Word: zionism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with the plight of the Palestinians, they're uncomfortable with the Arab bloc's apparent willingness to scuttle the whole conference by insisting that the harshest possible language on Israel remain in the final document - because the conference declaration must be adopted by consensus, the impasse over Israel and Zionism threatens to derail the entire enterprise. That prompted the Africans and Europeans to work hard on finding a compromise text, but when a Norwegian-authored text that had reportedly been acceptable to Washington proved was rejected by the Arab bloc over the weekend, first the U.S. and then Israel announced...
...about how the Middle East conflict has a way of metastasizing. The World Conference on Racism looked set for disaster Tuesday despite a last-gasp scramble by South African officials to find compromise language on the Middle East. Passages in the conference's draft declaration singling out Israel and Zionism for condemnation prompted the U.S. and Israel to walk out of the U.N.-sponsored event in Durban, South Africa on Monday - a move which was, in turn, harshly criticized by both friend and foe. While European nations share Washington's concern over singling out Israel at a conference intended...
...vitriol on the Zionism issue may be instructive of the conference's faults, because it's essentially a debate in which each side seeks to minimize or eliminate the other's claims to legitimacy. Israel and its supporters refuse to even contemplate a comparison between the Palestinian plight in the West Bank and Gaza and the condition of black South Africans under apartheid. And the Palestinians and their supporters are determined to diminish the significance of the Holocaust. Plainly, if they'd simply listen to each other, they may have a better idea of how why their peace efforts thus...
...danger of descending into a deeply weird Tower of Babel experience. Even the Middle East conflict, which has come to dominate the spotlight at the U.N.-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, produces its own strangely dissonant images: Hasidic Jews from New York bearing placards proclaiming that "Zionism equals Anti-Semitism," or Mary Robinson, the U.N.'s Irish Catholic human rights commissioner proclaiming that when she sees vicious anti-Semitic slurs, "I am a Jew." (Sorry, Mary. It's not like being a "Berliner" - the rabbis are pretty protective over their criteria.) Outside, meanwhile, a group of pro- and anti-Israel...
...Israel, of course. A number of European countries actually share Washington's concern that an event designed to tackle racism and intolerance on a global scale is in danger of being dominated by the Mideast conflict, and they plan to resist efforts to give disproportionate attention to Israel and Zionism. Not that they will exempt Israel from legitimate criticism, but instead will insist that the focus remains global, and that there's an acknowledgement that culpability for racism is widely shared among the nations of both the industrialized and the developing world. Few governments attending the conference are really...