A senior United Nations official resigned over a report labeling Israel an “apartheid regime” that dominates the Palestinians in violation of international law.
Rima Khalaf, a Jordanian diplomat who leads the UN panel of Arab states that produced the report, resigned rather than retract the accusation. Her ouster is a victory for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who condemned the report as “anti-Israel propaganda” on Wednesday and called for the UN to withdraw the charge.
“When someone issues a false and defamatory report in the name of the UN, it is appropriate that the person resign,” Haley said Friday. “UN agencies must do a better job of eliminating false and biased work, and I applaud the Secretary-General’s decision to distance his good office from it.”
Khalaf resigned in protest of the report’s withdrawal. “The secretary general asked me yesterday morning to withdraw [the report],” she said Friday, per AFP. “I asked him to rethink his decision, he insisted, so I submitted my resignation from the UN.”
The report was issued by the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Western Asia, a panel comprised of 18 Arab states and based in Lebanon, which called for the UN to take “swift action to oppose and end this apartheid regime.” The panel — with the help of Richard Falk, a controversial American academic —accused Israel of pursuing the “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people” by treating Palestinians differently based on where they live and by denying the “right of return” to Palestinians whose ancestors left following the 1948 and 1967 wars between Israel and the Arab states.
“That such anti-Israel propaganda would come from a body whose membership nearly universally does not recognize Israel is unsurprising,” Haley said Wednesday. “That it was drafted by Richard Falk, a man who has repeatedly made biased and deeply offensive comments about Israel and espoused ridiculous conspiracy theories, including about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is equally unsurprising. The United Nations Secretariat was right to distance itself from this report, but it must go further and withdraw the report altogether.”
