Israeli Delegates at U.N. Conference Call Apartheid Abhorrent

Israeli delegates to the U.N. women’s conference Friday condemned South Africa’s apartheid policy as abhorrent and anti-Semitic. On the fourth day of the conference marking the end of a decade dedicated by the United Nations to women, delegates also debated resolutions equating Zionism and racism.

Israeli delegate Naomi Chazan told a news conference: “It is imperative to separate Zionism from racism. . . . Israel and the Jewish people abhor apartheid. It is demeaning to the just cause of black people and an insult to the Jewish people, because it is intrinsically anti-Semitic.”

At the Nairobi University campus, where another women’s meeting was being held, dozens of women from around the world staged an anti-Israeli demonstration, waving placards saying, “Down with Zionism.”

Anti-Apartheid Songs

A larger group protesting apartheid, South Africa’s legalized racial segregation system, were led in song at the university by black nationalists from the African National Congress and the South-West Africa People’s Organization.

Women and scores of men sang “God Bless Africa” in Xhosa--a language of many South African blacks--and brandished their fists, shouting, “Victory to the people!” They listened to speakers from the two guerrilla movements fighting to overthrow the government in the last bastion of white rule on the African continent.

The demonstration was organized by a London-based anti-apartheid movement, one of hundreds of non-governmental organizations represented by 11,000 people taking part in a series of seminars at the university called Forum ’85.

The forum began July 10 and overlapped with Monday’s start of the official U.N. Conference, which marks the end of a decade dedicated to women’s rights. The U.N. meeting ends next Friday.

Complaints of Harassment

The Israeli denunciation of apartheid followed complaints at the news conference from an Israeli radio correspondent who said she had been “hounded, humiliated, harassed and abused” at Forum ’85 and at the U.N. conference because of Israeli government policy, including an alleged alliance with South Africa.

Delegation leader Sara Doron, a national legislator, said the problems of Israel--particularly of Palestinian women living in Israeli-occupied Arab lands--should not be singled out at the conference when there are refugees all over the world.

“Women should use politics to further their own aims and goals and not permit politics to use women to further ideological ends that have nothing in common with what women believe,” she said.

As Doron spoke, a negotiating group was thrashing out controversial wording for proposed resolutions equating Zionism with racism--one of the divisive issues that has split delegates at other women’s conferences into the traditional groups of East, West and developing nations.

‘Unique Concerns’ of Women

Israel supports the American stance that political issues debated in other U.N. forums should not dominate the Nairobi conference, which they argue should concentrate on more “genuine and unique concerns” of women.

Forum ’85 ended quietly on Friday without the march on the U.N. conference at the Kenyatta Conference Center that the women had called for Thursday. Nawal Saadawi, the radical Egyptian feminist who had called upon the women to march, told reporters that Dame Nita Barrow of Barbados, the Forum ’85 convener, had met with the march organizers and requested that they not embarrass the Kenyan government by marching.