UN Human Rights Council report accuses Israel of apartheid
United Nations Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk accused Israel of apartheid in a report submitted Tuesday to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.NGO Monitor: Michael Lynk’s Final Fiction
“With the eyes of the international community wide open, Israel has imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world,” wrote Lynk, whose full title is “Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”
Lynk is slated to formally release his report on Thursday ahead of a debate on Agenda Item 7, the permanent HRC item reserved for Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians and other Arabs.
This is Lynk’s final report in his six-year term.
“The political system of entrenched rule in the occupied Palestinian territory which endows one racial-national-ethnic group with substantial rights, benefits and privileges while intentionally subjecting another group to live behind walls, checkpoints and under a permanent military rule… satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid,” wrote Lynk.
The Canadian academic argued Israel is pursuing a strategy of “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian territory into separate areas of population control, with Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem physically divided from one another.”
Israel uses Gaza, Lynk claimed, for the “indefinite warehousing of an unwanted population of two million Palestinians.”
The issuing of thousands of work permits for Palestinian laborers in the West Bank and Gaza to work in Israel amounts to the “exploitation of labor of a racial group,” according to the report.
Lynk also posited that “torture continues to be used in practice by Israel against Palestinians in detention.”
The report, the main body of which does not mention terrorist groups Hamas or Islamic Jihad, says Israel “must cooperate in good faith with the Palestinian leadership to completely end the occupation and realize a genuine two-state solution.”
Israel and Jewish organizations blasted Lynk as hostile to Israel and the report as baseless.
Invented legal standards
Lynk continues to promote invented international law standards regarding the law of occupation. He states:
“By their very nature, occupations are required to be built with wood, not concrete. Accordingly, Israel’s occupation must be temporary, it must be short-term, it is prohibited from annexing even a millimeter of occupied territory, any changes to the occupied territory must be as minimal as possible, it must comply fully with international law and United Nations resolutions, and it must cooperate in good faith with the Palestinian leadership to completely end the occupation and realize a genuine two state solution.”
Contrary to Lynk’s claims, occupation is not illegal, nor is its duration proscribed under international humanitarian law (IHL). Article 6(3) of Geneva IV, however, limits the applicability of certain provisions of the Convention in occupied territory to one year after the ‘close of military operations’:
In the case of occupied territory, the application of the present Convention shall cease one year after the general close of military operations; however, the Occupying Power shall be bound, for the duration of the occupation, to the extent that such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory, by the provisions of the following Articles of the present Convention: 1 to 12, 27, 29 to 34, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 59, 61 to 77, 143.
In the absence of an IHL rule prohibiting prolonged occupation, Palestinian, Israeli and international NGOs, as well as UN rapporteurs, have sought to redefine the legal status of the West Bank from “occupation” to a situation of apartheid. Merging a discourse of “prolonged occupation” with allegations of apartheid began in the 1980s, coalescing further during preparations for the discredited UN Durban conference in 2001 and, following sustained advocacy by John Dugard and Richard Falk, Lynk has now taken up this narrative in his report.
Regarding the apartheid slander, Lynk relies on the invented definition proffered by Amnesty in its February 2022 report. See NGO Monitor’s Analyzing Amnesty’s Antisemitic Apartheid Attack, False Knowledge as Power: Deconstructing Definitions of Apartheid that Delegitimize the Jewish State, and Neo-Orientalism: Deconstructing claims of apartheid in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for more information on how Amnesty and other NGOs manipulate the definition of apartheid to target Israel.
.@MichaelLynk5 pretends he made a new finding. In fact, Lynk played a leadership role in several Arab lobby groups in Canada, including CEPAL which promoted “Israeli Apartheid Week” events. Lynk joined anti-Israel petitions and “One State” conferences seeking to eliminate Israel. pic.twitter.com/dx2qHFpLjn
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) March 22, 2022
NGO Monitor report debunks Israel apartheid claims, places Amnesty International ‘on the defensive’
A new report by NGO Monitor debunks the accusation of apartheid against Israel and assesses whether apartheid, as previously defined, is applicable to Israel and territories under its military administration.
This new report, titled “Neo-Orientalism: Deconstructing Claims of Apartheid in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict” and written by legal expert Joshua Kern, and legal adviser and U.N. representative for NGO Monitor Anne Herzberg, expands on a previous report published in December that sought to rectify the lack of a coherent and legally substantiated definition of the crime of apartheid.
According to NGO Monitor, “accusations of this crime against humanity have been historically leveled at the State of Israel and its officials by powerful NGOs such as Human Rights Watch (HRW), B’Tselem and, most recently, Amnesty International. The lack of an accepted definition of the crime of apartheid has been harnessed by central actors in the campaign to delegitimize Israel, who apply the term to characterize the political and legal nature of Israel’s government, and in many cases to delegitimize the notion of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.”
“Our report is for legal professionals, academics, practitioners and government officials,” Herzberg told JNS, “but it is also for those who are looking for answers to the false and often malicious charges by NGO and U.N. 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.”
In “A Threshold Crossed,” published in April 2021, HRW accused Israel of “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
Not to be outdone, Amnesty International took this accusation further on Feb. 1, when it released its own report, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity.”
According to NGO Monitor, “Amnesty’s 280-page report largely echoes those of the HSRC [Human Sciences Research Council] and HRW. It does, however, express (while HRW and HSRC only did so implicitly) a thesis that the establishment and maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state institutionalized apartheid.”