The World Conference Against Racism entered its second day today with attention focused on tackling accusations of racism in the Middle East - an issue that threatened to overwhelm the gathering's agenda.
Conference committees were due to work on the wording of a final declaration, a draft of which has been condemned by the United States for its alleged anti-Israeli language.
The White House, which has called parts of a draft declaration anti-Semitic, said American diplomats would leave the conference in Durban, South Africa, if the provisions were not removed.
In spite of an announcement yesterday by American civil rights leader the Rev Jesse Jackson that the Palestinians had decided not to derail the conference by singling out Israel as a racist state, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat accused Israel of "racist practices" against the Palestinians.
Almost a year into the Palestinian uprising, Arab nations have pushed to make Israel the main issue at the conference.
Arafat's harsh words undercut Jackson's efforts to solve the symbolic and semantic nature of the dispute. Jackson said he had urged Arafat to drop his support for a summit declaration that would label Israel as a racist state and equate Zionism with racism.
Zionism, the movement that founded Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people, has also come under attack in street demonstrations.
Palestinian officials later accused Jackson of being "overzealous" and said they would still seek condemnation of what they called Israel's "racist practices".
"What we can hope for is that this conference will say what is bad, what is just in the face of this bloody tragedy that has befallen the Palestinian people. It is a colonial, racist plot, a plot of aggression, of uprooting, of taking over land as well," Arafat told a roundtable discussion with world leaders.
"This brutality, this arrogance is moved by a supremacist mentality, a mentality of racial discrimination," he said.
Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Noam Katz reiterated his country felt that the racism conference was not the appropriate forum to discuss the Middle East conflict.
"We are not here at the conference to discuss, to deal with specific political problems. We are here to create a united front against racism," Katz said.
Jackson, when asked for his reaction to the speech, pointed out that Arafat had not condemned Zionism.
Before Arafat's speech, the American civil rights leader announced that the Palestinian leader had indicated to him that he would lobby against a conference declaration condemning Israel as a racist state.
Jackson produced a document written by Palestinian minister for international co-operation Nabil Shaath that said the Palestinian delegation did not want the conference derailed by attempts to criticise Israel. The document also said the Palestinians would support language recognising the Holocaust as the most murderous crime of the 20th century.
Shaath later said the Palestinian position had not changed and that the document did not commit the delegation to stop seeking the condemnation of Israeli policies.
"Anti-Zionist is out, definitely. We have taken out any attack on Zionism as such and we are not labelling Israel as a Zionist state, we are only against practices by Israel as an occupation authority that discriminates against the Palestinian people," Shaath said.
In his opening address yesterday United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked the delegates to look past their individual disputes and work together to develop an international plan to combat prejudice.
"Let us admit that all countries have issues of racism and discrimination to address," he said.
Annan said he recognised the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust, and the added pain of being accused of racism, especially when innocent civilians were being killed in Israel.
"Yet we cannot expect Palestinians to accept this as a reason why the wrongs done to them - displacement, occupation, blockade, and now extra-judicial killings - should be ignored, whatever label one uses to describe them," Annan said to a wave of applause.
AP