The anti-Israel activism, however, clearly was not a spontaneous combustion. From the outset of the U.N. conference, it was clear the Palestinian delegation arrived in this Indian Ocean port city well-organized, well-funded and highly motivated to hijack the conference for its own ends.

Every day during the NGO conference last week, pro-Palestinian groups demonstrated loudly in the streets, sporting posters, banners and T-shirts that linked racism with Zionism and apartheid with Israel. The Palestinians also handed out thousands of free checkered keffiyah-like scarves and T-shirts with anti-Israel slogans.

The public relations battle was a no-contest.

"I came here thinking the Middle East shouldn't be on the agenda," said one American at the conference. "But with the situation here, it forces you to choose sides. And given a choice between [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and [Palestinian Authority President Yasser] Arafat, I choose Arafat."

But the scene also had a number of ugly moments, Jewish activists say. During one street rally, they saw a placard that read "Hitler Should Have Finished the Job" and heard someone yell "Kill the Jews." Nearby, a man was reportedly spotted selling the most notorious and conspiratorial of anti-Semitic tracts, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Inside the U.N. conference grounds and within its tents, the rhetoric and agitprop were also white hot. Fliers were found with Hitler's photo above the question: "What if I had won? There would be no Israel, and no Palestinian bloodshed." A press conference held by the Jewish caucus was cut short by a rowdy group of Iranian women, one of whom screamed, "Six million dead and you're holding the world hostage!"

Israel's supporters, it should be noted, usually hold their own in the media and intellectual debate. But at the Durban conference, the Jewish side came armed with little more than position papers, books and other workshop materials, and was overmatched. Thrown on the defensive, they responded by quickly printing and handing out T-shirts of their own, one with a peace sign inside the Jewish Star of David under the slogan "Fight Racism, Not Jews" and a second with Martin Luther King Jr.'s quote: "When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews."

And certainly they had their high-profile defenders. When U.N. officials appeared ready to tolerate inflammatory anti-Israel language making its way into a final conference report, U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., the top Democrat in the U.S. delegation, said sharply, "What you have here is the paradox of an anti-racism conference that is itself racist." Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor sitting in Congress and a co-founder of its human rights caucus, blasted delegates from Western nations who he said were privately disgusted with the proceedings but refused to speak out.

The Americans walked out in protest Monday, followed soon after by Israel. The Jewish NGO caucus announced its formal withdrawal Tuesday. Canadian Foreign Minister John Manley cleared out on Wednesday. And the French warned that the European Union would do so as well if Israel were labeled as "racist."

On Thursday, Ali Khorram, the Iranian ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva who was elected chairman of the governmental declaration-drafting committee earlier this week (not a very good sign for Israel), dismissed the possibility that anti-Israel paragraphs would be dropped so as not to doom the rest of the 445-paragraph declaration.

"I'm not sure it's an appropriate way, because this conference has to deal with all matters regarding racism," Khorram told a press conference.

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