Everything You Know About Gaza Is Wrong - Chapter 1

Drafting a potential book that needs to be written

I’ve been writing about the war in Gaza since before there was a war in Gaza. The claims made against Israel since October 7, such as “Gaza is a concentration camp,” “Israel has no legal right to defend itself,” and “Israel is starving Gaza,” were all made before, some of them decades before, and I and others took them apart at the time. What nobody has done is write it all down in one place, and trace each claim back to where it came from. That is what this series is. If this works, this could become a book.

It starts, as the whole thing did, in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001.

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Part I: The Rehearsal — Chapter 1

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, and before Israel has launched a single major operation in response, the world’s leading human rights organizations endorse a declaration branding it guilty of “apartheid,” of “acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing,” and demanding the restoration of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism.

The year was 2001, not 2023.

The World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance met in Durban, South Africa, from August 31 to September 8, 2001.

It had two parts. The governmental conference, attended by state delegations, produced the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.

The NGO Forum, which met alongside it at the Kingsmead cricket ground with some three thousand organizations in attendance, produced its own declaration on September 3. That document accused Israel of “acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing” and of “apartheid and other racist crimes against humanity,” it called Zionism a form of racism, and demanded the reinstatement of General Assembly Resolution 3379, the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution that the UN had repealed in 1991.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch signed the declaration although both distanced themselves from the language. Amnesty said it did not condone the wording while accepting the declaration as “a largely positive document.”

The conference itself was an antisemitic hatefest. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed on the grounds by the Ahlul Bait Foundation of South Africa. Flyers praised Hitler; banners endorsed terrorism against Israel; the Jewish caucus was shouted down and expelled from meetings it had been accredited to attend.

The governmental conference was less explicit but not really better in substance. Of the forty-five paragraphs in its section on “victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” only one people was named, and it was the Palestinians. Language condemning antisemitism was stripped from the final text, as it had been from the NGO declaration, where statements denouncing attacks on Jews and synagogues were removed before adoption.

The Second Intifada was a year old. Three weeks before the Forum opened, a Hamas bomber had walked into the Sbarro pizzeria at the corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road on a school-holiday afternoon and detonated a charge packed with nails and bolts, killing sixteen people, seven of them children. Two months before that, a suicide bomber outside the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv had killed twenty-one, most of them teenagers waiting to get in. The bombs were built to maximize the slaughter of civilians. Israel had not yet begun a campaign to go after the groups building them.

A year after Israel offered the Palestinians a state and they responded with a terror spree, at the very time when Jews were being blown up on buses, discotheques and pizza shops, the world’s NGOs issued a document to ensure that no one could possibly sympathize with Israelis and to blame Israel for the violence being done to its citizens. The NGO Forum demanded:

Call for the establishment of programmes and institutions to combat the racist media distortion, stereotyping and propaganda, including the demonizing and dehumanizing of Palestinians as all being violent and terrorists, and undeserving of human rights protections. Call for the correction of misleading information surrounding their status as indigenous peoples, the history of the violations perpetrated against them, and the on-going distortion of the facts and nature of the peace negotiations.

Bill Clinton squarely blamed the Palestinians for the breakdown of peace talks; that was the “distortion. of the facts.”

This was one of the few times that world media and politicians showed sympathy for the Jewish state. The NGO Forum Declaration seems almost tailor made to combat any possible sympathy for those being brutally attacked and maximum sympathy for those who were cheering them on.

The United States and Israel walked out on September 3. The world’s attention moved elsewhere eight days later, towards the 9/11 terror attacks that the Palestinians were filmed cheering, and Durban was filed away as an embarrassment that the UN’s own High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, would eventually concede had been hijacked.

For the drafters, the declaration was not an embarrassment at all. It was a blueprint.

The NGO Forum declaration reads, a quarter century later, like a project plan that was carried out on schedule. Paragraph 418 demanded the reinstatement of Resolution 3379 and described Israel’s Law of Return as “part of the institutionalized racism and Apartheid regime in Israel.” Paragraph 419 called for “a war crimes tribunal to investigate and bring to justice those who may be guilty of war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing and the crime of Apartheid.” Paragraph 420 called for spreading the apartheid charge “through relevant UN agencies working closely with international civil society networks,” with “educational packs for schools and universities, films and publications.” Paragraph 421 asked for a standing UN body “to monitor and to report Apartheid and other racist crimes” by Israel. Paragraph 423 called for “the launch of an international anti Israeli Apartheid movement as implemented against South African Apartheid.” Paragraph 424 demanded “complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state,” through “mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel,” and it named the country that should “take the lead in this policy of isolation”: the Government of South Africa. Paragraph 425 condemned any state that supported Israel as aiding “racist crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing, acts of genocide.” The verdicts were apartheid and genocide; the sentence was isolation and prosecution; the instruments were the UN, the universities, the NGOs, and the courts. All of it was adopted by acclamation at a cricket ground while the funerals from Sbarro were still fresh.

Looking at it today, every paragraph was operationalized to some extent, some of them almost exactly as written.

Paragraph 424’s isolation policy became the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which the Palestinian NGOs launched formally in July 2005, and it cites Durban as its founding moment.

Paragraph 420’s educational packs became Israeli Apartheid Week, which 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 academic papers and progressive media, quickly morphing from contested to being treated as obvious without the facts to support them.

Paragraph 421’s standing UN body became the Human Rights Council’s permanent Commission of Inquiry on Israel, created in 2021 with no end date, the only open-ended inquiry in the Council’s history.

Paragraph 419’s tribunal became Goldstone in 2009, the International Criminal Court referral in 2015, the arrest warrants of 2024, and the genocide case at the International Court of Justice, filed in December 2023 by South Africa, the state that paragraph 424 had asked to take the lead.

The organizations that had distanced themselves from the declaration in 2001 were the ones that completed it. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch had read the apartheid and genocide charges, flagged the language, and signed. Then they spent two decades methodically arriving at both.

Human Rights Watch in 2021 and Amnesty in 2022 issued reports declaring Israel guilty of apartheid, the term the 2001 declaration had assigned, and the reports were received as independent findings by organizations that had no stake in the conclusion, though the conclusion had been on file under their signatures for twenty years. Both of them had to twist the definition of apartheid to make Israel fit, as we will see later. HRW wrote a scathing report alleging Israeli discrimination against Palestinians in the territories in 2010 but avoided saying a word about apartheid; by 2021 it changed its mind when the facts on the ground were virtually identical.

After October 2023, Amnesty completed the sequence: its December 2024 report put 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 Durban blueprint was nearly complete two decades later.

The UN, for its part, never treated Durban as a mistake to be lived down. It treated it as an achievement to be commemorated. The Durban Review Conference in Geneva in 2009, known as Durban II, reaffirmed the 2001 declaration in its entirety and gave its opening platform to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who used it to call Israel a racist state founded on “the pretext of Jewish sufferings”; the United States withdrew, and European delegations walked out of the speech. Durban III, a tenth-anniversary session in New York in 2011, was boycotted by the United States and thirteen other countries after the Obama White House said it would not see “the hateful and anti-Semitic displays of the 2001 Durban Conference commemorated.” Durban IV, the twentieth anniversary in September 2021, was scheduled for the second day of the General Assembly debate, which fell on Sukkot, and its stated purpose in the enabling resolution was “the full and effective implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.” That spring the Biden administration, newly returned to the Human Rights Council, led a joint statement on racism that included an unnecessary paragraph “recalling the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Durban Declaration,” a sentence with one certain effect: Israel could not sign, and every European country that had boycotted Durban III did. After the Jerusalem Post asked the State Department about it, the administration confirmed it would not attend the commemoration, and in the end thirty-eight countries stayed away.

Twenty years on, the declaration that called Israel genocidal weeks after the Sbarro bombing was still the UN’s official position on racism, still being reaffirmed at head-of-state level, and still capable of drawing a majority of the world’s governments to celebrate it.

October 7 showed the Durban strategy in full bloom. Within hours of the murder, rape and kidnapping of over a thousand Israelis, filmed by Hamas on their body cameras, the same crowd that had written the Durban declaration began rewriting the events before the bodies were buried. Israelis cannot be victims, Palestinians are the only group that can ever be considered to suffer and any Israeli deaths are Israel’s own fault.

Before the dead of the kibbutzim had been counted, the same organizations and the same vocabulary were describing Israel’s response, which had not yet begun, as genocide. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this was the charge’s function all along. It was never a description of anything Israel does. It was a device to establish, in advance, that whatever was done to Israelis, they had it coming, and to foreclose the possibility that the world might feel sympathy for Jews who had been brutally murdered.

In December 2023 the Republic of South Africa filed the genocide case at the International Court of Justice, twenty-two years after the declaration adopted on its own soil had asked it to lead, and the country that hosted the first draft delivered the indictment.

October 7 was a movie reboot with the same 2001 script.