The start of Durban II....

It already looks like Durban I....

A parallel meeting to Durban II, held in a Geneva hotel, which was organized by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, the International Coordinating Network on Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Committee, kicked off Sunday, one day ahead of the UN’s conference on racism.

Entitled the Israel Review Conference: “United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation, Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People”, it was attended by some 160 participants. The Palestinian NGO Badil, accredited to Durban I and II, presented a 300-page report on “Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the International Legal Prohibition on Apartheid”.

Several lawyers spoke on bringing Israel to the ICC (International Criminal Court) and the European Court of Justice for war crimes. Workshops were held on an “International campaign against the Jewish National Fund”; “State responsibility and arms trade with Israel”; “Legal BDS – Popular Tribunals and Public Petitions”.

A debate entitled “Israeli apartheid” paid credit to Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and political experience in the trade union movement in the combat against South Africa. The concept was vaunted as a valuable tool for political mobilization and solidarity.

Campaigns were proposed to launch international legal measures to reclaim Palestinian property. An initiative was proposed regarding water, by highlighting the supposed distinction between Israeli swimming pools and the “meager amount available for Palestinian olive trees”.

Countermeasures were discussed against those attempting to criminalize the boycott. Concrete examples reportedly mentioned an attack in Ireland on commercial/military suppliers to Israel: demonstrators apparently damaged computers at the Raytheon factory, bound for Israel.

There was debate on construction of a European resistance movement, based on “we are all Hizbullah, we are all Hamas…The world stopped Nazism, the world stopped Apartheid, we will stop Zionism”.

PR experts analyzed language for campaigns, recommending focus on “population transfer” and to be cautious in using the Nazi analogy as this opens the campaign to charges of anti-Semitism.

Badil suggested that South Africa and Israel not be presented as analogies, but that the Apartheid experience was applicable as this identifies “a program of racial engineering”.

“Race, color, family, descent, are related concepts. The Jew, by virtue of descent, has taken rights over the land that non Jews do not share… Jewish supremacy or Zionism through nationality or people hood has been the basis for ethnic cleansing”.