Professor (Emeritus) Gideon Shimoni is a former head of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and held the Shlomo Argov Chair in Israel-Diaspora Relations. One of his books deals with the Jewish community in apartheid South Africa.

"Alternately, when Israel cooperated with the South African government, after about 1973, the Israel=apartheid equation was deployed in the international forum as a propaganda sub-theme of the notorious ‘Zionism is Racism’ slander. More recently the ‘Israel-is-an-apartheid state’ mantra has subsumed and largely superseded the defamatory ‘Zionism is Racism’ slogan.

"The foreboding signpost for this new direction was the September 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban. Even the South African government hosts admit that it turned into an unprecedented anti-Semitic hate fest in the course of which the apartheid stigma was viciously stamped upon Israel.[1] The signal significance of what happened in Durban is the spin that turned the human rights cause against itself, disingenuously creating congruence between anti-Semitism and support of human rights. Anti-Semitism postured as anti-racism, and Israel was demonized as South Africa’s successor apartheid state!"

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