UN Geneva / Twitter.com
Israel has this week rejected a controversial report submitted to the UN’s Human Rights Council accusing it of ‘apartheid’.
The report, submitted by UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk, was renounced by Israel’s envoy to the United Nations in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar who dismissed Professor Lynk for his “well known…blatant and disturbing anti-Israel views”. She went on to state that the report “recycles baseless and outrageous libels previously published by NGOs that share the same goal as the author of this report: to delegitimise and criminalise the State of Israel”.
Mansour Abbas, leader of United Arab List the Arab party which is part of Israel’s coalition in the Knesset, last month rejected the use of the word “apartheid” to describe Israel and the relationship between Arabs and Jews in the country. He stated that he “would not call it apartheid”.
The report fails to mention Hamas, the terrorist group that rules Gaza, and says “to completely end the occupation” and come to a “genuine” two-state solution, Israel “must cooperate in good faith with the Palestinian leadership”. Shahar states that “no report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be taken seriously if the security challenges and threats faced daily by all Israelis, including the 20% non-Jewish minority, is not considered”.
The report, titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967”, includes statements from Professor Lynk stating that Israel, “with the eyes of the international community wide open”, has “imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world”.
The report comes six weeks after Amnesty International UK received wide criticism following the publication of its controversial report accusing Israel of being an ‘apartheid state’. At the time, International Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan condemned the language used by the report, stating that it “isn’t language I would ever want to see used” about Israel.
Professor Lynk has held the position of Special Rapporteur since 2016; this is his final report in his six-year term. According to the UN Human Rights Office, the role of the Special Rapporteur is to “assess the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”. Throughout the report Professor Lynk argues that Israel is pursuing a strategy of “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian territory”, claiming that Gaza is used for the “indefinite warehousing of an unwanted population of two million Palestinians”. He uses terminology such as “torture”, “occupation” and “exploitation” to describe Israel’s control over Palestinians.
A new report by NGO Monitor aims to debunk the accusation of apartheid against Israel by assessing whether apartheid, as previously defined, is applicable to Israel and territories under its military administration. Written by legal expert Joshua Kern with legal adviser and UN representative for NGO Monitor Anne Herzberg, the report builds on the report previously published in December 2021. As well as being for legal professionals and government officials, the report is an important read “for those who are looking for answers to the false and often malicious charges by NGO and UN Rapporteurs who grossly misrepresent the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the legal basis for Israel as a Jewish state, and the nature of Israel’s democracy and legal system”.
