13 - 19 September 2001
Issue No.551
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 13 - 19 September 2001 Issue No.551 |
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Necessary distinctions
The Durban conference took me by surprise, and I was rather struck by the distinction the world community made between two issues: whether or not Zionism is a form of racism, and whether Israel's current policies with respect to the Palestinians in the occupied territories can be described as racist.
While the world community would not accept or even discuss the idea that Zionism is equivalent to racism, most of the delegates at Durban, I noticed, were quite willing to support the idea that Israel's violence against the Palestinians is racist. Perhaps the Arab parties' greatest mistake was failing to respect that distinction, thus allowing Western official representatives to extend their position on the former to the latter.
With a little more subtlety, we might have managed to rally the majority vote necessary to declare Israeli policies racist. Most representatives were reasonably sympathetic to the Palestinian people, and far less so to Israel's policies. It would have been possible to channel these feelings toward an effective condemnation of Israel's oppressive policies as inherently racist. Prior research is as important to effective participation in any conference as preparation for the contribution made during the conference itself. We should have studied the positions of the various participating delegations beforehand in order to determine what could be achieved. Then we would have been able to capitalise fully on the opportunities available to us.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
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