I think it’s important to understand that the issue is not about somehow resisting holding Israel to account under international human rights standards. Indeed, Israel is daily held to account under international human rights standards at the UN in a wide variety of ways, and nothing gets in the way of the numerous bodies and mechanisms and committees functioning in this way both at the UN formally, and also by various international and Israeli human rights groups that work with the UN and other multilateral bodies to bring Israel to account.

The problem is that Durban is not about that, and often other settings at the UN or in Israel/Palestine are not really about that. It’s about singling out Israel, when no other country is covered. It’s about obsessive and even hysterical focus on Israel at the expense of other country situations. It’s about creating a constant frenzied mob within a context of international law that runs counter to the spirit of international human rights. It’s about one side always getting more media coverage as a simple artifact of the fact that Israel allows press coverage in the occupied territories unlike, say, Russia does in Chechnya.

Many will go on parsing each and every incident over the years in which Mary Robinson addressed Israel, and it will be hard to stop them on an open and free Internet. A reason why some groups will continue to feel indignation is because at both the original Durban conference and at its follow-up, Israel was the only country singled out, and within a framework that implied state-sponsored racism. That was wrong, and Mary Robinson, although she did achieve some successes in getting out the worst of the invective, did not succeed ultimately at addressing the central issue of imbalance here.

That’s why you cannot just brush this aside and say “let’s work for peace constructively” as wonderful a notion as that is—when the framework where some of this is being attempted is so unfair and so imbalanced. That’s why some of us signed appeals against the Durban NGO forum in Durban, and also again signed an appeal outlining the core principles that we as civic activists should have going into a conference like Durban:

http://www.magenta.nl/en/projects/5-core-principles-for-wcar-follow-up

When Israel breaks the chains that bind her and faces the world
alone, with only the merit of her vision to offer and unity at her core, will she not sink deep into the quagmire as before.

~Sandori VonRoth~