U.S. Walkout Was Right

The United States and Israel were right to walk out of the United Nations conference on racism now underway in South Africa. Washington provided plenty of warning that unless language branding Israel a racist state was removed, the U.S. would leave.

The Bush administration refused to send Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to head the delegation because of two key concerns. One was that representatives from African nations and some African Americans had demanded that the U.S. and other Western nations apologize for slavery, which in itself is not an unreasonable request. The cash reparations that could go with it, however, realistically are not going to be for the U.N. to settle. The other key concern was that Israel would be labeled, as a draft declaration put it, “an apartheid, racist and fascist state” conducting a new “holocaust” against the Palestinians. Instead, Washington sent a lower-level delegation to the meeting, formally known as the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

That kitchen-sink title indicates the conveners’ grandiose hopes. Participants certainly cannot think that the “plan of action” they hope to adopt this week will end oppression and racism any time soon. But the downtrodden do benefit by having their concerns brought to the world’s attention. Done properly, the conference would have allowed Kurds, Gypsies, Tibetans, India’s untouchables and other groups whose views are often squelched to make their cases on the world stage. Instead, the Arab-Israeli conflict has overshadowed legitimate demands.

The U.S. delegation tried to negotiate the offensive language out of proposed documents. At one point, there was progress. A member of the Palestinian Authority said Palestinians would not equate Zionism with racism but wanted to discuss discriminatory policies by Israel against Palestinians. A U.S. delegate said Washington was prepared to accept a compromise referring to Palestinian suffering. Unfortunately, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat torpedoed chances for compromise with a strident declaration at the conference that Israel has a “supremacist mentality, a mentality of racial discrimination.”

The General Assembly’s 1975 declaration that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” poisoned the atmosphere at the United Nations and its many agencies. It took 16 years before the General Assembly came to its senses and repealed the odious pronouncement. Now the U.N. again finds itself heading down a path that leads to trouble.

One major benefit of holding the conference in Durban was the chance to spotlight a symbol of hope: If South Africans could triumph over apartheid, others can also rise above whatever form of racism plagues their part of the world. That remains a noble goal. The remaining nations would be foolish to take the absence of the United States and Israel as a green light to adopt language of the type the conference was designed to campaign against.