According to the UN’s Michael Lynk, Facts Change, “Covetous” Jews Do Not

Contents:

• Who is Michael Lynk and Why Did He Write This Report Now?
• Employing Antisemitic Tropes to Deny the Jewish State’s Right to Exist
• Covering Up Terrorism
• Recasting Conflict as “Apartheid”
• UN-Sponsored Misinformation and Tall Tales
  • “Jewish-Only” Settlements
  • The Impermanence of “Permanent” Settlements
  • Inconvenient Geography is the Fault of the Jews
  • Erasing Palestinian Agency
  • Deceptively Clipped and Selective Quotes
• Lynk’s Self-Reliant Attempt to Reinvent the Law
• Conclusion

One seeking any more proof of the antisemitism behind much of the obscene accusations of Israel being an “apartheid” state need look no further than the new United Nations (“UN”) report that will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council (“UNHRC”) on March 25.

The report is authored by the UN’s Special Rapporteur “on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967,” Michael Lynk. In his report, an advance unedited version of which was made public on March 22, Lynk accuses the Jewish state of being a “covetous alien” entity.

Having thus started off with the tired antisemitic trope of the “covetous” Jew, Lynk goes on to spread numerous false claims using the megaphone handed to him by the United Nations.

In alleging Israel is now an “apartheid” state, Lynk begins his report with the statement that “When the facts change, so must our minds.” Yet an honest and critical reading of the content of his report elucidates that the facts haven’t changed, notwithstanding Lynk’s repeated lies. Instead, the special rapporteur is trying to change the law to fit the falsified “facts” he presents.

Who is Michael Lynk and Why Did He Write This Report Now?

First, some background. Michael Lynk has been the UNHRC’s Special Rapporteur “on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967” since 2016. In this position, Lynk reports to the Council annually about alleged Israeli violations.

Lynk has a history of making outlandish and extremely anti-Israel claims in his reports. In 2017, for example, he produced another report that attempted to reinvent international law to depict Israel’s “occupation” as “illegal.” As explained by renowned law professor, and expert on the law of occupation, Yoram Dinstein: “international law – far from stigmatizing belligerent occupation with illegality – recognizes its frequency and regulates its application in great detail.” Who did Lynk cite to justify his attempts to rewrite the law? Norman Finkelstein, best known for promoting the antisemitic “Holocaust industry” libel, which claims Jews exploit the Holocaust for their selfish interests.

This will be Lynk’s final report as the special rapporteur. On April 1, he will be replaced by another anti-Israel partisan, Francesca Albanese, who has a history of incendiary comments, including engaging in Holocaust inversion to attack Israel. Apparently Lynk wanted to get in one last vicious swipe at the Jewish state while he held the UN’s megaphone.

As CAMERA has written elsewhere, Lynk’s report was anticipated as part of the ongoing and coordinated assault on Israel’s right to exist being carried out by both UN figures and “human rights” organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These series of reports work to build up momentum for the anti-Israel slander ahead of the UN’s Commission of Inquiry’s report due in June, which is also expected to accuse Israel of “apartheid” and rewrite history to question Israel’s legitimacy.

Employing Antisemitic Tropes to Deny the Jewish State’s Right to Exist

Lynk’s contempt for the Jewish state is on full display in his latest report. One need read no further than the following paragraph, taken verbatim from the report:

“The past 70 years has taught us that a covetous alien power has two choices: either to abandon the fever-dream of settler-colonialism and recognize the freedom of the indigenous people, or instead to double-down with increasingly more sophisticated and harsher methods of population control as the inevitable consequence of entrenching permanent alien rule over a people profoundly opposed to their disenfranchisement and destitution.”

Describing the Jewish state as a “covetous alien power” is several steps beyond an antisemitic dog whistle. Not only is it an outright use of the “covetous Jew” trope, but it also describes the Jewish people as “aliens” to their indigenous homeland. It treats Jews – who have maintained a presence in ancient Jewish cities like Hebron and Jerusalem for millennia – as “aliens.” Or, put another way, it describes Jews as “alien” to Judea.

The specific reference to “the past 70 years” helps elucidate this point, too. Lynk is simply stating in slightly different terms what he said in 2009 when he claimed that the “critical date” was 1948 and that “partition” was a mistake. According to Lynk’s new language, since that “critical date” of Israel’s very creation, it has been a “covetous alien power” that does not belong and should not exist.

Covering Up Terrorism

As is tradition at the UN, Lynk’s report completely skips over the context of Palestinian terrorism in order to denigrate Israel.

At one point, Lynk implies Israel’s outlawing of terrorist organizations is evidence of an “institutionalized regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination.” In depicting Israel’s military orders as such, he writes:

“The lives of the Palestinians in the West Bank are governed by more than 1800 military orders issued since 1967 by the Commander of the Israeli Defence Forces…. The focus of the military legal system is the regulation of security, which covers such offenses as participating in protests and non-violent civil disobedience, standard criminal acts, traffic violations, terrorism, membership in over 400 banned organizations, taking part in political meetings and engaging in civil society activities.” (Emphasis added)

The reference to “banned organizations” – meant to paint Israel as repressing civil society – is never detailed or explained by Lynk. What he is referring to is the list of designated organizations by the National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing of Israel. Among those 400 banned organizations are the various chapters of the Islamic State, of which the terrorist who just murdered four Israeli civilians on March 22 was a known supporter. Other banned organizations include Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Al Shabaab, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, and Hamas. In other words, it’s the same kind of list as those maintained by the U.S. State Department and the European Union, with many of the same organizations.

Lynk also references certain other organizations included in this list, such as the six “non-governmental” organizations designed as terrorist organizations by Israel last year. He claims the decisions were based on “unsubstantiated links,” notwithstanding the abundant open source information connecting these organizations to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (“PFLP”), as detailed by CAMERA and NGO Monitor several months ago.

Earlier this year, in fact, Lynk was directly informed of some of this evidence. After sending a letter to the Dutch government when the latter halted all funding to one of those six organizations, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Lynk was informed in a reply letter dated January 31 that an external investigation had found “there were ties at the individual level between UAWC staff and board members and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) for a considerable time.”

The evidence is there for anyone who cares to look. That Michael Lynk prefers to close his eyes and cover his ears doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or is “unsubstantiated.”

Lynk’s terror apology doesn’t end there, however. Listed as one of Israel’s “inhuman acts” committed against the Palestinians is that “Israel has imprisoned members of the (dormant) Palestinian Legislative Council.” Lynk does not provide any further details. Perhaps he’s referring to Marwan Barghouti, a senior terrorist who is serving five life sentences for his role in the murder five Israelis in three terrorist attacks. Or maybe Lynk is referring to Ahmad Sa’adat, the Secretary-General of the U.S.-designated terrorist organization PFLP. Another possibility is Khalida Jarrar, the admitted senior member of the same terrorist organization, PFLP. Nasser Abd al-Jawad, a member of the terrorist organization Hamas, is yet another possibility. Each of these individuals is, after all, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and is serving or has served time in Israeli prisons for their acts of terrorism.

Recasting Conflict as “Apartheid”

As evidence of Israeli “apartheid,” Lynk points to the claim that “5,988 Palestinians have been killed in the context of the occupation and conflict” since 2008, a “denial of the right to life and liberty.”

The context of these deaths is important. For one, under both treaty definitions of “apartheid,” an “inhumane act” in and of itself is not evidence of apartheid. Under the Rome Statute, they must be “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination” and “committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Under the Apartheid Convention, they must be “committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

Consequently, deaths occurring in the context of a defensive war would hardly qualify as evidence of apartheid. Yet Lynk’s figure of 5,988 Palestinians includes such deaths. Using OCHA’s figures, more than two-thirds of those fatalities (4,057) occurred during “major hostilities” in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021. Many, if not most, of those fatalities were Palestinian terrorists. According to military and legal experts, the behavior of the Israeli Defense Forces during these wars fully complied with and often exceeded the requirements of the law of armed conflict, notwithstanding that it is often “to the detriment of the IDF’s tactical advantage on a highly challenging battlefield.”

Notably, the Special Rapporteur, when speaking about violence throughout the report, has a habit of using unsupported but highly charged language, such as “[t]he amount of violence that Israel is employing in order to sustain its occupation is constantly increasing.” Those same OCHA figures, however, disprove this claim. The latest “major hostility,” in 2021, was actually significantly less costly in terms of lives than both the 2008-09 and 2014 conflicts. According to OCHA figures, 253 Palestinians were killed in the May 2021 conflict, compared to 2,251 in 2014 and 1,385 in the 2008-09 conflict (168 were killed in the 2012 conflict). As CAMERA has also noted, the 2021 conflict was also significantly less costly in terms of property damage.

Even those fatalities that occurred outside of what OCHA calls “major hostilities” are deceptive. Of those 1,938, a total of 1,227 (63%) occurred in the Gaza Strip, territory in which Israel does not have a presence on the ground and which is controlled by the terrorist organization Hamas. Frequent engagements between terrorist organizations and the Israeli Defense Forces have occurred during this period. Of those fatalities, 1,509 (78%) were also adult men, a figure which would not include the frequent use of children by terrorist organizations to engage in violence.

Relatedly, of those deaths occurring outside major hostilities, many occurred during significant flareups of Palestinian terrorist attacks. The so-called “Knife Intifada,” which began sometime after the 2014 Gaza conflict, peaking during 2015 and 2016, is a prime example. During that period, hundreds of stabbing, car-ramming, and other attacks were carried out. Of the West Bank fatalities of Palestinians occurring outside of major hostilities, the two deadliest years were 2015 and 2016, amounting to 234 of the 679 (34%) such deaths between 2008-2022.

Lynk plays a similar game in the context of “settler violence.” Citing one of his own press releases, Lynk claims that “[s]ettler violence has increased, not only in number of incidents but also in severity.” But as CAMERA’s Tamar Sternthal pointed out recently in regard to that very same press release, OCHA figures are questionable at best. The agency conceals the “names, dates and locations [which] would enable independent researchers and journalists to cross-check and verify or discount the information.” Worse, as Sternthal notes:

“[O]mitted in the alarmist press release about alleged rising settler violence is the fact that the supposed victims who paid the ultimate price of settler attacks — ‘four Palestinians were killed by settlers this year’ — were possibly assailants, and not the victims depicted by the United Nations.”

In other words, Lynk’s self-citation in his “apartheid” report to suggest “settler violence has increased” is almost certainly counting incidents in which Israeli settlers were the intended victims and the Palestinian fatalities were the attackers.

The figures get even more absurd considering that the OCHA database counts as a civilian anyone who “is neither a member of security forces (including police) nor fulfills a combat function within an armed group.” Under this definition, the terrorist who was shot dead after murdering four Israelis in Beersheba on Tuesday (March 22) would be counted as a “civilian.”

This gets to the heart of the matter. On a broader level, what Lynk is trying to do is portray acts of Israeli self-defense as instead being part of a sinister plot to maintain racial domination. In Lynk’s fantasyland, when a Palestinian throws a meat cleaver at an Israeli settler, the subsequent neutralization of the attacker is, in fact, an “inhumane act” “committed with the intention of maintaining” an apartheid regime.

In Lynk’s world, when even according to Hamas, 50 of the 62 Palestinians killed during two days of mass riots in Gaza while attempting to breach Israel’s borders were its own terrorists, the IDF’s killing of those terrorists was an act of upholding an apartheid regime.

In Lynk’s world, when Israel responds to hundreds of terrorist rockets launched indiscriminately into Israeli population centers, threatening and killing both Jewish and Arab Israelis, Israel’s subsequent military operations are not actually meant to put an end to the rocket fire, but to maintain an apartheid regime.

This is the absurdity of Michael Lynk’s report.

UN-Sponsored Misinformation and Tall Tales

Continuing the tradition of similar reports accusing Israel of “apartheid,” Lynk heavily relies on objectively false claims.

            “Jewish-Only” Settlements

Throughout the report, Lynk repeatedly claims there are “Jewish-only” settlements. Israeli law, however, explicitly forbids the existence of “Jewish-only” communities. The Israeli Supreme Court confirmed this in the Ka’adan v. Israel Lands Administration (HCJ 6698/95) case, which ruled that the state could not discriminate on the basis of religion or nationality in allocating state land.

Notably, however, the Court made a caveat in another case involving Bedouin Arabs. In the Avitan v. Israel Land Administration (HCJ 528/88) case, the Court held there was a public interest in helping Bedouins settle in urban communities and allowed for a policy of preferential treatment for Israel’s Arabs. Israeli Supreme Court precedent directly contradicts Lynk’s claim that Israeli laws “privilege Jewish Israelis.”

Arab Israelis can, and do, live in Israeli settlements. In fact, over the years increasing numbers of Arabs have moved into “Jewish settlements” in eastern Jerusalem.  

On the other hand, the Palestinian Authority (“PA”) has strict laws banning the sale of land to Jews. In December 2018, for example, a PA court sentenced a Palestinian American to life in prison with hard labor for his role in selling properties to Israeli Jews. PA officials have made clear that this law isn’t just applicable to Israeli Jews, but rather all Jews. For instance, in 2009 a PA Chief Islamic Judge threatened Palestinians with charges of “high treason” – which carries the death penalty – after reports emerged of the sale of land on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem to an American Jew.

This prohibition does not apply to Arab Israelis. In fact, it has been anecdotally noted that there seems to be a growing trend of Arab Israelis purchasing housing units in the areas of the West Bank under PA control.

Lynk is either unaware of this reality or sloppy with his writing. Throughout the report, he switches back and forth between “Jewish-only” and “Israeli-only,” including in the same paragraphs. For example, in paragraph 47, he accuses Israel of expropriating Palestinian resources for “Jewish-only use and settlement,” and then in the very next sentence, admits that they’re not “Jewish-only,” but “Israeli-only”:

“In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinian lands – the single most important natural resource in the territory – are being steadily expropriated by Israel for Jewish-only use and settlement, buttressed by discriminatory planning laws and military orders. Since 1967, Israel has confiscated more than two million dunams of Palestinian land in the West Bank, which have been used to build settlements, Israeli-only highways and roads, recreational parks, industrial centres and military bases and firing zones, all for the purpose of cementing a permanent and immovable demographic presence.”

This is especially significant, and inconvenient to Lynk’s allegation of “apartheid,” because of Article 1(2) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which, after defining “racial discrimination” in Article 1(1), specifies:

“This Convention shall not apply to distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences made by a State Party to this Convention between citizens and non-citizens.”

There is thus a huge legal difference between a distinction based on race or religion on the one hand (i.e., “Jewish-only”), and a distinction based on citizenship (i.e., “Israeli-only”).

Conveniently, while Lynk cites this treaty for his claim that Israel is in violation of the “prohibition against apartheid,” he never addresses Article 1(2) of the convention. Had he done so, it would have exposed to readers the maliciously dishonest nature of his “Jewish-only” and “Israeli-only” contradictory claims.

            The Impermanence of “Permanent” Israeli Settlements

Another feature of Lynk’s report is the idea that Israel has a voracious (or in his words, “covetous”) appetite for taking land, engaging in settlement practices to create permanent facts on the ground. He accuses Israel over the “past 70 years” of “entrenching permanent alien rule,” or “cementing a permanent and immovable demographic presence,” and even describes Israel after 1967 as being “an acquisitive occupier determined to maintain permanent control over the land…”

Never mentioned in Lynk’s analysis is that after 1967, that same “acquisitive occupier determined to maintain permanent control” returned the Sinai to Egypt following a peace deal. Similarly, that “acquisitive occupier” withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.

An especially relevant detail Lynk ignores is that Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

Lynk claims Israeli settlements cement “a permanent and immovable demographic presence.” The story of Gaza directly disproves this claim. In the process of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, 8,000 Israelis were forcibly removed; 42 daycare centers, 36 kindergartens, 10 schools, 38 synagogues, and some 3,000 homes and public buildings serving Israelis in Gaza were either closed or demolished in the process.

According to Lynk’s report, however, such settlements were “irreversible facts-on-the-ground.”

Criticism of Israeli settlement policy is one thing. Lynk’s critiques, however, are easily disproven by a quick glance at history.

            Inconvenient Geography is the Fault of the Jews

One of the most shockingly absurd passages in Lynk’s report comes in paragraph 46:

“A central strategy of Israeli rule has been the 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.”

According to this UN “expert,” the physical distance between Gaza and the West Bank was a part of Israel’s “central strategy” of “strategic fragmentation” via keeping two different physically separated pieces of territory…physically separated. We’ve heard claims that Jews control the weather, but Jews controlling the physical realities of geography seems to be a new one. Then again, Moses did part the Red Sea.

The Special Rapporteur also manages to blame Israel’s “central strategy” of “geographic division” for the Palestinian political divide, writing:

“This geographic division not only severs the Palestinians under occupation from each other socially, economically and politically, but also from Palestinians living in Israel and the wider world. As the Special Rapporteur has previously observed: ‘No other society in the world faces such an array of cumulative challenges that includes belligerent occupation, territorial discontinuity, political and administrative divergence, geographic confinement and economic disconnectedness.’” (Emphasis added)

Blaming Israel for the political division between the West Bank and Gaza is nonsense. When Israel disengaged from Gaza, it left the Palestinian Authority in charge of the territory. The division between West Bank and Gaza Palestinian governance is the result of the fact that in June 2007, a Hamas offensive wrested control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority after months of Hamas murders and kidnappings of PA officials and Fatah figures. Since then, Hamas has forcibly ruled Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority maintains control in the areas designated to it under the Oslo Accords.

            Erasing Palestinian agency

Lynk’s delusions of grand Israeli conspiracies extend beyond merely controlling geography. Throughout the report, every aspect of the conflict and every consequence of history is described as the result of evil Israeli plotting and deeds.

In his narrative, Israel is the “covetous alien power” with a “fever-dream of settler-colonialism” that is doubling down “with increasingly more sophisticated and harsher methods of population control.” He asserts that Palestinians have “no path to self-determination or a viable independent state.”

These claims rest on the erasure of Palestinian agency and the distortion of the course of history. Contrary to Lynk’s claim that Palestinians have “no path” to an independent state, they have been repeatedly given a path to their own state. Since 2000, Israel has offered on multiple occasions increasingly generous peace deals that would have given the Palestinians their own state in the Gaza Strip and almost all of the West Bank (with corresponding land swaps). Each time, Palestinian leadership rejected the offers.

Palestinian rejectionism has nothing to do with objections over minor modifications to the so-called 1967 borders, either. Palestinian leadership rejected the UN Partition Plan in 1947. Even before then, Arab Palestinian leadership was objecting to the existence of a Jewish state within any borders. In December 1946, the Grand Mufti’s cousin, Jamal Husseini, famously told the Arab League that “even the tiniest Jewish state will be a rotten apple in a box of otherwise good apples,” while also informing them that “[t]here is not a single Palestinian Arab in the world who believes in political means” and that “bloodletting is the only way to resolve the problem.”

Indeed, had Palestinian leadership not spent the preceding decades waging a constant campaign of terror on Israel, helping instigate the 1967 war, Israel likely never would have come into control of the West Bank and Gaza in the first place.

            Deceptively Clipped and Selective Quotes

Lynk’s report follows Amnesty’s choice of deceptively clipping a quote by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in such a way as to make it look like he is saying exactly the opposite of what he truly said.  Claiming that Israel’s Nation-State Law “entrenches constitutional inequality and racial-national discrimination into Israel law,” the Special Rapporteur quotes the first part of a Netanyahu’s statement, where he wrote: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens, but the nation-state of the Jewish people and them alone.”

But as CAMERA pointed out in the context of the Amnesty report, the very next sentence of the same Netanyahu statement disproves the exact point Lynk is trying to make. Netanyahu went on to state: “As you wrote, there’s no problem with the Arab citizens of Israel – they have the same rights as us all and the Likud government has invested in the Arab sector more than any other government.”

Examples of deceptive clipping or selective referencing of quotes are abound in the report.

While claiming that there is a “widely-held consensus” that “Israel will keep East Jerusalem and either most or all of the West Bank, whether or not there is a peace agreement” (emphasis added), Lynk quotes a statement by Israeli Minister Meirav Michaeli, who said: “No one thinks that half-a-million settlers will be evacuated from Judea and Samaria.” (Note: Lynk incorrectly dates the statement to 2019. However, the footnote goes to an article that dates the statement to 2021.)

Hardly “most or all” of the West Bank, Michaeli was referring specifically to settlement blocs which are largely concentrated in a small area along the border. According to the Jerusalem Post article Lynk cites, Michaeli said that any peace agreement “would likely include a land swap for 4% of Area C territory.”

In fact, during that same speech, Michaeli “rejected claims by right-wing politicians that Israel has an inherent right to retain Area C of the West Bank and to apply sovereignty to it.”

Yet again, Lynk is only partially quoting an Israeli politician in order to create the impression that she is saying the exact opposite of what she actually said.

Similarly, Lynk uses a quote by Defense Minister Benny Gantz as further “evidence” that Israel intends to keep “most or all of the West Bank.” He cites a statement by Gantz that said: “We will strengthen the settlement blocs and the Golan Heights, from which we will never retreat. The Jordan Valley will remain our eastern security border.” The Golan Heights is obviously not a part of the West Bank. Furthermore, the Jordan Valley is not “most or all” of the West Bank. Even under the most favorable interpretation of the statement, the Jordan Valley constitutes less than a third of the territory of the West Bank, even including the Dead Sea.

It is apparent that Lynk felt he had to disingenuously clip and selectively quote statements by Israeli officials in order to falsely give his claims even the thinnest veneer of credibility.

Lynk’s Self-Reliant Attempt to Reinvent the Law

One of the telling signs of the lack of credibility of Lynk’s report is the sources he relies on for many of his most outlandish claims.

For one of his most consequential legal claims, Lynk cites only himself. In paragraph 16, Lynk makes the definitive claim that the “Israeli occupation has crossed the bright red line into illegality.” The footnote for this claim cites only “A/72/556,” a report Lynk submitted to the General Assembly in 2017.

In that report, Lynk writes that “the lawful occupant approach…has since become wholly inadequate,” before going on to invent a “lawful occupant test” that quite literally attempts to redefine the law in order to fit Lynk’s well-established anti-Israel bias and desire to label Israel an “illegal occupier.” But, as CAMERA has repeatedly had corrected in multiple media outlets, there is no “illegal occupation.” As written by expert on the law of occupation Yoram Dinstein: “In truth, international law – far from stigmatizing belligerent occupation with illegality – recognizes its frequency and regulates its application in great detail.”

Notice, however, that in that 2017 report, Lynk argued that the current approach of international law was “wholly inadequate.” Once again in his report to be presented on March 24, 2022, Lynk is arguing the law is “increasingly inadequate,” stating in paragraph 16:

“While the laws of occupation continue to apply in full force to the Palestinian territory, they have become an increasingly inadequate legal and political framework by which to accurately understand, let alone effectively regulate and end, the transformative reality that Israel has been imposing on the ground.”

Consider what Lynk is doing here. In 2017, he unsuccessfully tried to change the law to attack Israel. In 2022, he’s citing that attempt at legal revisionism to try and engage in yet another act of unilateral legal revisionism.

In legal terms, what Lynk is doing is arguing that the lex lata (meaning the law as it currently is) is bad, so he is basing his argument on lex ferenda (meaning what the law should be) according to himself. Lynk does so while partly arguing on the basis of criminal law, which is itself subject to the strict requirement of the principle of legality, i.e., one cannot be convicted of an action that was not prohibited when the crime was committed.

He also is pushing his idea of lex ferenda while simultaneously arguing that the prohibition against apartheid is “well-established” under “customary international law.” Yet customary international law quite literally requires an examination of existing practice and an existing acceptance of the rule as a legal obligation. In other words, while the prohibition on apartheid may be a part of customary international law, the understanding of what this prohibition actually means must be based on what already is, not what Lynk thinks ought to be.

Conclusion

On Friday, March 25, Lynk will present this report in his final remarks to the UNHRC. As CAMERA has previously noted, Lynk’s report is just the latest iteration of an ongoing campaign to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist.

Other such campaigners, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, will participate in the debate at the UNHRC, seeking to amplify each other’s respective slander against the Jewish state and create the impression of legitimacy and consensus regarding their anti-Israel libel.

Consequently, it is incumbent upon those who value accuracy and honesty in reporting on and analyzing to critically look at the claims being made. As with Amnesty’s report and Human Rights Watch’s report, Lynk’s report fails to hold up.

 

Updated 3/24/2022 – Added “Recasting Conflict as ‘Apartheid'” section.