This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff.

Last Friday, I attended a “Durban Counter Conference” at Fordham Law School in New York. The event was sponsored by the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists and The New York Jewish Week. There were only about 40 people in the room, most of whom were over 50 years old. It was an assembly of alter cockers, an unfashionable scene for sure, nothing like the boho chic Darfur rallies and anti Iraq war protests I had attended in years past.

No matter. If the ideas expressed at the conference are not a la mode, well, they should be. For here were speakers who had just returned from Geneva, such as Professor Irwin Cotler, a Canadian MP, and Professor Charles Small from the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, who lamented the kidnapping of meanings, the hijacking of symbols, that are pro forma at the United Nations’ anti-racism conferences. Both Cotler and Small understand that some UN bodies-such as the Human Rights Council-are now epicenters of what the French writer Julian Benda once called the “treason of the intellectuals.”

But they brought back some good news from Geneva. At Durban 1, by the end of the conference the document signed by the state delegations was cleansed of its most scurrilous anti- Zionist rhetoric. But the real orgy of hate occurred at the NGO forum, which passed the “Zionism is racism” resolution, resurrecting an old corpse in the annals of anti-Zionist demonology. According to Cotler, at Durban 2, pro-Zionist NGO voices “took back the narrative.” Small, who observed groups of students actively working together to confront hate in the halls of the UN, was hopeful that “a spark had caught fire.” Cotler described an iconic and thrilling image from the conference: a rally where Darfurian activists, draped in Israeli flags and “I love Israel t-shirts”, chanted: “We are Zionists too.”

I must admit to being less sanguine about the future. For a start, I read nothing about the marginalization of the shrill anti-Zionist NGOs in the major media outlets. The Durban 1 demonization of Israel by NGOs was front-page news. Why isn’t it news when NGOs express their solidarity with Israel and Zionism?

I imagine it is for the same reason that, when an IDF soldier allegedly kills one unarmed elderly Palestinian woman, a story which turned out to be false, it makes the New York Times front page, but when Human Rights Watch released a report this week accusing Hamas of executing 18 men for collaboration with Israel, the New York Times didn’t think it was important enough to warrant even a back page story.

Even more worrisome was Cotler’s report that the anti-Zionist NGOs have whipped up new strategies to demonize Israel. At Durban 1, the NGO forum concluded with a plan to launch a global BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) campaign against Israel. For the past few years the BDS campaign has been steadily gaining steam in Europe and, now, in America. Now anti-Zionist NGOs plan to launch a strategy of “lawfare”, where they will use the International Criminal Court and other popular tribunals to target Israelis.

The demonization of Israel as an apartheid state, a racist state, a Nazi state: these are all crude formulations and easily refuted. But the criticisms of Israel in the name of human rights and international humanitarian law are far more sophisticated and, in my mind, are the arguments which have enabled the BDS movement to broaden its base of social support to liberal circles. For anyone concerned about Israel’s legitimacy, it is high time to systematically analyze and reflect upon these criticisms.