‘Outrageous libels’ – Israel, advocacy groups respond to UN ‘apartheid’ report

Israeli government and pro-Israel NGOs slam new UN Human Rights Council report, say author is biased and distorts the facts.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

A new report urging the UN tp officially designate Israel as an apartheid state guilty of torture and racial exploitation of Arabs has sparked outrage from Israeli government officials and advocacy groups. They say the author, Michael Lynk, has a long history of hostility towards the Jewish State and that the report is a distortion of reality.

Lynk, who has served as a “Special Rapporteur” to the UN on Palestinian human rights issues since 2016, previously urged the international community to abandon trade agreements with Israel if it applied sovereignty to larger swathes of Judea and Samaria. He also came under fire for refusing to condemn an antisemitic political ally who called for Palestinians to use “violent resistance” against Israel.

“This report recycles baseless and outrageous libels previously published by NGOs that share the same goal as the author of this report: to delegitimize and criminalize the State of Israel for what it is: the nation-state of the Jewish People, with equal rights for all its citizens, irrespective of religion, race or sex,” said Meirav Eilon Shahar, Israel’s envoy to the UN in Geneva, in a statement.

Shahar added 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 percent [Arab] minority, is not considered.”

Anne Herzberg, NGO Monitor’s legal adviser, told the Jewish Chronicle that “Lynk’s latest report is not surprising. The… Rapporteur position for the Palestinians has a one-sided mandate where active demonization of Israel and promoting BDS is essentially a requirement for the job.

“Like his other reports, he has promoted the anti-Israel buzzword du jour – this time, apartheid. And like all his other reports, he provides a highly tendentious interpretation of international law, grossly misrepresents the facts, and employs antisemitic tropes.”

​​”It is unfathomable, that with all the major human-rights crises around us – from Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine and China’s ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs – that some in the international community, such as the United Nations and NGO civil society, should choose to prioritize and single out Israel for opprobrium at this historical juncture in time,” Arsen Ostrovsky, chair and CEO of the International Legal Forum, told JNS.

“However,” he added, “that is also highly revealing, indicating that these false and malicious aspersions of apartheid and distortions of truth are not grounded in law or motivated by desire to advance peace, but rather by intellectual dishonesty and the simple refusal to accept Israel’s very right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”