–Rajani Jerome Welix, Tamil Rights Advocate: "We are very angry. They don’t see us. They don’t listen to us. We are crying. We are calling. What’s this world? We don’t ask anything. We don’t ask but peace. We want to live … like everybody, everybody in the world." In the end I think we made a well-balanced film that listens to the message each group was trying to express and presents it in a balanced way. It is also a film that exposes the UN for one of its major flaws, its relentless focus on the Middle East to the detriment of millions of victim’s of racism world-wide. All these years of arguing and political jockeying and killing – what effect has the UN really made to bring peace and happiness to the world? But was I left feeling like the UN is a hopeless venture? Not at all. A powerful feeling still lies underneath my cynicism. I don’t want to live in and can’t imagine a world without it. It still seems to me Israel needs the power of the Security Council to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. Even though Obama didn’t attend the Durban Review Conference he has renewed interest in the UN and has begun to engage the Human Rights Council. It seems like the US needs it. All the good work UNICEF has done feeding the hungry shouldn’t be underestimated. UN Peacekeeping operations are active in 15 countries around the world. Brave UN officials provide election support in Afghanistan, Congo, Sudan, Haiti and Iraq. The world needs it. At the end of all my internal debate, it was the words of Winston Churchill that seemed to ring most true, ‘The UN is the worst multilateral institution in the world, except for all the other multilateral institutions". Judge for yourself after you see the film. "The Battle of Durban II" is screening Wednesday December 2nd at 6:30 PM at NY’s Simon Wiesenthal Center. For more information about the film go here.

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Most importantly I learned how the UN, the pro-Zionist organizations and the pro-Palestinians were actively organizing to tell their version of the story. The Jews wanted desperately to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2001.  Palestinians and their supporters didn’t see anything wrong with the events of 2001 and, still without a state of their own, thought they could use the Durban Review Conference to continue pleading with the international community for help. UN officials, who felt the 2001 conference was a landmark success, wanted to continue their momentum without being criticized by the NGO community, members of which had been the most vocally anti-Israel. As the April 20, 2009 start date got closer the tension was high, with many countries, including the US and Israel, threatening to boycott. It didn’t take long for me to realize the pro-Israel, pro-Zionist groups were obviously very well funded and very well organized in getting their message out. Antisemitic language had not in fact been included in the UN conference outcome document. But the anti-Semitism the Jews felt that week in Durban led to an eight-year-long fight to never let it happen again. A quick Google search for ‘Durban hate-fest’ produced endless results. Groups such as the ADL, B’Nai B’rith, WJC, AJC, The Israel Project etc. had spent a tremendous amount of time speaking to the media, had published numerous pamphlets, media-guides, and op-eds and had been able to control the message, effectively re-branding the first conference an utter failure. They also seemed able to convince Obama administration officials the same. When I called these organizations they were happy to talk, to give me interviews, to help out in whatever way the could. In the film you’ll meet many of these key strategists: –Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Simon Wiesenthal Center (speaking about a man he met at the 2001 conference): "In the middle of the handshake he pulled his hand back and he said, ‘Are you a Jew?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and he wiped his hand off on his jacket."

–Anne Bayefsky, Hudson Institute: "Saudi Arabia and Cuba and China are all members of the UN Human Rights Council, the lead UN human rights body. It doesn’t do human rights. It does anti-Semitism, and the destruction of the State of Israel is its number one agenda."

–Gerald Steinberg, NGO Monitor: "Durban One wasn’t just a conference, it wasn’t just a week and a half of angry words and declarations targeting Israel. Durban was a strategy. And the Durban strategy was to use the United Nations, to use the rhetoric of human rights, to use international relations, to use the legal system as a weapon of war and against Israel."

In order to present a fair and balanced story we were intent on providing strong pro-Palestinian voices in the film. I wanted to hear their version of the events in 2001. According to Ingrid Gassner, director of BADIL, a major pro-Palestinian NGO, "There were no anti-Semitic events on the ground in Durban." The 2001 conference had marked the beginning of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which Gassner helped lead. This is a loosely organized body of groups all over the world intent on taking down the Israeli Government in the same fashion the South African apartheid government was made to implode in the 90’s. The movement had grown over the years and is now international. Israel Apartheid Week is held every year on college-campuses around the world.  They were beginning to get their message across to the world community.
However, Palestinian supporters, as I could tell by the dearth of supportive articles in English, were having difficulty influencing Western media to take notice – in part, it seemed, because they had limited access to funds. I spent hours calling pro-Palestinian groups in Egypt, Israel, Cairo, the UAE, Iran and all over Europe. Besides the language barrier, distrust, I surmised, was also an issue.  It was very hard for me to get anyone to return my calls or e-mails. In the end we did manage to speak to some of the BDS movement’s leaders and we acquired archival footage of others to help support their case.

–Ameer Makhoul, Ittijah: "I believe that the Palestinian cause is one of the very clear, just causes in the world, but its victims – it’s a victim of the system of not only the Israeli racism but international racism, to put aside and to marginalize and to [silent] the voice of the victims in order to protect the order and to protect in fact, de facto, the oppressors."

–Omar Barghouti, Human Rights Activist: "Israel’s particular form of apartheid is different in many ways from South Africa’s, as has been mentioned. It is a three tiered system of oppression, consisting of occupation and colonialization of the 1967 Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem; denial of Palestinian refugee rights, including the right to return; and the system of racial discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel."
The two other main groups we wanted in the film: UN officials who organized the conference and representatives from the US administration. UN officials, after much negotiating, finally accredited us to shoot. Understandably, they were very concerned we were going to be critical, and when we were in Geneva UN public affairs minders watched our every move. The UN had severely limited the space for NGOs at the Durban Review Conference in order to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2001, and they were concerned when they overheard us asking NGO leaders about it. In a surprisingly candid moment though UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay admitted this was true. " I come from the NGOs myself," she said, "and I am embarrassed that they were not given sufficient space to participate."  But Palestinian supporters did manage to infiltrate – passing our fliers that read ‘Zionism is Racism’. Whenever it happened UN security removed them from the grounds. Israeli supporters also managed to cause some trouble – as you’ll soon see.
The US, who in the end decided to boycott the conference in support of Israel, would not speak to us at all. Hours and hours of calls to every corner of the US State Department, NSC, White House and UN missions in NY and Geneva came up short. If the US wasn’t going to participate they didn’t want the message getting out. They were controlling our message – by not talking to us. Would the Middle East again disrupt the attention of the Durban Review Conference away from those in need? When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the only head of state who accepted an offer to speak at the opening of the conference, took to the stage it seemed inevitable. This was a perfect storm – eight years of intense Israeli organizing, eight years of intense Palestinian organizing, a UN conference on racism beginning with a speech by a man who denies the Holocaust. What else could one expect but mayhem to ensue? Part Three will be posted Tuesday, December 1st

THE BATTLE OF DURBAN II: ISRAEL, PALESTINE & THE UNITED NATIONS will be screening Wednesday, December 2nd at 6:30 PM at NY’s Simon Wiesenthal Center.

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The post “UM Schmum,” Or: The UN? Who Needs It? (Part Two) appeared first on Jewcy.

I had been hired in February 2009 by a small, award-winning media company called Globalvision Inc. to help produce a new documentary about the United Nations and the upcoming Durban Review Conference to be held in Geneva, Switzerland that April. The Review Conference was meant to review progress that countries had made in addressing racism and intolerance in their respective borders since the first Durban Conference in 2001. I was still coming down off the intense hopefulness that the election of our new biracial president gave me and I began the project optimistic and excited. It was a new era.  Maybe now the world could finally come together and make real progress addressing the needs of the millions of marginalized, repressed, suffering people on our planet. Now that the film is finished, after endless hours of research, interviews with many of the main conference organizers, UN representatives and heads of NGOs from around the world; having poured through hundreds of hours of articles, photos and footage, and having thought a great deal about how effective a huge multilateral institution such as the UN is in truly provoking change, unfortunately much of my cynicism has returned. Why?

Let me tell you the inside story of the making of this film – The Battle of Durban II: Israel, Palestine & the United Nations (which you should all see, by the way) – and you’ll get a sense of why, when examined through the prism of the Middle East, my positive conceptions on the efficacy of the UN have been shattered. A bit of disclosure to begin – I was raised a Conservative Jew, was very active in USY in high school and have visited Israel numerous times. As a journalist, I follow world affairs closely and know, as we all do, that the Israeli-Palestinian divide is an extremely heated one.  As an American, although I haven’t been directly affected, I do have strong emotions about the situation. Since I was a little boy (the Camp David Accords were signed 9 months before I was born) I’ve watched it all play out in newspaper headlines, non-fiction literature and fiction (Skinny Legs and All!), in long conversations with friends and family, blogs, Al-Jazeera and the occasional documentary on PBS’ POV or at the local Jewish Film Festival. Images of Orthodox Israeli settlers desperately trying to keep their houses while being forcefully removed by Israeli soldiers; Palestinian refugees waiting in long lines only to be turned away at the checkpoint border into Israel; Jewish groups rhythmically swaying during prayer at the Kotel, Jimmy Carter getting lambasted for his new book ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’ during conversations at the Passover dinner table, young Palestinian children starving, bombs dropping into Sderot; etc. all continuously swirl in my head when I think about it.  How can one not get emotional? Though the emotional effect of these images goes only so far.  They never taught me one very important part of the struggle, the strategies both sides of the divide use at the international level to get their message heard. And where else better to get their message heard then the UN, the body that’s supposed to be a forum to solve the world’s troubles? After seeing and interacting with Palestinian sympathizers and staunch Zionists trying to get their voices heard directly in trying to make this film I realized that this is what much of the conflict is actually about – controlling the message. Not who is right and who is wrong, but who can best convince the largest group of people to believe in their position. Watching the intense political jockeying that took place during the build up to and during the Durban Review Conference was an amazing chance to see and document this process in real time. The UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance had been held in the summer of 2001 in the midst of the second Intifada. World headlines reported daily on suicide bombings all over Israel and about the increasingly desperate plight of the Palestinian people. Figuring that a World Conference on Racism was an excellent chance to get additional media attention to their cause, masses of pro-Palestinian protesters took to the streets of Durban. They fought hard at a parallel forum for representatives of Non-Governmental Organizations, which preceded the official UN conference, to encourage UN officials to incorporate critical language about Israeli treatment of Palestinians into their final report or outcome document. Halfway through the UN conference the fight got so heated delegations from the US and Israeli delegations walked out in a flurry of protest. This was not the first time the Middle East issue had derailed a United Nations effort. Founded out of the ashes of the Holocaust, the UN was meant to be a place where the world could come together and prevent conflict. But when it comes to a discussion of human rights the Middle East conflict tends to occupy most of the conversation. The Middle East was the subject of 76% of country-specific UN General Assembly resolutions, 100% of the Human Rights Council resolutions, 100% of the Commission on the Status of Women resolutions, 50% of reports from the World Food Program, 6% of Security Council resolutions and 6 of the 10 Emergency sessions. These decisions, passed with the support of Muslim countries represented by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) among others, invariably criticize Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. Even though the UN in effect created the State of Israel in 1948, the country has obviously never felt at home there. Many UN delegates believe Israel should not even exist. Zionism was officially declared a racist practice in a 1975 resolution by the UN General Assembly. This was repealed in 1991 but, as we saw on the ground in Durban in 2001, the concept was far from being forgotten. In our interview with Gabriela Shalev, Israel’s current Ambassador to the UN in New York, she reminded me of a famous quote from David Ben-Gurion: "UM-Shmum" which roughly translates from Hebrew to "The UN? Who needs it?"  More loosely: "When Israel feels danger, it feels it can’t depend on the world community to support it, so why even try?" Admittedly, at times during the making of this movie, I’ve tended to agree.
But then the journalist in me thinks – why shouldn’t it be criticized?  No country is perfect.  If Israel is wronging people it should be held accountable. I also see the way the world quickly divides itself into blocks when Israel is criticized – with the US and Europe invariably supporting it, the Arab countries against it, and all the other suffering people the UN is supposed to help screaming, "What about us!?"  What a mess! 

Part Two will be posted Tuesday, November 24th 

Part Three will be posted Tuesday, December 1st

For more information, you can visit TheBattleofDurbanII.com to watch the trailer or become a fan of the movie on Facebook.

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