Israel has established an "apartheid regime" based on "racial
discrimination" to "dominate" the Palestinian people "as a whole". These are the findings from a new report released by the UN experts, published yesterday in Beirut (Lebanon) from the Economic and Social Commission of the United Nations for Western Asia (CESAO, ESCWA).
A document that has provoked the protests of the Jewish state and the United States and from which the same UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has taken his distance.
According to the United Nations researchers Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, the policy of occupation as well as originating "social discrimination” has also to wiped out the remaining hopes of a two-state solution. The document raised a stir and protests.
However, the authors report that it was made on the basis of a "scientific investigation and hard evidence".
Inside it explicitly talks about a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions implemented by the Palestinians in response to Israeli policies; the goal is to end "apartheid" and the promotion of a "just peace."
The support of the boycott, economic sanctions and other initiatives comes at a time when Israel is trying to break the international support for Palestinian rights.
Executive Secretary of the CESAO, Rima Khalaf, emphasizes that it is the "first report of its kind" by an organ of the United Nations. It states "clearly and succinctly that Israel is a racist state, which established a system of apartheid that haunts the Palestinian people."
In a tough response to the report by the United States Permanent Representative at the UN, Nikki Haley, stated that Washington is "shocked". Stéphane Dujarric, UN spokesman, made a dash from the document stating that "the report and its positions do not reflect the view of the Secretary-General" of the United Nations Antonio Guterres.
The Israeli government described the report as an attempt to "falsify" the only "true democracy" in the Middle East, creating a "false analogy" and constitutes a "blatant lie".
The leaders of the Jewish state are appealing to the general secretary to distance himself from the content of a "bias distorted and misleading" report.
Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, had previously lashed out against colonial policy promoted by Israel.
In 2014 he stated that in the occupied Palestinian territories "Israeli policy has assumed unacceptable connotations of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing".