Israel was accused of genocide before - and there is a lesson there

Palestinian terrorists attack families going about their lives. They blow up young people heading out to dance. They detonate a roadside bomb at 7:30 in the morning beside a bus carrying schoolchildren, killing a teacher and a maintenance worker and maiming children badly enough to cost them their legs.

The killings shock the world. Before Israel has launched a single major operation in response, the world's leading human rights organizations endorse a declaration branding guilty of "apartheid" and of of "acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing," and demanding the restoration of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism.

2023? No, 2001.

The final declaration at the NGO Forum of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, released on September 3, 2001, accused Israel of "acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing" as well as "apartheid and other racist crimes against humanity." 

The Second Intifada had begun only a year earlier. In the months before Durban, the attacks increased in pace and deadliness. A suicide bomber killed twenty-one people and wounded one hundred and twenty outside Tel Aviv's Dolphinarium discotheque in June 2001, most of them teenagers waiting to get in.

The Sbarro massacre occurred a mere three weeks before Durban: a Hamas bomber walked into a pizzeria packed with families on a school-holiday afternoon at the corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road and detonated a charge studded with nails and bolts, killing sixteen people, seven of them children, and wounding about a hundred and thirty.

Sbarro was the visible peak of a sustained campaign rather than an isolated horror. It came at the end of a two-week effort to concentrate terror in Jerusalem, and within days a suicide bombing at the Wall Street Café in Kiryat Motzkin wounded twenty-one while a car bomb near the Russian Compound in downtown Jerusalem carried a second, larger device that had to be dismantled before it could kill. The bombs were built to maximize the slaughter of civilians, packed with hardware whose only function is to tear through human bodies.

It wasn't as if the world's media ignored the terror spree. Full page stories described the horror of the attacks. The NGO Forum decided that the very moment when Jews were being targeted for death for being Jews was a good time to accuse Israel of genocide. 

Even though blatant antisemitism was prevalent in Durban, including the poster shown here, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had both signed the Durban document and both had distanced themselves from its worst language at the time, with Amnesty noting it did not condone the wording while accepting the declaration as "a largely positive document." By any definition, Hamas and the other terror groups were guilty of genocide— but this didn't bother the two leading human rights organizations, who claimed they didn't agree with every sentence in the final declaration but decided its blatant antisemitism was not enough to decline signing it. 

Israel had not even begun a campaign to go after the terror groups at this time. The idea that Israel was guilty of these crimes in September 2001 while its citizens were being ripped apart by bombs aimed at children is a bizarre joke. 

But Durban wasn't a joke. It was a blueprint.

The drafting and the trial were separated by twenty years of patient construction. Israeli Apartheid Week began on a single Canadian campus in 2005, reached forty cities by 2009, and passed two hundred by 2013, carrying the apartheid charge into progressive spaces as settled vocabulary rather than contested claim. The activist fringe supplied the repetition, and "apartheid," "genocide," and "settler colonialism" migrated from the mock walls on university quads into the working language of the institutions that had once kept their distance. What began as a slogan students chanted became a premise educated people no longer thought to question.

Amnesty and HRW read the genocide charge in 2001, flagged it, and signed anyway. Then they spent two decades methodically arriving at it. Human Rights Watch in 2021 and Amnesty in 2022 issued reports declaring Israel guilty of apartheid, the very term the 2001 declaration had assigned. After October 2023, Amnesty completed the sequence: its December 2024 report named the verdict in its title — "Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza" — and reached it, by the account of Amnesty's own Israel branch, as a "predetermined" conclusion, written by the international office without the Israeli branch's involvement and resting on a looser definition of genocidal intent than the International Court of Justice has ever accepted. The conclusion came first, and the evidence was gathered to fit it.

The cynicism of accusing Israel of genocide while it was a victim of weekly genocidal acts was only surpassed in October 2023, when it took a mere hours after the horrors of October 7 for the same Israel haters and antisemites to accuse Israel of what it had just been a victim of. It is herd to escape the conclusion that the charges are deliberately intended to remove any possibility that the world would be sympathetic to Jews for being brutally murdered. The bodies were not yet counted before the massacre was reframed as resistance and the retaliation pre-labeled genocide.

 Durban built the frame in 2001, and October 2023 supplied the hook it had been waiting for. The function of the genocide charge was never to describe what Israel does. It was to establish, in advance, that whatever is done to Israelis, they had it coming.

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)