Sit back for a few minutes, because I want to take you back 25 years, to a beachside city. Durban, South Africa. For nine days in late August and early September of 2001, Durban hosted the United Nations for what was supposed to be the great anti-racism conference of the new century. What it turned out to be instead, in the words of Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to the US Congress – was, quote, “the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”
That is a very serious sentence. Said by a very serious person. Who saw, with his own eyes, the actual Nazi period.
What I want to do today is walk you through the Durban Conference. What happened there, why it happened, what came before it, what came after it, and why a quarter of a century later this conference – that probably few under thirty have even heard of – is still shaping how millions of young people around the world think about Jews, about Israel, and about the Middle East.
I’ll tell you up front: this episode is about more than a conference. Buried inside the story of those nine days in Durban is a much older and much deeper question. A question about how the Jewish people understand ourselves. A question about an ancient Biblical verse, that might be a blessing but also might be a curse.
We’ll get there. But first, we start with Durban
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Chapter 1: What was Zionism for?
Let’s back up. Way up.
I want to ask a question that not enough of us actually discuss, in the Israel space: What was Zionism for? Like, what was the project of Zionism actually supposed to accomplish?
There is something I have said 147 times, minimum. There is no such thing as Zionism. Yes, my friend Haviv Retig Gur and I have debated this many times, but he is not here to defend himself, so I can simply make the argument that there have always been Zionisms. For Theodore Herzl, the founder, it was a kind of grand sociological solution. Herzl looked at Europe at the end of the 19th century and he saw a civilization that was modernizing, that was talking the language of universal rights, that was supposedly leaving behind the old hatreds. And he saw, alongside all of that, an antisemitism that was getting worse, not better. The Dreyfus Affair. Pogroms. In Vienna, where he lived, the mayor was a vicious antisemite named Karl Lueger, who would later inspire none other than Adolf Hitler.
And Herzl reached a conclusion that was, in its own way, almost optimistic about humanity. He decided that the reason Jews were hated was that they were quote-unquote “ghosts.” Stateless, scattered, without a normal national existence. Once Jews had what every other people had – a state, a flag, a passport – once Jews became normal, the rest of the world would treat them normally. Antisemitism would dissolve. With Zionism, the Jewish problem would become, in Herzl’s phrase, the Jewish solution. To Herzl, the goal of Zionism was to end antisemitism once and for all! For Herzl, the goal was simply to save Jews.
Spoiler alert: Herzl’s optimistic vision was touching, hopeful, and – as we are about to see – tragically wrong.
Because here’s the thing about Zionism. It tried to solve two problems at once that were honestly kind of in tension with each other. Problem one: the Jews want to be exceptional. We want to fulfill the prophetic vision. We want to build a society that’s a light unto the nations, that lives by the values of Judaism, that gathers in the exiles, that makes the desert bloom. We want to be different. We want to be ourselves.
Problem two: we want to be like everyone else. We want a normal country, a normal liberal democracy, with normal laws, and normal diplomatic relations. A place where Jews can stop being weird, stateless, rootless wanderers. We want to take a seat at the family of nations and finally just be one of the gang. We Jewish people want the Jewish state to participate in Eurovision and finalllllly make the World Cup again. Nerd corner alert: Israel’s men’s national football team has not qualified for the FIFA World Cup since 1970. To put this in American terms, that is a longer drought than the New York Knicks winning a championship for 53 years.
Zionism said: we can do both. We can be a chosen people who choose to be normal.
For a brief and beautiful window in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it almost looked like it was working. Israel was admitted to the UN by an overwhelming vote. (33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, if you’re keeping score.) The Soviet Union and the United States both supported its creation. Jewish rabbi and philosopher Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, in his book Kol Dodi Dofek, saw in that unlikely convergence something almost heaven sent, a mysterious door opening as the world’s rival powers, almost despite themselves, cleared a path for the return of Jewish sovereignty.
Andrei Gromyko (GRO-mih-ko) – the Soviet foreign minister, of all people – gave a speech in 1947 in which he said the Jews had suffered indescribable losses in the war and were owed, by basic human decency, the chance at their own state.
For a moment, it looked like Herzl was right. Once the Jews became a normal nation, they would be treated like one.
And then, very quickly, that window closed.
Chapter 2: 1975
Fast forward to November 10, 1975.
The date matters. November 10, 1938, was Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that launched the Holocaust.
On the 37th anniversary of that night, the UN General Assembly took up a draft resolution that declared Zionism to be a form of racism.
That resolution did not fall out of the sky. We’ve done a whole episode on this – link in show notes – but very briefly, it was the product of three forces converging:
Number 1, the Soviet Union’s Cold War propaganda campaign, which recast Zionism as imperialism and racism after Israel aligned with the US.
Number 2, the politics of decolonization, as newly independent African and Asian states entered the UN, and the PLO successfully repackaged the Palestinian cause as an anti-colonial liberation struggle.
And number 3, the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when the Arab oil embargo gave much of the world a powerful incentive to stay on the right side of the Arab bloc.
Soviet propaganda, decolonization politics, and oil pressure. Put those three together, and by November 1975 the General Assembly was ready to do something the founders of the United Nations would never have dreamed of: declare Zionism a form of racism.
Which brings us to the chamber on the East River, on a cold autumn evening, and the Israeli ambassador who walked up to the rostrum to face that declaration down.
His name was Chaim Herzog – and he would later become the sixth President of Israel. (Nerd corner alert: also father of Isaac Herzog, current President of Israel, as of July 2026.) And what he did in the next few minutes is, in my opinion, one of the great moments of moral oratory in the entire history of the United Nations.
Herzog began with the date.
[AUDIO] “It is symbolic that this debate, which may well prove to be a turning point in the fortunes of the United Nations and a decisive factor as to the possible continued existence of this Organization, should take place on 10 November. This night, 37 years ago, has gone down in history as the Kristallnacht.”
He went on. He pointed out that the very idea of Jews as a “race” was an antisemitic invention of the 19th century, and that the UN, which had been founded as an anti-Nazi alliance, was now on its way to becoming the world center of antisemitism.
[AUDIO] “Hitler would have felt at home on a number of occasions during the past year, listening to the proceedings in this forum, and above all, to the proceedings during the debate on Zionism.
I stand here not as a supplicant. Vote as your moral conscience dictates to you. For the issue is not Israel or Zionism. The issue is the continued existence of the Organization which has been dragged to its lowest point of discredit by a coalition of despotisms and racists.
As I stand on this rostrum, the long and proud history of my people unravels itself before my inward eye, I see the oppressors of our people over the ages as they pass one after another in evil procession into oblivion. I stand here before you as the representative of a strong and flourishing people which has survived them all and which will survive this shameful exhibition and the proponents of this resolution. I stand here as the representative of a people one of whose prophets gave to this world the sublime prophecy which animated the founders of this world Organization and which graces the entrance to this building:
“…nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaiah ii, 4)
And then, in a gesture that everyone who saw it remembers – and you can watch it on YouTube to this day – Herzog tore the resolution in half. Right at the rostrum. Right in front of the General Assembly.
[AUDIO]: “For us the Jewish people this resolution based on hatred falsehood and arrogance is devoid of any moral or legal value.We the Jewish people this is no more than a piece of paper, and we shall treat it as such.”
Just before the vote, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American ambassador to the UN, gave an equally rousing speech, condemning the resolution.
“[AUDIO]: “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations and before the world that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”
Infamous. He used the word on purpose. He knew that Franklin Roosevelt had used it after Pearl Harbor, when he called December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy.
“[AUDIO]: A great evil has been loosed upon the world.The abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty – and more – to the murderers of the six million European Jews.”
Fighting words. Truly extraordinary oratory. So, so powerful. Sadly, it wasn’t enough. The die was cast as they say. The resolution equating Zionism with racism passed comfortably. 72 countries in favor, 35 against, 32 abstentions.
That was 1975. And the “infamous act” stayed on the books for 16 years. Through the entire Cold War – the official position of the United Nations was that the Jewish people’s national liberation movement was a form of racism.
Until 1991. By then, the world that had produced the resolution was collapsing. The Soviet Union was in its final death throes. The Arab bloc had been fractured by the Gulf War. The old diplomatic order that had made “Zionism is racism” possible was coming apart.
In a September 1991 speech at the UN, President George H. W. Bush called the resolution “this body’s mockery of itself” and demanded it be repealed. Three months later, the General Assembly revoked Resolution 3379 by a vote of 111 to 25.
There was an enormous sense of relief in the Jewish world. It seemed like a bad chapter was closed.
Chapter 3: A decade of hope…and then Tehran
Ten years between 1991 and 2001. Ten years of optimism.
Oslo. The peace process. Rabin and Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan instituting Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The world, for a moment, seemed to be moving in a different direction, opening up to the Jewish state. In Israel and across the diaspora, there was a sense of possibility.
So when the UN announced it would hold a World Conference Against Racism in South Africa, which had just emerged from apartheid – Jewish organizations around the world greeted the news with genuine enthusiasm.
Irwin Cotler, the legendary Canadian human rights lawyer and anti-Apartheid crusader, who had represented Nelson Mandela, was thrilled.
The South African Jewish community was particularly excited. They had been prominent in the anti-apartheid struggle. This was the perfect moment to bring the fight against antisemitism into the larger global fight against racism. To finally close the gap.
That was the hope. And then, very quickly, it all began to dissolve.
Now – the way the UN runs these big conferences is that they first hold regional preparatory meetings. Africa, Europe, Latin America, Asia. Each region puts together a draft document. Then those documents feed into the main one.
For most of the regional meetings, this went fine. Jewish delegates, Israeli delegates, were able to participate. They were able to push back when language got distorted. They were able to incorporate balance.
And then came the Asian regional meeting. Which was held in February 2001.
In Tehran. You see where this is going. And Iran did something which I have to admit was smart. They didn’t refuse Israeli and Jewish delegates outright. They simply refused to issue them visas.
Now technically, Iran never said no. That would have been politically costly. Iran’s public position was that Israeli and Jewish delegates were of course welcome. The visas would be processed in due course. The paperwork was under review. The phones would be answered shortly.
The phones were not answered shortly. The visas were not processed in due course.
What Iran was doing was the oldest authoritarian trick in the book – refusing through stalling. And then finally, after weeks of stonewalling, the permissions arrived. Right after the last flight from Paris to Tehran had taken off.
So the Asian preparatory document – the document that was supposed to represent the human rights priorities of half the planet – was drafted with no Jewish or Israeli voices in the room. None.
And here’s what they wrote: a six-point indictment of Israel. Calling it an apartheid state. Accusing it of ethnic cleansing. Accusing it of crimes against humanity. Declaring that Zionism was “based on race superiority.”
That document then became the template for everything that came next.
Mary Robinson – the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who was organizing the whole conference – declared at one point in the lead-up that “the formulation ‘Zionism equals racism’ has been done away with.” She said it would not return.
She was, to put it gently, like Herzl previously, mistaken.
By late August 2001, as the Jewish delegations arrived in Durban, they already sensed trouble. But no one – no one – understood what they were walking into.
Chapter 4: What they walked into
16:49-18:06
That was Hillel Neuer of UN Watch.
This conference is of course the heart of the story, and I want to give you a feel for what it was actually like. To do that, I’m going to draw heavily from the recollections of three young student leaders who were there. Mark Pozniak. Peleg Reshef. Michael Kransdorff.
Now the conference was actually three conferences, running one after the other. First, there was a Youth Summit. Then there was an NGO Forum, a gathering of non-governmental organizations from around the world – meant to be the voice of civil society. And then there was the official intergovernmental conference where the actual governments would meet.
I’ll start with Mark Pozniak. Mark was a nineteen-year-old first-year student at Wits University in Johannesburg. South African Jewish kid, traditional background, just back from a gap year in Israel and the March of the Living to the death camps in Poland. He’d been invited to be part of a multinational youth delegation to the World Conference Against Racism. He was excited. World Conference Against Racism. It sounded incredible.
He gets to the youth summit on the first day. He goes to register. He’s given his badge. He picks a breakout session – something about new forms of colonialism and imperialism. He sits down. The room is mostly empty. The moderator is at the front, wearing a keffiyeh, which Mark notes but doesn’t really worry about.
Then people start filing in. And Mark notices one of them wearing a striking t-shirt. It’s a t-shirt with a picture of Muhammad al-Durrah, the Palestinian boy who was tragically killed in the crossfire at the start of the Second Intifada the previous September, an image that had become iconic around the world. On the back of the t-shirt, in red letters: Occupation = Colonialism = Racism. End Israeli apartheid.
[AUDIO] “So okay, that was a bit jarring, but fine. And then 5 minutes later, I looked up again, and I realized, wow, you know, there’s a few people wearing this t-shirt, not just one. So I rationalized that this was a delegation. But then another couple of minutes passed, and the room was now at capacity, it was packed, standing room only. And I realized that the vast majority of people are now wearing this t-shirt. So I was now alarmed, and I was on guard, because I wasn’t expecting this. This wasn’t really what I signed up for.”
The session opens. The agenda. First on the list: Vieques, the island in the Caribbean used for American military bombing practice. Heartbreaking presentation. A few minutes. A perfunctory vote. “We the youth of the world stand with Vieques,” etc. Everyone in favor. No one against. Done. Next on the list: the Aboriginal people of Western Australia. Heartbreaking presentation. A few minutes. Another perfunctory vote. “We the youth of the world stand with the Aborigines.” Everyone in favor. No one against. Done. Beautiful, right? Young people from everywhere, standing with the maligned and the marginalized and the oppressed, saying their pain is our pain.
And then Israel lands on the agenda. And Mark says everything changed.
[AUDIO] “I can’t explain to you, the mood shifted, almost subliminally. The other 2 were like the curtain raiser, nobody was really paying attention. And now this was the main event. We were going to deal with this issue. We were going to ruminate. Where this wasn’t going to be a cookie cutter statement. And wave after wave of individuals stood up, and just completely vilifying Israel, castigating the behavior of the Zionist entity, and all of these terms that 25 years later have become commonplace but weren’t in use back then.”
Mark sat there for about half an hour, listening to a parade of speakers stand up one after another and describe Israel as a colonial settler entity, an apartheid state, the Nazis reborn, a country that should not exist. He was 19. He had no idea what to say. He knew, without question, that he was the only Jew in the room.
After thirty minutes of this, he couldn’t anymore. He got up. He walked out.
And what he encountered when he stepped back into the hotel lobby was the moment that changed his life.
“[AUDIO]: In the time that I’d registered and gone into the room to the time that I’d come out, the entire foyer of the hotel had been transformed from what I had seen, which was the registration desk, into a shuk, a carnival of hatred, a bazaar. There were a cacophony of noise, just people shouting and screaming, and handing out the now ubiquitous Mohammed al-Durrah shirt, and tearing images of the Israeli flag, and handing out the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was bananas.
And through this chaos, while I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do here, because I’m feeling the most alone I’ve ever felt in my whole life and ever have, and since, I’ve never felt that again, I hear Hebrew. My Hebrew is not amazing, but it’s good enough to locate it and understand. I see a man arguing with a woman, they’re in a really heated discussion. And I know enough to understand that this guy, who’s not much older than me, this guy, he’s on my team. And this girl, she’s like 100% not on my team. Anyway, they finish arguing, and he starts to storm off and walk away. So I ran up to him. At this point, I’m on the verge of tears, and I’m shaking, and I don’t know what to say to him. And the only thing that comes to me is – Achi, ani Yehudi.”
Brother. I’m a Jew.
The young Israeli man’s name was Peleg Reshef. He was the president of the World Union of Jewish Students.
[AUDIO]: that was actually the first time that I met Mark. You mentioned Mark Posnack, who is a great guy and a good friend. And that was, you know, we walked in and then I see someone, I think, I don’t know if he’s going to deny that, I think he was a bit frightened.
And so Peleg put his arm around Mark, and he walked him into the very small, very young, very outgunned Jewish caucus.
25 years later, Mark told us exactly what that moment meant to him.
“[AUDIO]: It was a seminal moment for me in my life. Standing alone in the foyer of a hotel, I kind of understood and digested, after the fact, that as long as there’s another Jew there, you’re not alone. And I needed to find a way in my life to ensure that I could be that Peleg in the lobby for the next Mark who felt alone.”
Wow.
Chapter 5: NGO Forum
Okay, so Day 1 was the youth summit. Super intense. Super acrimonious. Super intimidating for the young Jewish delegation. Would the next few days be calmer? Would the NGO Forum part of the conference be a more welcoming, inclusive space?
The opposite. At the NGO Forum, the tension ratcheted up 1000%.
It was held the following day at the Kingsmead Cricket Stadium in Durban. Tens of thousands of people. Three thousand NGOs from all over the world. A sprawling city of tents in the open field, each tent hosting a different workshop, a different cause.
Michael Kransdorff was the national treasurer of the South African Union of Jewish Students at the time. He helped coordinate the South African Jewish student delegation.
[AUDIO] “As we walked into the conference, all we saw was a sea of people wearing keffiyehs and posters denouncing Israel as the last bastion of apartheid. We defeated apartheid in South Africa, and now we need to finally defeat apartheid in Israel. People wearing t-shirts branding Zionism as racism. And it was sort of quite a shock to realize what a large percentage of the delegates actually had one particular view.”
It gets worse.
[AUDIO] “The conference venue was plastered with posters of Jews with hooked noses, really out of Nazi magazines. Jews controlling the world. It was just a crazy, crazy experience. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was literally on sale by the Arab Lawyers Union table at the conference. You could literally go up and buy a copy of, like, one of the most classic antisemitic forgeries. Posters were handed out – we got a picture of – which was a picture of Hitler. And it said: ‘Unfortunately, Hitler didn’t win. Then we would have solved the Jewish question and there would be no more persecution of Palestinians.'”
Just to repeat that: a flyer making a wistful case for the Nazi Holocaust. Distributed openly. At a United Nations Conference. Against. Racism.
Years later it would come out that the man behind the flyer, Yousuf Deedat, was running an organization that was receiving major funding from the family of a man named Osama bin Laden – a name few people outside intelligence circles really knew much about at that point.
“[AUDIO]: Personally, I was a young student, and I’d never really experienced antisemitism on that level. I’d obviously read a lot about the Holocaust and seen a lot of antisemitic imagery from history books. But I’d never thought that I would personally have to come face-to-face with it. And particularly at an anti-racism conference.”
There was, technically, supposed to be a panel on antisemitism at the NGO Forum. Each form of racism was supposed to get its own session. The Jewish delegation took the antisemitism session very seriously. They had brought some of the world’s top experts. The session was held in a tent at the cricket stadium. The tent was packed. And the session was hijacked.
Michael describes what happened.
“[AUDIO]: …Hijacked by Palestinian protesters who came in shouting, ‘We are the true Semites. You are not Semitic. You are European colonialists. We are the true Semites, and you are the real antisemites, and we’re not going to allow you the opportunity to express your views.'”
There’s one particular detail from Michael’s account that I keep thinking about. Among the people in the tent watching this happen was a man named Paolo Jordan. Paolo Jordan was a senior member of the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling party. The party of Mandela. The party of the anti-apartheid struggle.
“[AUDIO]: And he was so shocked by the behavior of the protesters, the way that they tried to silence any sort of Jewish discussion, that he actually released a public statement condemning what he saw. Which was quite a thing at the time.”
A South African ANC minister, in 2001, watching the panel on antisemitism at the World Conference Against Racism get shouted down by a mob, said: this is wrong. That is how far things had drifted from the conference’s stated purpose. The host country’s own ruling party was issuing condemnations of the conference itself.
Peleg Reshef and the Jewish delegates decided, after some debate, that the worst response would be silence. The Americans and the Israelis were considering walking out. Most of the Jewish organizations wanted to boycott. The students felt differently. They wanted to make themselves visible. So they did something simple. They set up a small wooden table near the press tent, in the middle of the stadium. They draped an Israeli flag on it. They put out their pamphlets.
Within minutes, they were surrounded. Hundreds of people. Screaming. Spitting. Holding burning flags. Police forming a human shield around them. And Peleg’s delegation, twelve, thirteen Jews, standing behind the police line, singing.
[AUDIO] “One of the students that I brought from Israel was actually an Ethiopian Israeli. She started saying, ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance.’ We were a small delegation of about ten people. Hundreds of people are all around us. The police are standing between us. And we are starting to sing – ‘All we are saying, is give peace a chance.'”
The group also started handing out white flowers. To people who were calling them murderers. Here’s Mark:
[AUDIO] “We handed out flowers for peace. We made these signs ‘flowers for peace.’ And we were singing ‘salaam.’…I’ll never forget. I handed a flower to a Muslim woman wearing a head covering.And I said ‘Here’s a flower for peace.’ And she spat at me and said ‘Your flowers are dripping in the blood of Palestinian children.’What struck me was the real, genuine hatred in her eyes..She, she hated me. She didn’t know me. She’d never met me.And she hated me, not for who I was, but what I was…And that was very, very frightening.”
That image – the images of those twelve students, standing alone in a stadium of tens of thousands, singing peace songs and handing out flowers while being assaulted – went out to international news media. CNN. The wire services. The world saw it.
Now I want to flag one more thing. Mark said one more thing that really stuck with me. He said that on day one, the conversation was technically about Israel. Israel’s policies, Israel’s behavior, Israel’s military, Israel’s settlements. By day two, by day three, it was no longer about Israel. It was about Jews. And he gave one example. He was having a conversation with somebody. Genuinely engaged conversation. And another participant walked up to his conversation partner and said: “Why are you talking to him? Don’t you know he’s Jewish?”
Not, don’t you know he’s a Zionist. Not, don’t you know he supports the IDF. Not, don’t you know he’s a supporter of Israeli government policy. Don’t you know he’s a Jew.
And the man Mark had been talking to looked at his friend and said, Oh, I’m sorry, I had no idea, and walked away.
Mark said that moment is what he keeps coming back to when people ask him, 25 years later, where the line is between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Because the answer is – there is a line. There is plenty of legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. But the line was crossed at Durban in plain sight, and the crowd moved across it without flinching. Within 72 hours, the conversation was no longer about Israel and was now about Jews.
Chapter 6: The walkout
By Saturday, September 1st, the NGO Forum was wrapping up its declaration. The official document. The paper that would be handed to the governments of the world.
The procedure was a mess. There were 43 caucuses. Each was supposed to be able to insert language defining its own form of discrimination. So the Jewish caucus – fifty-eight people, finally gathered together – proposed a paragraph on antisemitism. A real one. Acknowledging the worldwide spike in violence against Jews since the start of the Second Intifada. Naming anti-Zionism as a vehicle for antisemitism.
It was put to a vote. 42 delegations. In favor of including the Jewish paragraph: three. The Jewish caucus. The Roma caucus. The Central European caucus. Against: 39.
That was the moment the Jewish delegation knew it was time to leave.
They got up. The Israeli flag stayed on the table. They walked out, 58 Jews, with the crowd jeering them, shouting, threatening. Michael describes the police forming a human barrier and telling them, walk fast, do not wait for the bus, keep moving.
Jewish delegates. At a UN conference. Against racism. In post-apartheid South Africa. Being escorted off the premises by police because the police could not guarantee their physical safety. Crazy.
The Jewish caucus had a final chant of its own. They had one word. They repeated it over and over again as they walked out.
Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.
And behind them, the crowd chanted back: Free, free Palestine.
The final NGO declaration was drafted that night – in part by people who, according to members of the Israeli delegation, physically intimidated the drafting committee until they fled the room. It called Israel a racist nation, accused it of war crimes and acts of genocide, demanded the application of all measures used against apartheid South Africa, including embargoes, and called for the resurrection of the 1975 General Assembly resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism.
Mary Robinson – the same Mary Robinson who had assured everyone that this idea of “Zionism being synonymous with racism” would not be brought back – refused to recommend the document to the governments. For the first time in UN history. She knew it was too far gone.
But the document existed. It was published. It was circulated. And the script was written.
And I do mean the script. The phrase “Israel is an apartheid state.” The framing of Zionism as racism. The application of South-Africa-style sanctions to Israel. The beginnings of what would become the BDS movement three years later. All of it traces back to those nine days in Durban under the supervision of 3600 NGOs. The narrative we are all living inside in 2026 was finalized on a Saturday night in 2001.
Which brings me to one more voice I want you to hear. Anne Bayefsky.
Now, the students I’ve been quoting – Mark, Peleg, Michael – they were kids. They entered Durban with no idea what they were walking into, and honestly, you’d forgive them for being blindsided.
Anne Bayefsky is a different story. Bayefsky is a human rights lawyer who had been working the UN system for years. She knew who sat on which committee and which delegations could be trusted and which ones were going to make trouble. If there was anyone at Durban who should have seen it coming, it was Anne.
She didn’t see it coming.
Here’s an excerpt from a speech she gave in the aftermath:
[AUDIO] “I went to the first Durban conference in order to confront racism. In order to help end the scourge of antisemitism. Representing the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, I found myself in the middle of a storm… Jewish NGOs holding an open forum on antisemitism were silenced by a screaming mob. The Jewish community center where we met each day was shut down because of threats of violent protesters. The world’s NGOs adopted a declaration saying that Zionism, the self-determination of the Jewish people, was racism.”
And then the moral indictment of the entire NGO sector that was supposed to be on the right side of this:
[AUDIO] “Perhaps most distressing of all, the world’s leading human rights NGOs – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Lawyers Committee for Human Rights – decided to abstain exactly when it mattered most to stand up and be counted.”
The most prestigious human rights organizations in the world were in that room. They watched what happened. They saw the Protocols on sale. They saw the Hitler pamphlets. They saw the panel on antisemitism get hijacked. They saw the Jewish caucus walk out under police escort. And when the moment came to vote on whether the final declaration should include a paragraph that called anti-Zionism a form of antisemitism – they abstained.
This is, more than anything else, the inheritance of Durban that still shapes the world we live in. The big human rights NGOs, who should have been the natural allies of the Jewish delegates, took a pass. And those NGOs are today the institutions that produce the reports that shape the campus discourse, the UN resolutions, the language of international law. Their failure to stand up at Durban set the trajectory of every conversation that has followed.
The governmental conference began the very next day. It lasted about 24 hours before the Americans had seen enough.
On September 3rd 2001, Tom Lantos led the American delegation in a formal walkout from the intergovernmental conference. Israel walked out with them. A handful of other nations followed.
And Lantos, the Holocaust survivor, walking out, told the journalists who asked him why: “This is the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”
Chapter 7: The gaslight
I want to pause here, because I want to say something slightly dramatic, but also critical.
Durban was, at its heart, gaslighting on a global scale.
What is gaslighting? The term is cliched and overused, often incorrectly. But basically it’s the rhetorical trick where you do something terrible to someone, and then you tell them that what just happened wasn’t what they think it was. That their experience is wrong. That their perception is faulty. That what really happened was that they did something to you.
The Jewish delegates flew to Durban for a World Conference Against Racism. They went in expecting to be partners. They went in expecting to fight racism!
And then over the course of nine days, they were told – repeatedly, loudly – that they were not partners in the fight against racism. They were the racists. That their state was an apartheid state. That their movement was a form of Nazism. That their religion was a curse. That their flag was stained with blood.
And the most disturbing part of all is that this was the language of human rights. The language of anti-racism. The language of decolonization. The language Jewish thinkers, Jewish activists, Jewish writers had spent the entire 20th century helping to build.
It was our own language. Turned around. Pointed at us.
And the message underneath it all – the thing the conference said to the Jewish people without ever quite saying it out loud – was this: you are alone. And whatever loneliness you feel in this stadium, you brought it on yourselves.
Hold onto that word. Alone. Because we’re going to come back to it…
Chapter 8: The aftermath
I want to give you three quick beats on what came next.
Beat one. The conference ended on September 9, 2001. Mary Robinson refused to recommend the final document. The world media barely noticed. Because two days later, two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York, and the world was reordered.
Irwin Cotler – Canadian Jewish lawyer, future justice minister – flew home from Durban via Montreal. He landed on September 10. He woke up the next morning to images of the towers on fire. He picked up the phone, called a colleague, and the colleague said something to him that he has never forgotten: “9/11 was the Kristallnacht of terror. Durban was the Mein Kampf.”
Anne Bayefsky, the human rights lawyer who had been at Durban, was at Columbia University when the towers came down.
[AUDIO] “I could not but think of the hate-mongering and intolerance that had been legitimized under UN auspices. The feigned grievances against America and freedom that had coursed through the streets of Durban and had been promoted onto the global stage. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots between hate and violence. But it is a responsibility that the United Nations has never been forced to acknowledge or confront.”
The links between Durban and 9/11 were not literal – Durban obviously did not cause 9/11 – but they were ideological. The same hatred. The same backing band. Even the same money. As we mentioned, some of the funding towards the Hitler pamphlets came from the bin Laden network.
So that was the immediate aftermath. Durban, and then the world on fire, and a handful of people who had been in that stadium watching the smoke rise and feeling like they had just seen the trailer for the movie. But the thing about Durban is that it didn’t end when the planes hit. It had a sequel. And the sequel tells you everything about how the world was changing.
Beat two. In 2009, the UN held a “Durban Review Conference” in Geneva to assess the implementation of the 2001 Durban Declaration. Ten countries boycotted in advance. The only head of state who showed up was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, who gave a speech in which he called Israel “the most aggressive, racist country,” accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust to dispossess the Palestinians, and described global Zionism as “the complete symbol of racism.”
23 European Union delegations stood up and walked out during his speech.
So eight years on, the message that Durban I had inadvertently sent – we know who you are now – had become something more deliberate. The international community had begun to peel away from the Durban process. By Durban III in 2011, fourteen countries refused to participate. By Durban IV in 2021, thirty-eight countries plus the EU stayed home.
Durban was dying: conference by conference, country by country, the world backing away. You’d think that would be the end of it. You’d be wrong.
Beat three. The Durban template, the script, did not stay in 2001. The script went on tour. It went to universities. It went to NGOs. It went to international bodies. It went onto social media. The accusation that Israel is an apartheid state, that Zionism is a form of racism, that the very existence of a Jewish national project is a crime – that accusation, which in 1975 had felt like a Soviet-era oddity, and which in 1991 had felt like a closed chapter, was reborn at Durban and shipped around the world.
The BDS movement – Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – was formally launched in 2004 and 2005. It is, in a real and traceable sense, the operationalization of the Durban NGO declaration.
Stacy Burdett, the associate government relations director at the Anti-Defamation League, said something that has stuck with me. She said Durban created two camps inside the Jewish community itself. One camp came out of Durban believing that antisemitism never dies and we can only rely on ourselves. The other camp came out of Durban believing that we have a great deal of work to do to re-anchor antisemitism inside the broader civil rights and human rights movement, because that movement is the moral home of most Jews and we can’t afford to lose it.
Both camps were responding to the same trauma. Both are still arguing about it today. After October 7, they’re arguing about it more. Because October 7th seemed to prove both of them right at once. One camp watched students celebrate the massacre before Israel had fired a shot, watched the same institutions that went silent at Durban go silent again, and said: we told you.
The other camp watched the same thing and felt the ground shift under them. Because these are Jews who genuinely believe – who were raised to believe – that our home is within the human rights movement, shoulder to shoulder with everyone else fighting for a better world. And yet the coalition they’d given their lives to had gone quiet, and they had to ask themselves whether there was still room for them in it at all.
That argument, between those two camps, is the one that started in a cricket stadium in Durban in 2001. And it took the worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust to bring it to a boil.
So that’s the story of the 2001 Durban Conference and here are your five fast facts.
One. The 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism was held in Durban, South Africa, from August 31 to September 7 – and became, in Tom Lantos’s words, “the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”
Two. It began before Durban: at the Asian regional preparatory meeting in Tehran, Iran barred Jewish and Israeli delegates and produced the template for what followed.
Three. The NGO Forum’s final declaration revived the “Zionism is racism” charge, accused Israel of genocide and war crimes, and called for apartheid-style sanctions.
Four. Durban became the launchpad of modern BDS and the campus language of Israel as an apartheid state.
Five. The conference ended on September 7, four days later before 9/11 – many who had been in Durban felt they had just seen the same hatred, with a different, more earth-shattering result.
Enduring lesson
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
A few months before the Durban conference, on the festival of Shavuot, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory sits down to lunch in Jerusalem.
With him at that table are a former lay leader of a major diaspora community, a Canadian Jewish leader, and an Israeli diplomat.
The conversation drifts to this UN conference coming up at the end of August. The World Conference Against Racism. And already, in May, the signs are not good. The preparatory documents are leaking out. People who track these things can feel that something ugly is coming.
So the mood at the table turns pessimistic. And the Israeli diplomat – a religious man, a thoughtful man, trying to comfort the room – leans in and offers a verse.
Am levadad yishkon. “A people that dwells alone.”
It’s from the book of Numbers. The prophet Bilaam, hired by King Balak to curse the Jewish people, opens his mouth to curse, and blessings come out instead. And one of the things he says is: I see a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.
The diplomat offers this verse the way Jews have offered it to each other for thousands of years. As consolation. As an explanation. They hate us. They’ve always hated us. Am levadad yishkon. We dwell alone. That’s just how it is. It’s a blessing, remember?
And Rabbi Sacks, sitting at that table, has what he later described as an epiphany. An explosion of light in the brain. Because he hears the words, and he turns to the diplomat, and he says:
“Are you sure this was a blessing?”
Remember who said it. Bilaam. A non-Jewish prophet hired to curse the Jews. The Talmud teaches that every blessing Bilaam pronounced over the Jewish people eventually curdled into a curse, with one exception. Bilaam was deliberately ambiguous. His blessings carried a hidden second meaning. A darker one.
And what Sacks realized, in that flash, is that am levadad yishkon is one of those backhanded blessings. A blessing that is actually a curse. Because, Sacks said, if you define yourself as the people that dwells alone – you are likely to find yourself alone.
And being alone, in the Torah, is almost never a good thing. The very first time the words “not good” appear in the whole Torah: lo tov heyot ha’adam levado. It is not good for man to be alone. Over and over, in the Torah, being alone is a tragedy.
And here’s what haunts me about that lunch. Three months later, Durban happened. And Durban became the thing they saw coming at that table. It became the moment the world looked the Jewish people in the eye and said: yes. You do dwell alone. And it’s your fault.
So after the conference, Rabbi Sacks sat down and wrote what I think of as one of the most important essays of the entire 21st-century Jewish condition. He called it “A People That Dwells Alone?” – with a question mark at the end.
The question mark is the whole point.
Because Sacks goes back to the classical commentators, and none of them read am levadad yishkon as meaning that we are condemned to be isolated, friendless, hated, surrounded. That reading, Sacks argues, is a tragic misunderstanding. And it’s a misunderstanding with a heavy price.
And then he makes a distinction that I think about almost every day. There is a difference, he says, between being apart and being alone.
To be apart is to be different, distinctive, set aside for a purpose. The word kadosh – holy – literally means set apart. Leaders are set apart from the people they lead. Teachers are set apart from the people they teach. They are apart, but they are not alone. Their apartness has a purpose, and the purpose is connection. They go apart in order to come back with something to offer.
The Jewish people, Sacks says, were chosen to be apart. Through you all the families of the earth will be blessed, God tells Abraham. A mission of contribution, not isolation. Abraham was different from his neighbors. But he argued for them. He prayed for them. He was apart, and he was not alone.
What the world tried to tell us at Durban is that we are alone. That our particularity is a wall. That our existence is a problem. That we have nothing to offer.
What Sacks is saying – what a deeper reading of that verse is teaching us – is that we are apart. Our particularity is a gift. Our existence is a contribution. Our story holds, inside it, the building blocks of how every human being might live.
Now look. I’m a proud Zionist. I love the people of Israel deeply. And I point out the moments when Israel, when the Jewish people, have failed to live up to its calling. We’ve done Deir Yassin. We’ve done Kfar Qasim. We’ve done Kibya. We don’t flinch. The full story is the only story worth telling. Israel is not a perfect country. No country is.
But the real question of Durban was never whether Israel is perfect. The real question of Durban is whether the Jewish people can be a normal nation while being a peculiar one. Whether we can be apart without being alone.
Herzl believed that once the Jews had a state, the world would stop hating them. Durban told us that was, at the very least, premature.
But Durban did not tell us that am levadad yishkon is our destiny. It told us it is a temptation. The temptation to receive every act of hatred as confirmation of an eternal truth. The temptation to crawl back inside the fortress and pull the gates up behind us.
Here is one of the most powerful lines from Sacks’s essay:
“If you define yourself as the people that dwells alone, you are likely to find yourself alone. That is not a safe place to be.”
That is not a safe place to be.
So here is where I land. Being apart is part of our condition. We are different. We have been different for thousands of years. We will be different tomorrow. There’s no escaping it, and there’s no point trying.
But being alone is a choice. It’s an interpretation. A bet about the meaning of the verse.
And I keep thinking about two nineteen-year-olds who made the other bet.
Remember Mark Pozniak – the kid on the verge of tears in that hotel lobby, surrounded by people who hated him, who heard Hebrew across the room spoken by Peleg Reshef. Mark walked towards that Hebrew and said the only thing he could think of: achi, ani Yehudi. Brother, I’m a Jew. Two young men, in the middle of the most hostile room either of them had ever stood in, who found each other and decided they were apart – together. The next day they walked into that stadium with a dozen other Jews and an Israeli flag, and they sang songs of peace to a crowd that wanted them gone.
That is the Jewish bet. In every generation. To keep showing up. To keep telling the story. To keep believing that we are apart for a purpose – and that the purpose involves staying connected, somehow, to a world that does not always know what to do with us.
The diplomat at that lunch table offered Rabbi Sacks a kind of cold comfort. And Sacks refused it. He refused to accept that we are destined to be alone. He refused to read Bilaam’s verse as a verdict. He refused, in the end, to let Durban be the last word about who the Jewish people are.
You can hear am levadad yishkon as a curse pretending to be a blessing. Or you can hear it as a blessing pretending to be a curse. In every generation, we get to choose which side of the verse to live on.
Bilaam left the choice deliberately open. The Sages knew it. Rabbi Sacks understood it. Mark and Peleg, in a cricket stadium in Durban, bet their whole hearts on it.
Apart, not alone. That bet is still ours to make.