On Wednesday, I left my morning meeting at Palais de Nations and stepped onto the 13 Route Tram. I arrived at Théâtre du Léman, swapped my UN badge for a different wrist ID bracelet and waited in yet another security line to enter a bustling conference.
I am stealing away from the World Conference Against Racism, Discrimination and Xenophobia, also known as the Durban Review Conference, to go to another conference. Glancing around me in the security line, I recognize a face from the halls of the UN. We make eye contact with each other and smile knowingly. It seems I’m not the only one foregoing the highly talked about UN-sponsored conference for this other, smaller and less-talked about conference across the lake.
I have spent the past two days observing the official proceedings as well as the side events at the Durban Review Conference. As a delegate from ACCESS, the American Jewish Committee’s New Generation Program, I have come to Geneva with a group of young journalists, filmmakers, lawyers and finance professionals to participate in a conference that has been under great scrutiny since its inception in 2001.
The 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism took place in Durban, South Africa and drew the attention of the global community when the agenda was hijacked by the countries of the African Bloc, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and numerous NGOs and transformed into a forum for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment. As Joëlle Fiss, former President of the European Union of Jewish Students, writes in her account of Durban I, “for the first time in their lives, they [the Jewish participants] have been subjected to racism—by people who staged antiracist speeches. Thousands of people united to isolate, offend, and intimidate them—all in the name of antiracism.”
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