The UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia is one of five regional councils charged with promoting cooperation and integration between countries in each region. The ESCWA covers 18 countries in Asia and Africa: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, The Sudan, The Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, The United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Rima Khalaf, who is Jordanian, was appointed to head the UN ESCWA in 2010. She was re-appointed in 2015 over protests by Israel and Saudi Arabia. Both US allies were angered over the ESCWA report: Arab Integration — A 21st Century Development Imperative. It discussed the Arab Spring and the many regional impediments, including repressive regimes, that were undermining it.
Earlier this year, the UN ESCWA was set to release a report that was highly critical of Arab regimes repressing their citizens. The report was not published:
Several countries in the Middle East, such as Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, have objected to its findings.
Egypt has reportedly disputed that President Mohamed Morsi was overthrown in 2013 in a military coup, while Israel has taken issue with the report's descriptions of its treatment of occupied Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has argued against the report having any mention of its execution of Shia Muslim leader Nimr al-Nimr in January 2016. — Al-Jazeera
A UN spokesperson said the Arab Integration report would be released by the independent scholars engaged by UN ESCWA who wrote it. The UN would not publish it. It seems like the UN ESCWA under Ms. Khalaf was publishing reports that seemed to annoy many of the powers that be in the region.
Earlier this week, the agency published a report written by two American academics, Richard Falk (Princeton, U Cal Santa Barbara) and Virginia Tilley (Southern Illinois University). Here’s the opening paragraph:
Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid
This report concludes that Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole. Aware of the seriousness of this allegation, the authors of the report conclude that available evidence establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Israel is guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid as legally defined in instruments of international law.
Falk served for six years as the UN-HRC special investigator for the Palestinian territories. While serving in that role, he was refused entry into Israel. He remained in that role despite continued opposition by Israel. The report received widespread coverage in The Washington Post, Counterpunch, The Hindu, The New York Times, Democracy Now, The Jerusalem Post and the Palestine News Network. Juan Cole’s commentary is worth a read.
The report said the "strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people" was the main method through which Israel imposes apartheid, with Palestinians divided into four groups oppressed through "distinct laws, policies and practices."
It identified the four sets of Palestinians as: Palestinian citizens of Israel; Palestinians in East Jerusalem; Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and Palestinians living as refugees or in exile. — Haaretz
The UN Secretary General distanced himself from the report which was issued by the agency without coordinating with his office:
A UN spokesperson has said that ‘the report as it stands does not reflect the view of the Secretary-General’. The report made no claim to represent the views of the UN as a whole. It does, however, reflect the views of a regional UN commission, made up of eighteen member states of North Africa and West Asia. And here it is important to remember that the genesis of the UN sanctions and arms embargo against South Africa flowed up from below and inwards from the periphery, not down from on high or out from the core. The Third World states led the charge against apartheid for many years in the face of Western resistance and support for South Africa. It was 1952 when a group of thirteen Arab and Asian states first succeeded in adding ‘The Question of Race Conflict resulting from the policies of apartheid’ to the UN General Assembly’s agenda. It took another 25 years – after multiple abstentions and vetoes by Britain, France and the US, and a rising global social movement against apartheid – before the Security Council eventually imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa. — Counterpunch
Equating Israeli rule over Palestinians to Apartheid isn’t new, a senior editor at the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz did it in 2015. In 2010, Ehud Barak said Israel was going to turn into an Apartheid state, and he’s a former PM. Noam Chomsky doesn’t think the term Apartheid is useful, but has said what Israel is doing is worse. Jimmy Carter’s said much the same. And all this is happening when the American alt-right claims they’re practicing “white Zionism”. Let’s just say this is all a touchy topic.
Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman likened the report, which was published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) on Wednesday, to Der Sturmer—a Nazi propaganda publication that was strongly anti-Semitic. — The Independent
What may have caused particular alarm was this section of the report:
Apartheid in southern Africa was brought to an end, in part, by the cumulative impact of a variety of measures, including economic sanctions and sports boycotts, undertaken with the blessing of United Nations bodies and many Member States, and with grassroots support in States with strong strategic and economic ties withSouth Africa. The effectiveness of the anti-apartheid campaign was in large part due to the transnational activism of civil society, which reinforced the intergovernmental consensus that took shape in the United Nations. [...]
National Governments should support boycott, divestment and sanctions activities and respond positively to calls for such initiatives.
The US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley did not mince words either:
“The United States is outraged by the report,” said Haley in a statement. “The United Nations secretariat was right to distance itself from this report, but it must go further and withdraw the report altogether.” — Times of Israel
The report has since been pulled from the UN ESCWA website. A summary is still on the ESCWA website and the UN website. The complete 76 page report is still available here.
Rima Khalaf resigned in protest today.
"It was expected, naturally, that Israel and its allies would exercise immense pressure on the U.N. secretary general to distance himself from the report and to ask for it to be withdrawn," she said. Khalaf said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres instructed her on Thursday morning to withdraw the report.
"I asked him to review his position but he insisted on it. Based on that, I submitted to him my resignation from the United Nations." — NY Times