Malicious accusations of genocide against Israel did not begin with the Hamas-Israel war. The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, were a catalyst in a conspiracy that began 25 years ago in South Africa, where NGO activists, hostile countries and U.N. officials coordinated in Durban, ending days before the 9/11 terror attacks. On Sept. 28, the United Nations will convene a meeting in New York City to mark the 25th anniversary of the Durban declaration.
The Durban conferences were designed to become a landmark in confronting racism, but instead, turned into “a hallmark of antisemitism and antizionism,” in the words of the World Jewish Congress. Participants created a set of false and vilifying charges against the world’s only Jewish state—apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide—a full generation before the war in Gaza.
These poisonous narratives have sparked an unprecedented, global firestorm of antisemitic attacks at schools, city councils, synagogues and even on sidewalks, all while demonizing Israel.
Singling out Israel
The U.N. World Conference Against Racism convened in September 2001 alongside a separate forum for 7,000 NGO activists. Non-governmental organizations are nonprofit groups that operate independently of governments to achieve their goals.
The outcome was set before the delegates arrived. The Islamic Republic of Iran chaired a preparatory meeting and refused entry to Israeli and Jewish organizations, despite assurances from the U.N. human-rights chief. In their absence, the delegates produced a document accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, describing Zionism as a doctrine based on racial superiority.
The Durban conference concluded with a declaration that condemned only one country: Israel. The text “recognized the right of refugees to return,” which is a demand for unlimited Palestinian immigration into Israel.
The chief historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center, Dina Porat, was part of the Israeli delegation. She asked the Belgian representative chairing the sessions how the conference had turned on Israel so quickly. He explained that most delegations came from countries once under colonial rule and wanted compensation for it—and that Spain, Portugal and Belgium would be the ones paying. Then he added: “The simple solution to this problem was to pick on Israel and the Jews.”
‘The complete and total isolation of Israel’
Activists harassed Jewish participants at the parallel NGO Forum. Vendors sold the antisemitic Russian screed Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and activists handed out pamphlets with Hitler’s photo asking, “What if I had won?”
The Roma, Europe’s largest ethnic minority who were also targeted by the Nazis for extermination, walked out of the forum and condemned the declaration’s text as antisemitic. At the time, Holocaust survivor Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) described the Durban Conference as “the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”
The NGO Forum released its own declaration that also invoked the “right of return” and called for the “complete and total isolation of Israel.” It declared that Israel’s “brand of apartheid” included “acts of genocide and practices of ethnic cleansing.”
The declaration also demanded that the United Nations reinstate its 1975 Soviet-backed resolution branding Zionism a form of racism, which it had revoked in 1991. Zionism is the right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland.
The NGO Monitor, founded in response to the Durban conferences to track anti-Israel networks, labeled the campaign the “Durban Strategy.” The executive director of UN Watch, identified Durban as the institutional launch of Israel’s demonization as a racist state. Human-rights activist and former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, who attended the conference, said Durban turned the language of human rights into cover for antisemitism at the world body. He called it the “tipping point for the laundering of antisemitism at the U.N.”
Representatives of 1,500 organizations adopted the NGO Declaration as grounds for boycotts and sanctions against Israel. Its terms moved directly into mainstream headlines, endorsed by NGO leaders including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Both organizations have spent decades weaponizing the language of human rights against the State of Israel. Amnesty went further in December 2024, declaring Israel guilty of genocide in Gaza while acknowledging that it had applied a looser standard of proof for intent than the International Court of Justice requires. Amnesty’s own Israel branch accused the international body of working toward a “predetermined outcome.”
Durban never ended
The NGO Declaration at Durban called for a “war crimes tribunal” to investigate the charges against Israel. Activists reached a courtroom 22 years later. On Dec. 29, 2023, less than three months after the Oct. 7 massacres, South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel to the U.N.’s International Court of Justice. The case is still under review.
Maintaining the world body’s obsession with Israel, the U.N. Human Rights Council keeps a standing agenda item reserved for only one country: Item 7 requires every session to debate Israel’s record. The HRC’s Commission of Inquiry specifically investigates Israel—with no end date.
The NGO network that drafted the Durban language has grown into an industry that promotes Islamist propaganda against the West, supports activists and feeds false stories to media organizations. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof parroted the NGO Euro‑Med Human Rights Monitor’s false claim that Israelis train dogs to rape male Palestinian prisoners.
NGO Monitor has identified 157 groups in the United States linked by nearly 3,000 funding and partnership connections, a structured network with shared objectives. In the United Kingdom, 80% of anti-Israel protests since Oct. 7 were organized by NGOs, many with links to the Iranian regime, Hamas, Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood.
25 years later in New York City
The U.N. General Assembly is convening a one-day high-level meeting at its Manhattan headquarters on Sept. 28 to mark 25 years since Durban. The United Nations has held the anniversary event three times before, and Western governments have boycotted in growing numbers each time: 38 withdrew in 2021. At the 2009 event, Iranian President and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave the opening speech.
The commemoration falls during the annual U.N. General Assembly, when world leaders give speeches, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called for protests against the Israeli leader’s visit, while acknowledging that the New York City Police Department cannot arrest him.
The day before Netanyahu is set to speak, major Jewish groups plan to hold a rally against antisemitism directly across from U.N. headquarters on Sept. 23. Organizers are calling on world leaders to “act decisively to stop the growing tide of antisemitism.” Sponsors include the Anti-Defamation League, Conference of Presidents, Israeli-American Council and StandWithUs.
Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, recently launched the U.N. Task Force on Combating Antisemitism, citing the gap between what governments say publicly and what they do in practice. He warned that “the words ‘Never Again’ weren’t meant to be a slogan; they were meant to be a commitment.”
Points to consider:
1. The foundation of the anti-Israel NGO industry was set at Durban.
Durban’s NGO Forum didn’t just pass a declaration. It handed activists a playbook: Weaponize the language of human rights to target one country. The first test run came seven months later, when NGOs and the news media reported a supposed Israeli “massacre” of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Jenin. The U.N. Middle East peace envoy, CBS reporters and others described a “stench of death.” In reality, the majority of the 52 dead were terrorists, according to frequent Israel critic Human Rights Watch. The correction never spread as far as the accusation.
2. Oct. 7 did not create the charges against Israel. It accelerated them.
A study of American campuses found that genocide claims grew largely out of BDS activism by professors and speakers already in place. Activists created the vocabulary first; the war expanded their audience.
3. A false charge of genocide gives people permission to hate Jews.
Words have meanings. Genocide means the attempt to destroy an entire people: 3 million Jews in Poland before the Holocaust, 45,000 after. Applying the word to a war Israel did not start does not describe what happened in Gaza. It manufactures a justification.
4. Young Americans have forgotten who the terrorists are.
News agencies heavily covered Durban, but the story disappeared after the 9/11 terror attacks a few days later. Twenty-five years later, comedian Bill Maher marked the anniversary by noting how much has changed: “There was a war on terror, and we won. And yet, so much has changed since 9/11. For example, back then, we were against the terrorists.” Now, one in five young Americans hold a positive view of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and a majority support Iran-backed Hamas over Israel.
5. Jewish groups push back against activists trying to erase Jewish history.
The Durban meetings described Israelis as colonizers and Zionism as racism. Strip away the Jewish people’s 3,000-year presence in their homeland and everything else follows—Jews become foreign occupiers, self-determination becomes a crime, and a national liberation movement becomes racism. The J50 Forum, an alliance of leading worldwide Jewish groups, recently signed a declaration stating that “Zionism is deeply rooted in Jewish history and tradition. Zionism is part of Jewish identity. We will not allow others to define it for us.”
