Love of the Land: NGO “Apartheid State” Campaign: Deliberately Immoral or Intellectually Lazy?

NGO “Apartheid State” Campaign: Deliberately Immoral or Intellectually Lazy?

NGO Monitor
22 March '10

-Labeling Israel an apartheid state is part of a larger strategy of political warfare that includes NGO boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns and “lawfare” cases against Israelis. It is the latest manifestation of the 1975 UN “Zionism is racism” resolution and the 2001 Durban Conference NGO Forum declaration.

-The only internationally recognized case of apartheid was in South Africa. Customary law is based therefore on those practices that were unique in apartheid South Africa. Since Israel does not share these practices, it cannot be defined as an apartheid state under international law.

-Many NGO claims and legal arguments equating Israel with apartheid South Africa originate with the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department and were developed for propaganda purposes.

-Many NGOs falsely portray the Arab-Israeli conflict as a dispute motivated by alleged Jewish race-hatred of Arabs, rather than one based on competing national and territorial claims.

-A significant portion of the organizations involved in apartheid based demonization receive substantial funds from the European Union, European governments, New Israel Fund (NIF), Ford Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

-NIF’s funding of such organizations is entirely inconsistent with a March 2010 statement by CEO Daniel Sokatch, that “apartheid” is “a historically inaccurate and inflammatory term that serves only to demonize Israel and alienate a majority of Jews around the world.”

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Love of the Land: NGO “Apartheid State” Campaign: Deliberately Immoral or Intellectually Lazy?

Love of the Land: Analyzing the Durban II Conference

Analyzing the Durban II Conference

Interview with Gerald Steinberg

Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg
Institute for Global Jewish Affairs
Published March '10
No. 96

From 20-24 April 2009, the Durban Review Conference took place in Geneva. It is also known as Durban II, a follow-up to the infamous "Durban I" World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in the late summer of 2001. At Durban I, an NGO Forum accepted what can be summed up as a declaration of war against Israel. Participating nongovernmental organizations adopted a strategy for the complete isolation of Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.

The Canadian Harper government was the first to announce in February 2008 that it would not participate in Durban II, followed nine months later by Israel. Other countries, including the United States, eventually followed suit in refusing to come to Geneva. The withdrawal accelerated when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced his intention to participate. Many funders that had provided large amounts of money for the Durban I NGO Forum, including Canada and the Ford Foundation, did not provide NGO support for 2009.

Although the nonparticipation of so many key countries made Durban II less of a diplomatic disaster for Israel than Durban I, it did not result in any erasure or renouncement of the anti-Israeli "Durban strategy" adopted at the 2001 NGO Forum.

Many UN-sponsored mini-Durbans promoting the indictment of Israel continue to take place, led by the same NGOs active in the Durban I hate-fest. In the dominant narrative, Israel is the world's worst violator of human rights and must be held accountable through investigations predetermined to find it guilty. Judge Richard Goldstone has become the patron saint of this "Durban process."

(Read full interview and analysis)

Love of the Land: Analyzing the Durban II Conference

Love of the Land: Israel Apartheid Week Comes to Town

Israel Apartheid Week Comes to Town

Honest Reporting
Media Critique
03 March '10

The insidious analogy returns to college campuses as part of the campaign to delegitimize Israel.

The false analogy between apartheid South Africa and Israel - particularly since the UN's racist 2001 Durban Conference - has played a key role in the campaign to delegitimize Israel and threaten its existence. The strategy of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) is based on convincing the public that Israel is no more legitimate than the apartheid regime in South Africa, and can be removed with enough public pressure.

Now, this insidious delegitimization campaign has returned to university campuses around the world, including the US, UK and Canada, as part of Israel Apartheid Week.

As the Jerusalem Post states:

Problem is, if left unchallenged, proponents of the apartheid analogy are liable to stifle free speech and trample open debate on campuses by using intimidation and bullying tactics. They recently prevented Ambassador Michael Oren from finishing a speech at UC Irvine, and on the same day in Cambridge they interrupted Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, allegedly shouting in Arabic, "Slaughter the Jews." Meanwhile, Cambridge University’s Israel Society bowed to pressure from Muslim students to cancel a speech by historian Benny Morris.

(Read full critique)

Love of the Land: Israel Apartheid Week Comes to Town

Love of the Land: Judicial jihad: Engaging a new battlefront

Judicial jihad: Engaging a new battlefront

Shimon Samuels
Columns/JPost
14 December 09

On December 6, 2001, three months after the Durban hatefest, I attended the last meeting of its NGO Forum International Steering Committee in Geneva.

Though I had been successively elected and expelled, I now became privy to an eight-point plan attacking Israel as the last bastion of apartheid. It included educational, economic, cultural, diplomatic and legal campaigns to demonize, boycott, embargo and isolate the Jewish state.

Legal measures began with sporadic and - so far unsuccessful - attempts to arrest IDF reserve officers in countries of universal jurisprudence.

In 2005, I was charged with criminal defamation by a Franco-Palestinian charity, designated by the US as a terrorist organization. My sentence was one symbolic euro, which was politically too expensive. I won on appeal, and was taken to the French Supreme Court, where, this July, I was finally acquitted.

This long, agonizing and costly experience was emblematic of an epidemic of such suits designed to intimidate and silence pro-Jewish/Zionist activity. The charges against me were replicated against seven other targets - journalists, authors and a Christian Website. Parallel were the suits and countersuits relating to Muhammad al-Dura - the Palestinian child presented by French television as an IDF victim, in terms redolent of ritual murder.

Some denote such cases as "lawfare." Perhaps more appropriate would be "juridical jihad," due to the clearly Islamist context of the most litigious plaintiffs.

(Continue reading)

Love of the Land: Judicial jihad: Engaging a new battlefront

Love of the Land: Targeting Israelis via International Law

Targeting Israelis via International Law

Israel and Its Enemies

by Barak M. Seener

Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2009, pp. 43-54

Based on principles derived from the Hague and Geneva conventions, individuals have been brought to trial for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. The outstanding examples of such trials were those held at Nuremberg after World War II where numbers of leading Nazis were brought to court for some of the many crimes committed by Germany under the Third Reich. The shadow of those trials is still visible today. In July 2009, John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian accused of crimes while working for the Nazis as a concentration camp guard was deported from Canada to Germany to stand trial. On a smaller but significant scale, cases have been brought against individuals responsible for the genocide that took place during the Bosnian war of 1992-95. More recently, however, individuals and organizations with political grievances have started to make use of war crimes legislation in order to pursue a variety of officials from states equipped with well-run courts and tribunals, notably the United States, Great Britain, and—most of all—Israel. Should this matter to us? Aren't war crimes clear and cut; shouldn't those who commit them be pursued with the full force of the law? This essay tries to answer those questions and others.

This poster of Dan Halutz, former IDF chief of staff and Israeli air force commander, is an example of attempts to delegitimize Israel and present its officials as war criminals for conducting antiterrorist actions.

Again and again attempts have been made to indict Israeli soldiers and civilians as war criminals when their only crimes have been to thwart terrorist actions or punish those responsible for murder. A boost was given to this gambit when speeches at the Durban Conference on Racism in 2001 branded Israeli antiterrorist actions as "war crimes" and condemned Israel as "an apartheid state" that has committed ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide. This has set the tone for a series of attempts to summon Israelis before foreign courts, from Ariel Sharon and Amos Yaron (particularly with regard to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, which had already been investigated by Israel's own Kahan Commission),[1] to Avraham (Avi) Dichter for the assassination of a Hamas leader while he was director of the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, to Doron Almog, an Israeli general accused of mass murder in 2002, and Moshe Ya'alon, former head of Israeli military intelligence (and later chief of staff), indicted for bombings in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996.

The sweep of charges is wide. The individuals charged have been important figures in Israeli life and major contributors to Israel's security. Attempts to charge them with crimes against humanity have never been matched by calls to indict Palestinian terrorist chiefs. The bias is very clear, and it is inspired not by humanitarian concerns or a desire for justice but by political motives.

The Durban Strategy

The 2001 Durban conference, organized by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, crystallized the strategy of delegitimizing Israel as "an apartheid regime" through international isolation based on the South African model. The conference consisted of three parallel gatherings—an official diplomatic forum, a youth summit, and a massive nongovernmental organization (NGO) forum with delegates from 1,250 groups. The delegitimization plan is driven by groups that exploit the funds, slogans, and rhetoric of the human rights movement. The complaints by NGOs against Israeli generals abroad were based on the Durban speeches that branded Israeli antiterrorism responses as "war crimes" and "violations of international law." Article 426 of the declaration of the Durban conference seeks the "condemnation of those states who are supporting, aiding and abetting the Israeli apartheid state and its perpetration of racist crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing, acts of genocide."[2] Israeli and Jewish NGOs were deliberately excluded from a regional conference in the run-up to Durban, designed to draft a composite declaration against racism. None of the international NGOs present protested at this violation of Israeli rights, and no one protested when Israel was outrageously and falsely accused of "committing holocausts and being anti-Semitic."[3] This last statement deliberately replaced the longstanding and common meaning of "anti-Semitism" (hatred directed against Jews) to mean hatred of Arabs, who are also Semites. The reference to "holocausts" was wholly without historical foundation. These accusations laid the foundation for NGOs to invoke a politicized interpretation of universal jurisdiction in their bid to indict Israeli officials and military abroad.

Ariel Sharon in the political dock. The first case of a civil indictment against an Israeli official was filed in Brussels three months before Durban on June 18, 2001, against Ariel Sharon for his role in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon by twenty-three survivors as well as five eyewitnesses. The reliance upon eyewitnesses is a common strategy used by NGOs that make unverifiable claims. A multiple indictment was made against Ariel Sharon; Amos Yaron, a former general in charge of Israeli troops in Beirut at the time; Rafael Eitan, the Israeli Army chief of staff in 1982; and Amir Drori, the former head of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)'s Northern Command. The lawsuit was translated into English by LAW, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, an attendee at the Durban conference. Sharon was charged with crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes.[4] Dyab Abou Jahjah, president of a Belgian-licensed NGO, the Arab European League (AEL), admitted the political nature of the case, stating, "We had to prepare on the legal level as well as the political, financial, and logistical levels."[5] Abou Jahjah is an uncompromising opponent of assimilation and integration, who insists that European society has to adapt to Muslims, not vice versa. He has stated that he experienced feelings of "sweet revenge" on 9/11.[6]

(Full Article)

Love of the Land: Targeting Israelis via International Law