russia by the infamous hoax Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which a secret cabal of rabbis supposedly plotted to control the world. A bit later in the century, Social Darwinism and pseudo-scientific theories of racial superiority flourished, and Jews were said to contaminate superior peoples and these ideals. In each and every manifestation of antisemitism, riots, pogroms and, ultimately, mass genocide against Jews were the tragic result.
Following the Holocaust, and after two millennia, Israel was revived as a modern Jewish state. Alongside it manifested a new form of antisemitism known as anti-Zionism. Israel was the Jew among Nations, and became so targeted for unique sanction and discrimination.
When numerous wars against the fledgling Jewish state failed to eliminate it, the enemies of the Jews turned to political and economic warfare. There followed modern conspiracy theories and blood libels masked as sophisticated political rhetoric and bathed in the zeitgeist of the time.
The noble fight against racism, which became a theme in contemporary history, has been deliberately and falsely misappropriated to equate Zionism, the noble liberation movement of the Jewish people, with racism. When apartheid rightfully became synonymous with evil and iniquity in the post-war era, it became expedient to malevolently condemn Israel as an apartheid state.
And this takes us back to sunny Durban, South Africa, where the United Nations hosted what at the time sounded like an important conference against racism in September 2001.
As many now know, the infamous conference became the latest conspiracy breeding-ground for racism against the Jewish people. The so-called NGOs and anti-Israel activists in attendance in 2001 distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and shared Pro-Nazi flyers bemoaning that if only Hitler had won the war, Israel wouldn’t have existed.
The outcome of Durban was the launch of a global, organized and well-funded antisemitic machine, masked in the language of human rights and cloaked in the guise of anti-apartheid activism, known as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS is the 21st century equivalent of the 14th century blood libel, falsely characterizing Israel as the current manifestation of evil in the world that needs to be eliminated.
It is no coincidence that South Africa was chosen as the ground zero for promulgating the apartheid smear on Israel in order to give an air of credibility to this otherwise crude hatred.
Sadly, all this achieved is to hijack the meaning and memory of apartheid for black South Africans who suffered under it. The BDS movement uses South Africa as the nucleus of its abhorrent agenda because it’s symbolically convenient to use the stain of apartheid against the only country that offers universal support and protection for Jews, and in so doing selfishly overwrite and dilute decades of systematic oppression against black people.
What’s perhaps worse is that they managed to infiltrate and influence levels of the South African government and ruling party, including a member of the Mandela family, to repeat their talking points and do their bidding.
Their goal is for the Jewish state to be seen as a universal evil and pariah state that must be obliterated through political and economic warfare using the well-oiled tools of mass deception and propaganda.
It goes without saying that Israel is everything that BDS claims it isn’t: a beacon and shining light of democracy with one of the most respected legal systems and supreme courts in the world, and Arabs not only well represented in its parliament but now even serving in the ruling coalition.
Israel offers affirmative action policies, remarkable opportunities (obviously including the right to vote) for Arab women that are not available anywhere else in the Middle East, and redress for discrimination where it occurs.
That is not to mention decades of attempted peacemaking with the Palestinians. If Israel was able to make peace with Egypt, Jordan and now vast swaths of the Arab world, then perhaps she is not the one to blame for the lack of a resolution with the Palestinians.
But facts should not get in the way of the big lie (a propaganda technique they gleaned from Hitler’s Mein Kampf) that the haters have learned to repeat at every opportunity.
Twenty important countries, from Germany to New Zealand, have now pulled out of the UN’s Durban 20th anniversary conference this week, and any country still involved will be tainted with aiding and perpetuating a campaign of hate against the Jews.
The legacy of Durban is a global and systematic effort to undermine Israel’s right to exist as an indigenous Jewish and democratic state, and that is ultimately how the Durban agenda will be remembered when it fails its objectives. History places antisemites on its scrap heaps, and the Jewish people always overcome their self-declared adversaries. Twenty years on from Durban, Israel is stronger, securer, richer, more loved and more respected than ever before.
The writer is the national chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, and a recipient of the World Zionist Organization’s Herzl Award.