A United Nations special rapporteur has accused Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the occupied territories, joining a growing group of international, Israeli and Palestinian rights watchdogs that have sought to recast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle for equal rights instead of a territorial dispute. Strongly denied by Israel and its supporters, who accuse the UN investigator of bias, the claim is the first time that a UN-appointed investigator has accused Israel of apartheid in such an unequivocal way. The rapporteur, Michael Lynk, a Canadian law professor appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council to investigate rights abuses in the occupied territories, did not directly compare the situation there to that of apartheid-era South Africa, where a white minority ruled over a Black majority. However, he said that it met the legal definition of apartheid set out by international law.
The two-tier legal system enforced by Israel in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, he said, enshrined a system of domination by Israelis over Palestinians that could no longer be explained as the unintended consequence of a temporary occupation. “In the Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967, there are now five million stateless Palestinians living without rights, in an acute state of subjugation, and with no path to self-determination or a viable independent state which the international community has repeatedly promised is their right,” he wrote in an advance copy of his report. “The differences in living conditions and citizenship rights and benefits are stark, deeply discriminatory and maintained through systematic and institutionalized oppression,” the report said. The Israeli government said that Professor Lynk’s claims were baseless, devoid of context and the latest iteration of a smear campaign aimed at undermining Israel’s right to exist.
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