Jerusalem - Israel will boycott the United Nations conference against racism to be held in April in Geneva, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced Wednesday. Israel will not participate and will not legitimize the "Durban 2" Conference, she told North American Jewish community leaders assembling in Jerusalem.
The country threatened already earlier this year to boycott the event, if like the previous UN anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa of 2001 it would again focus excessively on the Jewish state to the exclusion of human rights violations elsewhere in the world.
The conference this spring is to be a review of the 2001 conference in Durban. In addition to Durban, two more World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia were held in 1983 and 1978, both in Geneva.
The last conference in the South African port city in September 2001 was widely seen as a failure, and was slammed for having singled out Israel at the expense of a host of other countries with contentious human rights records.
"The Durban Conference of 2001 became a forum for pernicious accusations and incitement against Israel, attacks against Zionism libeling it as a form of racism, denial of the unique and special nature of the Holocaust, and a distortion of the meaning of the term anti-Semitism," a statement from Livni's office said.
"Although we had many reasons to believe that the Review Conference will be a repetition of Durban 1, Israel announced in February 2008 that it would wait for an assurance that the incitement and gross excesses of 2001 will not be repeated in the upcoming Review Conference," she said.
"Since then, unfortunately, we have not seen any proof that things would be better."
She charged that "once again" anti-Israeli Arab and Moslem groups were trying to control the conference's agenda and use it against Israel.
A draft outcome paper submitted by Asian participants "named or singled out" no particular country except for Israel," she said.
"During recent months, we expressed the hope that the language of hatred will not repeat itself. We declared that we will not agree to the singling out of Israel," she said.
"Despite our efforts and those of friendly countries, for whose position we are grateful, the conference appears to be heading once again towards becoming an anti-Israeli tribunal, which has nothing to do with fighting racism."
Israel also called on other countries "not to participate in a conference which seeks to legitimize hatred and extremism under the banner of the 'fight against racism.'"
At the 2001 conference in Durban, Arab and Muslim states had demanded the closing statement of the conference equate Zionism with racism, said Israel's policies in the occupied territories amounted to "ethnic cleansing" and used the term "holocaust" to describe the killing of almost 4,900 Palestinians in now eight years of mutual violence.
Pro-Palestinian activists had also staged protests outside the conference, in which they held up signs equating the Jewish Star of David to the Nazi Swastika, chanted "kill the Jews" and sold copies of the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a forged, early 20th century anti-Semitic document.
The United States, followed by Israel, had walked angrily out the conference.
Israelis have often complained of a strong anti-Israel bias in many UN and other international forums, where it is outvoted by pro- Palestinian, Arab and Muslim blocs.
