A new final document produced by the Durban Review Conference this week has removed all criticism of Israel and might persuade some countries who have withdrawn to change their minds.
And while the blatant anti-Israeli language that characterised the final document of the original conference in 2001 has disappeared, so has almost every reference bar one each to Holocaust commemoration and antisemitism.
However, the changes have brought a degree of cautious optimism from Board of Deputies’ president Henry Grunwald, who is also chair of the Jewish Leadership Council.
After meeting Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown on Thursday, Mr Grunwald said: “There’s no doubt that the new document is, on the face of it, a vast improvement on anything that has been considered before. It might well be that the document has emerged in that form because of the fear of withdrawal by the European Union countries.
“Our concern is that either before the review conference (in Geneva on April 20-24), or at the conference itself, attempts will be made to amend this document and re-insert those offensive passages that have made the prospect of a repeat of the first Durban conference a real one.”
Mr Grunwald had written to Lord Malloch-Brown prior to the new document’s appearance last week, stating it was the Board’s belief that the co-called “red lines” – the conditions that if broken would lead to Britain’s withdrawal – had already been crossed and requesting a meeting to clarify Britain’s position.
There were four “red lines”: no downgrading of antisemitism or Holocaust commemoration; no singling out of Israel; no defamation of religion, for example the row about the Danish cartoons denigrating Islam and no hierarchy of racism.
As far as the government was concerned, Lord Malloch-Brown said the lines remained the same “which means that if they are crossed either before or at the conference, we would expect the British government to do the right thing and withdraw,” said Mr Grunwald.
He said it would have been preferable to have more than just a single mention of antisemitism and Holocaust commemoration in the new document “but it is so completely different to what went before.
“The worry still remains that there is an affirmation (in the new document) of the first Durban document and realistically there is no prospect of that changing. However, if the document remains basically as it is now, there is a chance that the review conference will not be a repeat of the first one,” he said.
The reason why work on the final document starts long before the conference ever gets under way is because there would not be enough time to debate it and reach agreement in the five days.
