BNC Statement

UN Special Rapporteur confirms Israel perpetrates apartheid against Palestinians.

Let’s escalate the pressure to get International Community and the United Nations to comply with their legal obligations to end Israeli apartheid.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee, the largest coalition in Palestinian society, welcomes the conclusions of the most recent report by UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Prof. Michael Lynk, that Israel is perpetrating apartheid against Palestinians. 

The Special Rapporteur’s report affirms the growing international consensus that Israel’s decades-old regime of oppression against the Indigenous Palestinians includes the crime against humanity of apartheid and calls on states to “assemble a diplomatic menu of accountability measures,” in response.

Earlier this year, a detailed report by Amnesty International concluded that Israel has imposed since its establishment in 1948 a regime of apartheid against the entire Palestinian people, calling for effective international accountability measures to dismantle this regime.

Apartheid has finally become an unavoidable framework for addressing Israel’s systemic denial of Palestinian rights. Last year, studies by Human Rights Watch and Israel’s largest human rights organization B’Tselem also confirmed what Palestinian, South African and international human rights advocates have been saying for decades, that Israel is an apartheid state.

The European Citizens Initiative to stop all trade with illegal settlements in occupied territories is one effective measure that the European Union and its member states must heed as a first step in ending their shameful complicity in Israel’s settlement enterprise, which amounts to a war crime under international law. Other states also have legal obligations to end all forms of support for Israel’s apartheid regime and to collaborate to bring this regime to an end.

Prof. Lynk’s report recommends to re-establish the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid, a demand widely supported by Palestinian civil society as well as by leading international figures, particularly in the Global South, who are pressuring the UN to #UNInvestigateApartheid.

The UN, under U.S. and European hegemony, was directly responsible in 1947-48 for enabling the establishment of a regime of Zionist settler-colonialism and apartheid through the ethnic cleansing of a majority of Indigenous Palestinians. This legally and morally obligates the UN to shoulder the responsibility to #DismantleApartheid in historic Palestine as it did in South Africa years ago. It’s high time for the UN to make apartheid history.


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