Twenty five years after Durban, equating Zionism with racism has become mainstream - editorial

Twenty-five years ago today, representatives from around the world gathered in Durban, South Africa, for what should have been one of the most worthy exercises the United Nations could undertake: a global conference against racism.

Instead, Durban became a watershed in the modern campaign to delegitimize Israel, and helped set the stage for the attitude, language, and vitriol we see directed against the Jewish state and those termed “Zionists” nowadays.

The 2001 World Conference against Racism 2001 included a draft document equating Zionism with racism, targeting Israel alone for its right to exist. Among back-and-forth debates over the exact language used, the idea still stood out as attacking the tiny Jewish state.

The United States and Israel eventually walked out. Jewish participants encountered open antisemitism surrounding the parallel NGO gathering. Israel was accused of racism, apartheid, and genocide, while a conference intended to confront prejudice became consumed by an attempt to revive, in a new form, the old charge that Zionism itself was racism.

The final declaration of the official UN conference did not equate Zionism with racism. Attempts to insert such language were defeated, and the document condemned antisemitism.

The NGO forum was another matter, however. Its declaration accused Israel of being an “apartheid state,” spoke of genocide and racist crimes, and called for its international isolation. Outside the conference halls, antisemitic caricatures circulated, and demonstrators carried signs praising Hitler.

What makes Durban so important 25 years later, however, is that it was more than an ugly gathering. The accusations themselves were hardly new. The Soviet Union and Arab states had spent decades portraying Zionism as racism and Israel as uniquely malevolent. Durban took those ideas and gave them a new home.

The language migrated from Soviet and Arab political polemic into the world of NGOs, international law, and human rights, a trajectory we see continuing today. Accusations could now be accompanied by reports, legal terminology, boycott campaigns and the authority of organizations widely regarded in the West as guardians of universal moral principles.

The language associated with racist regime was increasingly transferred to Israel

South Africa provided a particularly powerful setting for that transformation. Apartheid had ended less than a decade earlier, and a conference there against racism should have celebrated that achievement. Instead, the language associated with South Africa’s racist regime was increasingly transferred to Israel.

Durban helped to establish the future strategy that was to be used to delegitimize Israel.

Over the following quarter-century, that strategy became steadily more familiar. Successive conflicts involving Israel brought allegations of war crimes, international investigations, and NGO reports. Boycott campaigns grew, and the apartheid accusation moved from activist circles toward mainstream political and academic discourse.

Then came October 7 and the Gaza war.

By 2026, much of what caused outrage at Durban has become routine. Israel is regularly accused of apartheid, racism, and genocide. Zionism – the movement for Jewish national self-determination – is increasingly presented as an inherently racist ideology.

More troubling still is the way the word “Zionist” itself is sometimes used. Criticism of Zionism is not inherently antisemitic, just as criticism of Israel is not. But when “Zionists” supposedly control governments, money, or the media, or when Zionists as a category are declared unwelcome in public spaces, the ancestry of those accusations is difficult to disguise. An ancient prejudice does not become respectable simply because “Zionist” has replaced “Jew.”

None of this places Israel beyond criticism. Israeli governments should be scrutinized, wars examined, civilian suffering confronted and policies challenged. Israelis themselves conduct those arguments every day.

Criticism of Israel and opposition to what Israel is

Durban’s poison lay elsewhere. It helped erode the distinction between criticism of what Israel does and opposition to what Israel is.

Durban did not invent antisemitism or anti-Zionism. Its significance lay in helping to take ideas that had existed at ideological extremes and repackage them in the vocabulary of human rights.

Twenty-five years later, we have come disturbingly close to completing the circle. Language that helped drive Israel and the United States from a UN conference against racism in 2001 no longer shocks people. Much of it has become part of the everyday vocabulary used to discuss Israel.

That is Durban’s legacy – and why, a quarter-century later, remembering what happened there is still of the utmost importance and worth fighting against.