Twenty-five years ago, representatives from around the world gathered in Durban, South Africa, for a United Nations conference dedicated to one of the most important of human causes: combating racism.
What followed should still trouble anyone committed to that cause.
The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance opened on 31 August 2001. More than 12,000 representatives were expected in South Africa to confront racism, xenophobia and discrimination.1 Yet Durban is remembered for something else.
Around the official conference developed an extraordinary campaign against Israel and Zionism. At the parallel NGO Forum, Israel was described not simply as a country pursuing objectionable policies but as a racist and apartheid state. Accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes were incorporated into a political programme calling for sanctions and Israel’s international isolation.
It would become one of the important moments in the development of modern anti-Israel activism — not because Durban invented antizionism, but because it helped change the language in which it could be expressed.
Before Durban
The story begins well before 2001.
In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. The significance was profound. Zionism — the movement for Jewish national self-determination — was placed within the international vocabulary of racism and associated politically with apartheid South Africa.
The resolution was repealed in 1991 by General Assembly Resolution 46/86.2
But the underlying idea did not disappear.
Six months before the Durban conference, representatives of the Asian regional group met in Tehran to prepare for it. Israeli and Jewish organisations were reportedly denied effective participation. The resulting text accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and “a new kind of apartheid”, described Zionism in racial terms and accused Israel of crimes against humanity.3
The United States warned that it would not participate at Durban if the conference became an attempt to resurrect the equation of Zionism with racism. Some of the most inflammatory language was eventually removed from the official text under pressure from Western governments.
Outside the formal negotiations, however, something considerably more radical was taking shape.
The NGO Forum
More than 7,000 representatives attended the parallel NGO Forum.3
Its final declaration went far beyond criticism of Israeli governments, settlements or military conduct. Israel was declared a “racist, apartheid state”. The declaration accused it of the “systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing”.4
It called for the launch of an international anti-Israel apartheid movement and for the “complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state”, including comprehensive sanctions and embargoes and the severing of diplomatic, economic, social and other links. It also called for the reinstitution of UN Resolution 3379.4
The model was explicit: Israel was to be understood through the experience of apartheid South Africa, and the international campaign that had helped isolate Pretoria was to be applied to the Jewish state.
Every government can be criticised. Israeli governments are no exception. Settlements, military operations, treatment of Palestinians, discrimination and the conduct of individual politicians, soldiers or officials can and should be judged on evidence.
But declaring the state itself an inherently racist enterprise makes a different argument. If Israel is not merely a state sometimes acting wrongly but an apartheid entity whose foundational character is racist, then changing Israeli policy cannot solve the underlying problem. Israel itself becomes the problem, and isolation, boycott and ultimately transformation of the state become logical consequences.
Durban provided an international platform on which that argument was articulated in the vocabulary of universal human rights.
There Was Nothing Ambiguous About Some of It
It is important to distinguish criticism of Israel from antizionism, and antizionism from antisemitism, rather than collapsing these different concepts into one another. Durban itself demonstrates why.
There is an ongoing debate over when opposition to Zionism — particularly when it entails denying Jews a right to national self-determination accorded to other peoples — becomes antisemitic. There was considerably less ambiguity about some of what occurred around the NGO Forum.
Copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous antisemitic forgery alleging a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, were reportedly sold. Material circulated featuring Adolf Hitler and asking what would have happened had he won, with the answer suggesting that there would have been no Israel. Contemporary accounts also described anti-Jewish intimidation and abuse directed at Jewish participants.5
US Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and member of the American delegation, subsequently described what he witnessed at Durban as one of the most “unabashed demonstrations of hatred for Jews” he had seen since the Nazi period.5
Whatever arguments exist about the boundary between antizionism and antisemitism, there was nothing ambiguous about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or approving references to Hitler.
What Durban Changed
Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, put the historical argument starkly in an interview with the Jerusalem Post published on the eve of Durban’s 25th anniversary.
“Durban was the restarting of the Zionism is Racism campaign. It was the blueprint for accusing Israel of genocide and starvation and war crimes,” Steinberg told the newspaper.6
His more interesting argument, however, concerns not simply the accusations but the institutions carrying them.
Durban did not invent hostility towards Zionism, nor did it invent allegations that Israel was racist or comparable to apartheid South Africa. What changed was the vehicle. Ideas previously associated principally with Soviet, Arab and Palestinian political campaigns increasingly entered the vocabulary and institutions of international human-rights activism.
That transformation mattered. An argument presented simply as opposition to Zionism was recognisably political. The same argument expressed through the categories of apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes acquired the authority of universal human-rights principles.
The legacy can therefore be understood as a method as much as a set of accusations: constructing a framework in which Israel could repeatedly be understood through the categories of humanity’s gravest crimes.
Whether any subsequent use of those terms is justified is a separate question. Each allegation must stand or fall on its own evidence. But Durban helped institutionalise a vocabulary through which those accusations could travel.
From Durban to BDS
The continuity is particularly apparent in the campaign for Israel’s isolation.
It would be too simple to say that the modern Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement began at Durban. The formal Palestinian civil-society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions came four years later, on 9 July 2005.7
But Durban was an unmistakable precursor. The NGO Forum had already articulated much of the strategy: portray Israel through the South African apartheid paradigm, build an international civil-society movement, impose economic and political pressure and pursue the country’s international isolation.
That strategy did not depend upon persuading Israel to change one particular policy. Its power came from establishing a moral analogy.
Once Israel was apartheid South Africa, the appropriate response followed almost automatically.
You did not negotiate with apartheid. You isolated it.
The Official Declaration Was Different
This is where an important distinction must be maintained.
The NGO Forum declaration was not the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action adopted by UN member states. The United Nations is not proposing to commemorate the NGO document on 28 September. It is commemorating the official declaration.
That official text was considerably more restrained than the documents produced in Tehran or at the NGO Forum.
It stated that “the Holocaust must never be forgotten” and recognised “with deep concern the increase in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in various parts of the world”. On the Middle East, it expressed concern about “the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation”, affirmed the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and an independent state, while also recognising “the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel”.8
Much of the Durban Declaration concerns genuine problems of racism, slavery, discrimination, xenophobia and the treatment of indigenous peoples and migrants. Those provisions do not become objectionable simply because of what happened elsewhere at Durban.
That raises a fair objection to the case for staying away in 2026.
Why should today’s United Nations be required to repudiate a declaration it never adopted before governments can commemorate the declaration they did?
The answer lies in what happened after 2001.
Durban did not end with two documents travelling down entirely separate historical paths. The official UN process retained the Durban name and repeatedly returned to the same political terrain. The problem surrounding the first conference was followed by further controversies at Durban II, Durban III and Durban IV. Governments repeatedly concluded that participation risked legitimising a process whose association with anti-Israel demonisation and antisemitism had never been adequately resolved.
The issue, therefore, is not collective responsibility for everything said by NGOs in South Africa 25 years ago. It is institutional continuity.
If the United Nations wishes to celebrate the Durban process as a continuing achievement, it cannot reasonably claim the achievements while treating the failures surrounding that same process as irrelevant history.
The Process Continued
In 2009, the United Nations convened the Durban Review Conference in Geneva.
New Zealand was one of ten countries that did not participate.9 The decision looked prescient when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used his address to attack “World Zionism” as an embodiment of racism and described the establishment of Israel after the Second World War as the creation of a racist government “under the pretext of Jewish suffering”. European diplomats walked out during his speech.10
Two years later, the United Nations held a high-level meeting to mark the tenth anniversary of the original conference. New Zealand stayed away again.
Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully explained that while New Zealand was “fully committed to combating racism”, the Government remained concerned that the commemoration could “re-open the offensive and anti-Semitic debates which undermined the original World Conference”.9
Fourteen countries ultimately declined to participate.
Then came Durban IV in 2021, marking the twentieth anniversary. Again, New Zealand stayed away. This time the boycott was much larger: 38 countries declined to participate, including Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States.11
This history is why the NGO Forum cannot simply be dismissed as an unfortunate sideshow from 2001. Successive Durban gatherings repeatedly encountered the same underlying problem, and successive New Zealand governments reached essentially the same conclusion: opposing racism did not require New Zealand to legitimise a process carrying serious unresolved baggage of its own.
Durban 25
Now the question has returned.
On 28 September 2026, the United Nations General Assembly will hold another high-level meeting in New York, this time commemorating the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.12
Its theme is “Mobilizing global public support for the full and effective implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action”.12
New Zealand has already signalled caution.
On 15 December 2025, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 80/193, which among other measures provided for the 25th-anniversary commemoration. The vote was 127 in favour, 16 against and 40 abstentions. New Zealand abstained.13
On 28 July 2026, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 80/299, setting the scope, modalities, format and organisation of the September meeting. The vote was 142–3–13. Argentina, Israel and the United States voted against; New Zealand was among the 13 abstentions.14
New Zealand then explained its vote explicitly:
“New Zealand has abstained on this resolution as per our longstanding position on texts that relate to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.”14
It went on to say that racism in all its forms was “abhorrent and unacceptable” and reaffirmed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination as the basis for efforts to combat racism.
But abstaining on the resolutions is not the same as declining to attend the meeting. So the question now is straightforward – Will New Zealand participate in Durban 25? And if it does, what has changed?
A Reasonable Test
UN Watch, which is campaigning for governments to withdraw from Durban 25, argues that they should refuse to participate unless the September meeting expressly renounces both the elements of the Durban process that single out and demonise Israel and the extreme antisemitism surrounding the original conference.15
There is room to argue about precisely how that demand should be formulated. The official Durban Declaration did not endorse The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, praise Hitler or restore the “Zionism is racism” resolution. Asking it to answer for every outrage committed at the NGO Forum would be historically imprecise.
But asking the Durban process to acknowledge its own history is different.
Twenty-five years should be sufficient time for a process devoted to fighting racism to say clearly that the antisemitism surrounding its foundational conference was not merely unfortunate but fundamentally incompatible with the principles Durban purported to defend.
That does not require repudiating the entire Durban Declaration. It does not require pretending that everything discussed at Durban concerned Israel. It certainly does not require abandoning international efforts against racism.
It requires institutional honesty.
The United Nations should be able to commemorate the worthwhile elements of Durban while acknowledging the hatred that surrounded the original conference and affirming unequivocally that opposition to racial discrimination cannot itself become a vehicle for demonising Jews or denying Jewish national self-determination.
If Durban 25 can do that, there is a case for countries such as New Zealand to engage.
If it cannot, why should New Zealand lend the commemoration its legitimacy?
The Language Survived
There is a deeper reason why the question matters in 2026.
Consider how much of Durban’s political vocabulary is now familiar:
Apartheid. Settler-colonialism. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions. The international isolation of Israel.
That does not prove contemporary accusations against Israel are false.
History cannot substitute for evidence. If Israeli conduct constitutes a war crime, calling it a war crime is not antisemitic because somebody used the same term improperly at Durban 25 years ago. If someone alleges genocide, that claim must be tested against the legal definition of genocide and the available evidence.
But intellectual genealogy matters too.
Durban shows that the use of these concepts as part of a programme to delegitimise Israel did not suddenly emerge after October 7, 2023. The framework was already there, as were the strategy and much of the language.
What changed after October 7 was their reach.
Ideas that once inhabited international conferences and activist NGOs can now be heard in parliaments, universities, protest movements and mainstream political debate. That makes maintaining distinctions more important, not less: between criticism of an Israeli government and hostility towards Israelis; between opposition to occupation and opposition to Israel’s existence; between Palestinian national rights and denial of Jewish national rights; between Zionists and Jews; and between evidence-based allegations of wrongdoing and the reflexive assignment to Israel of humanity’s gravest crimes.
Durban blurred many of those distinctions. Twenty-five years later, we are still arguing about them.
New Zealand Should Ask What Has Changed
New Zealand does not need to choose between opposing racism and opposing antisemitism. It should be doing both.
Nor does New Zealand need to accept UN Watch’s interpretation of every aspect of the Durban process in order to recognise the problem. The historical record is sufficient.
A conference created to oppose racism became surrounded by overt antisemitism. Its NGO gathering produced a political programme describing the world’s only Jewish state as inherently racist and calling for its comprehensive international isolation. The official UN process continued under the Durban name, and subsequent gatherings generated enough concern that democratic governments repeatedly chose not to participate.
New Zealand was among them.
It did not participate in Durban II in 2009, stayed away from Durban III in 2011 and stayed away again from Durban IV in 2021. It has now abstained on both UN resolutions leading to Durban 25, citing its longstanding position.
There is therefore nothing radical about asking the Government to maintain that position. The burden of explanation should run in the other direction.
If Durban 25 explicitly confronts the antisemitism associated with the process’s history and repudiates attempts to resurrect “Zionism is racism” in contemporary language, New Zealand can reconsider.
If it does not, New Zealand should stay away.
Twenty-five years after Durban, the question is not whether the world still needs to fight racism.
Obviously it does.
The question is whether a process established to fight racism is prepared to confront the antisemitism in its own history.
Until it does, New Zealand has no reason to lend it legitimacy.
References
- United Nations, “World Conference on Racism (Durban) — Background Release”, 2001.
- United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 (XXX), Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, 10 November 1975; United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86, Elimination of racism and racial discrimination, 16 December 1991.
- Mathilda Heller, “The Durban Conference 25 years later: A blueprint for anti-Israel demonization — interview”, Jerusalem Post, 30 August 2026; UN Watch, Durban 25.
- WCAR NGO Forum Declaration, Durban, 3 September 2001, especially paras 162 and 418–425.
- Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Jewish activists seek to place blame for U.N. forum”, 5 September 2001; Tom Lantos, “Anti-Semitic Circus”, Washington Post, 14 December 2001.
- Mathilda Heller, “The Durban Conference 25 years later: A blueprint for anti-Israel demonization — interview”, Jerusalem Post, 30 August 2026.
- Palestinian Civil Society, Palestinian Civil Society Calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel Until it Complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights, 9 July 2005.
