ABSTRACT
The antizionism that dominated the 2001 UN ‘World Conference against Racism’ was neither a new antisemitism nor was it simply the latest manifestation of an eternal phenomenon. During the peace process, the focus on Israel as a key symbol of all that was bad in the world had been in remission, but at Durban, the 1970s ‘Zionism=Racism’ culture returned. Many conference participants embraced the reconfigured antizionism. Others failed to speak out, even when they witnessed the recognisable antisemitic tropes with which it came intertwined. The proposition that Zionism was the key symbolic form of racism in the world after the fall of apartheid offered unity across different movements and milieus: post-colonialism, human rights and humanitarian law; the women's movement, anti-racism, much of the global left and NGOs; even oppressive governments, if they positioned themselves as anti-imperialist or Islamic. The chapter discusses the question of agency, and so responsibility, for an antisemitism that is always denied. Based on elements of truth, exaggeration and invention, and made plausible by half visible fragments of older antisemitisms, Durban antizionism was attractive because it offered an emotionally potent way of imagining and communicating all that which ‘good people’ oppose and which they have difficulty facing rationally. It portrayed racism, and in the end oppression itself, with an Israeli face. Delegates brought this worldview home, and to the spheres in which they operated intellectually and politically. They worked to make Durban antizionism into the radical common sense of the 21st century.
