Jordanian diplomat Rima Khalaf, said UN Secretary General António Guterres urged her to retract her commission’s report after it sparked outrage in Israel and the US, the The New York Times reported.
Khalaf, the Under-Secretary General and Executive Secretary for the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), refused to retract the report despite the pressure from Guterres.
On Friday, Guterres, buckling under pressure from the Trump administration, demanded that ESCWA remove the report from its website. This demand, which was later met, led to Khalaf submitting her resignation.
“It is only normal for criminals to pressure and attack those who advocate the cause of their victims,” Khalaf wrote in the resignation letter, seen by Reuters.
US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley welcomed Khalaf’s resignation, calling her commission’s report “false and defamatory”.
“When someone issues a false and defamatory report in the name of the UN, it is appropriate that the person resign,” Haley said. She also lauded Guterres for his refusal to accept the findings of the commission and calling for its withdrawal.
The report was authored by a commission made up of 18 Arab UN member states, including former UN human rights investigator Richard Falk, who has been accused of anti-Semitism.
Falk, former “UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” is a fringe “9/11 conspiracy theorist” and was denounced by the former Secretary-General of the UN, for comments blaming the Boston terrorist attack on “the American global domination project” and “Tel Aviv”. He is also the author of an article “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust” that compares Israel to Nazi Germany, the NGO Monitor pointed out.
It was the first time a UN body had unequivocally charged Israel with “establishing an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced that he is planning to honor Khalaf. Khalaf will be awarded the “highest Palestinian honor” by Abbas, Haaretz reported Sunday.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric denied however that the report was rejected because of its findings: “This is not about content, this is about process,” Dujarric told reporters in New York on Friday.
Israel rejected the reports findings, likening it to Der Sturmer – a Nazi publication. But the ESCWA report said it had established on the “basis of scholarly inquiry and overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid”.
Apartheid is the description of the now-abolished South African policy of racial segregation and seperate development.
Supporters of the report have expressed hope that it could add momentum to an international movement to boycott Israel, in a similar international campaign of economic pressure to the one on South Africa that helped end apartheid.
