The Final Call

Controversial 'Apartheid' Report Angers U.S., Israel

By Brian E. Muhammad -Contributing Writer- | Last updated: Mar 29, 2017 - 1:04:15 PM

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A mid-March report titled “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” caused political upheaval in the corridors of the United Nations.

The document, commissioned by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) said available evidence establishes “beyond a reasonable doubt that Israel is guilty” of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid as legally defined by international law.

“We are no longer talking about risk of apartheid, but practice of apartheid,” said Virginia Tilley, professor of political science at Southern Illinois University and co-author of the report during its March 15 release in Beirut, Lebanon.

The crucial conclusion is Israel designed its apartheid regime around strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people geographically and legally, she said.

Ms. Tilly co-authored the detailed report with Richard Falk, a renown Princeton University professor emeritus and former UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Palestine.

Virginia Tilley, professor of political science at Southern Illinois University

The report raises major questions for Israel which touts itself as the “only true democracy” in the Middle East, one observer said.

“The effect of the UN report is basically to say that actually they’re not a democratic state,” said Bill Fletcher, racial justice, labor and international activist.

 “When you have a system that authorizes the expropriation of land of a population … a differential in education … permits separate roads in the occupied territories for settlers versus non-settlers. Then you have an apartheid system and that cannot be a democracy,” he added.

The report provides documentation and legal teeth to strengthen the struggle for a “just peace” for Palestinians, said the authors.

Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says, “ ‘The crime of apartheid’ includes acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group or groups with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The statute lists apartheid in the category of crimes against humanity.

Richard Falk

ESCWA is the first UN agency to issue an official document characterizing Israeli atrocities against Palestinians as apartheid. It garnered political indignation from Israel, the United States, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who ordered it withdrawn.

“The report as it stands does not reflect the views of the secretary-general” and was done without consultations with the UN secretariat, said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley rejected the findings as “false and defamatory” and accused report authors and ESCWA of anti-Israel conspiracy peddling.

Further fallout included the resignation of ESCWA Executive Secretary Rima Khalaf, a Jordanian diplomat and former UN under-secretary. Ms. Khalaf stepped down in dissension after Mr. Guterres requested she renounce the report.

“I asked the Secretary General to review his stance on this,” Ms. Khalaf said in a press conference. “But he insisted on it—so I submitted my resignation from the United Nations.”

Wafa, the Palestine news agency, reported Palestinian leaders countered by accusing Mr. Guterres of capitulating to Washington and Tel Aviv.

“Instead of succumbing to political blackmail or allowing itself to be censured or intimidated by external parties, the UN should condemn the acts described in the report and hold Israel responsible,” said Hanan Ashrawi, longtime PLO executive committee member.

The response from adversaries of the report was intense because of use of the word “apartheid” and analogy with past apartheid rule in South Africa. 

“It’s kind of amusing in an unfortunate way, that the Israel lobby or Zionist power configuration … was so furious that the word apartheid was used to describe what’s going on in occupied Palestine,” Dr. Kevin Barrett, author and editor of Veterans Today told The Final Call.

“This is the height of hypocrisy,” Mr. Barrett said. There is no question about the comparison of Israel to South African apartheid, he said.

A sculpture in honor of David Ben-Gurion at Israel's airport which is named after him.

And it’s not only Israel critics voicing the portrayal, Mr. Barrett pointed out. A long line of Israeli leaders—past and present—including former Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin and others who stated “if there’s no two-state solution; this is an apartheid state,” he said. 

Israel dismisses the characterization of “apartheid” as an attempt at “destroying Israel’s image and isolating it as a pariah State.”

They call it the “new anti-Semitism,” especially where criticism argues the ethnic premise of Jewish statehood is illegitimate, because it violates international human rights law, the report said.

In 2016 efforts to expand what constitutes anti-Semitism was realized through Israel’s Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism—a national forum whose expressed aim is to “delegitimize the delegitimization of Israel.”  The forum lobbied for legal changes in U.S. law on how Israel and Jews are handled in public discourse.

The report said Israel imposes systematic ethnic oppression and racial discrimination on the Palestinian people.

“The roughly 4.6 million Palestinians who live in the occupied Palestinian territory (2.7 million in the West Bank and 1.9 million in the Gaza Strip) are governed not by Israeli civil law, but by military law, codified as orders issued by the commander of the territories and administered by the Israeli Defense Forces and other designated arms of the occupying power,” the report noted.

Historically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is normally ascribed to the aftermath of the Six Day War of 1967. However, Israel has been a source of upset since 1922, when the League of Nations—the United Nations forerunner—granted Zionist Jews a “national home” that illegally morphed into a “Jewish state” through politics and bloodshed after its creation in 1947. 

Pro-Palestinian activists maintain that “no amount of suppression can hide the fact that Israel is becoming more isolated by the day” and solidarity with Palestine is increasing.

Although it’s censored, the report is still circulating outside the UN and likely to upset and outrage people and increase awareness apartheid type of situation exists in Palestine.

“I believe this is actually a good time to be organizing on this issue and many other issues,” said Dr. Barrett.