In an exhaustive presentation, lawyers for South Africa presented its case to the International Court of Justice that Israel has failed to prevent and is continuing to commit acts of genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
“The study is the most comprehensive and persuasive analysis of why the Israel occupation has now become illegal,” says former UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk. “It will be the intellectual and political touchstone on Palestine and international law for some time to come.”
Even a scholar who opposes the label says, “Israel does not have a case against apartheid.” That is the power of the apartheid framing. The label for Israel has gained broad acceptance because of the widening awareness of the death of the Two State Solution — that Israel never really wanted a legitimate, contiguous Palestinian state. Because of American support for Israeli impunity, it may take years for the apartheid name and frame to achieve the result we are hoping for. But at least we now have a tool for organizing and persuasion of great potential potency, if we bang the apartheid drum often and loudly.
Michael Lynk reflects on his time as UN Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian Territories.
When Canadian human rights lawyer Michael Lynk ended his term as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories on May 1 he left a series of reports and statements laying out the realities of Israeli apartheid. Now in an extended interview with Mondoweiss, Lynk describes the process that led to his apartheid declarations, and what steps the international community can take to force Israel to abandon its “fever-dream of settler-colonialism.”
In case you missed it, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic lately issued a report that finds Israel’s treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank amounts to the crime of apartheid. The study came out on February 28 in the wake of five longer, wider-ranging, apartheid reports published since 2020 – and just before the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine published yet another apartheid report on March 21. Despite its quiet rollout, the study’s high quality and association with Harvard likely mean it will play a significant role in establishing Israel’s apartheid, and represents a victory for Palestinian human rights.
The rightwing Israel lobby is enraged by the new report by the Special Rapporteur to the U.N. accusing Israel of “apartheid”– a “landmark moment of recognition of the lived reality of millions of Palestinians,” says Amnesty International. But J Street has had nothing to say about the report. It surely hopes it will go away, because these reports foster demands among progressives to actually do something about human rights violations beyond acknowledging their existence.
New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley used a fresh apartheid report, by U.N. special rapporteur Michael Lynk, to finally slip Amnesty International’s apartheid finding into the paper. Kingsley wrote that Lynk, a distinguished Canadian law professor appointed by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, had “accused Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the occupied territories.” He quickly summarized Lynk’s finding, gave Israel’s foreign ministry and other critics a chance to respond — and then, right at the end, mentioned that Amnesty, among others, had produced a “similar” report.