Biased UN Report Falsely Accuses Israel of ‘Apartheid’

Anti-Israel activists Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley produced a UN commission report urging “swift action to oppose and end” Israeli “apartheid.”

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon condemned a report by the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) that accuses Israel of practicing apartheid.

The report, titled “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid: Palestine and the Israeli Occupation,” was produced by Princeton Professor Emeritus Richard Falk, the UN’s former Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Palestine, and American political scientist Virginia Tilley of Southern Illinois University. Both have a long history of anti-Israel activism.

The report “concludes, on the basis of overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid, and urges swift action to oppose and end it.”

‘A Blatant Lie’

“The attempt to smear and falsely label the only true democracy in the Middle East by creating a false analogy is despicable and constitutes a blatant lie,” Danon asserted.

ESCWA, based in Beirut, is currently under the leadership of Rima Khalaf, a Kuwait-born Jordanian diplomat whom former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor has accused of “modern-day anti-Semitism.”

In the summer of 2015, Prosor met Carmen Lapointe, head of the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services, calling for a disciplinary hearing against Khalaf, AP reported at the time. Prosor told Lapointe that “Khalaf has abused her position in order to promote an anti-Israel agenda in a flagrant violation of UN obligations and principles.”

“It comes as no surprise that an organization headed by an individual who has called for boycotts against Israel and compared our democracy to the most terrible regimes of the 20th century would publish such a report,” Danon stated. “We call on the secretary-general to disassociate the UN from this biased and deceitful report.”

By: World Israel News Staff