Professor S. Michael Lynk:

I am deeply honoured to be invited to make a presentation to the committee today with respect to my work as the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory and more specifically on my latest, and final, report as special rapporteur, which I delivered last week to the UN Human Rights Council.

I will take a minute to explain my role within the UN. Special rapporteurs are human rights experts who are appointed by the Human Rights Council for a six-year non-renewable term. We are part of what are called UN special procedures. We are not paid for our work and many of us are university academics with specialties in our areas of appointment. We are autonomous from the council and while we work within our specific mandates, we are free to explore themes that we choose ourselves and free to come to our own conclusions and recommendations in the reports that we deliver to the UN. Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the UN, called special procedures the "crown jewel" of the UN human rights system.

Before I explain my role and report, may I say that Ireland and its policy towards the Israeli occupation of Palestine have been a shining north star in the EU and the west. I commend the resolution adopted by the Dáil last May with regard to de facto annexation and salute the principled stance Ireland and its Government have taken in support of Palestinian civil society in general and the defence it has offered to the six Palestinian organisations that were designated as terrorist organisations by the Israeli Government last October, with very thin evidence to support this alarming claim. I acknowledge the fact that Ireland, in its statement to the UN Security Council in February, specifically stated that the Israeli occupation has become illegal, which makes it among the very first European countries to officially adopt this stance as part of its foreign policy. I am aware that this committee has discussed the topic of Palestine on a number of occasions and produced a well-regarded report last summer on home demolitions and displacement in the occupied Palestinian territory.

I am completing my six-year term as special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory at the end of April. The past six years while I have served as special rapporteur have been momentous with regards of developments in the occupied Palestinian territory. Alas most of these developments have been disheartening and an affront to our international human rights standards. There have been several periods of intense and destructive violence with great loss of life and property against the Palestinians under occupation by the Israeli military, particularly in Gaza during the Great March of Return in 2018 and the short explosive war on Gaza in May 2021. The Israeli occupation, which is in its 55th year with no end in sight, has become ever more entrenched and repressive. In terms of Palestinian deaths at the hands of the Israeli military, 2021 was the deadliest year since 2014. The instances of settler violence towards Palestinians in 2021 was the highest level of recorded attacks since statistics were first assembled in 2012. The demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israeli military has also been spiking continuously upwards. We must also recognise and condemn the deaths of innocent Israel civilians during this period. Too much bloodshed on all sides of this occupation have been shed.

In 2014, when the last serious peace process efforts under the then US Secretary of State John Kerry collapsed, there were 370,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. Today, there are close to 480,000 settlers, which is an increase of 23%. Add to that the 230,000 Jewish Israeli settlers in Jerusalem and there are now 710,000 Israeli settlers, over 10% of the Israeli Jewish population, living in occupied territory in settlements that the UN Security Council has declared to be a "flagrant violation under

international law".

In terms of Palestinian civil society and international human rights observers, the news is equally discouraging. In October 2021, Israel designated six Palestinian civil society organisations as terrorist organisations and has not rescinded this attack notwithstanding the consistent statements from member states and international donors that Israel has not presented persuasive evidence to back up any of its claims. As well, Israel has refused to renew the visas of a number of international staff officers working in the occupied Palestinian territory for the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights, thereby forcing them out of the country. This unjustified interference with the legitimate work of the UN are actions not worthy of a democracy or a UN member state.

The dedicated theme of my 12th report as special rapporteur addresses the question as to whether Israel's acquisitive and repressive practices over the course of its 55-year-old regime have curdled from an endless occupation into something darker, harsher and more ominous. In recent years and months, distinguished voices have concluded that the inexorable facts of Israel’s occupation - the relentless land confiscation, the ever-expanding Jewish-only settlements, the dual legal system, the vast gap in living conditions between Israeli settlers and the Palestinians living among them, the vast separation in political rights, the use of torture, home demolitions, collective punishment and the depleted Palestinian economy – have amounted to, or resemble, apartheid. Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon wrote in 2021 that Israel’s "structural domination and oppression of the Palestinian people through indefinite occupation arguably constitutes apartheid." Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu stated in 2014 "I know first-hand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation." South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor spoke in 2022 about her country's "significant dismay at the continued apartheid practices of Israel against the

long-suffering people of Palestine" and perhaps most revealing, the former Attorney General of Israel Michael Ben-Yair wrote last month in an Irish publication:

Israel's ongoing domination over these territories is a gross injustice that must be urgently rectified. It is with great sadness that I must also conclude that my country has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid regime. It is time for the international community to recognise this reality as well.

He continues:

You simply cannot be a liberal democracy if you operate apartheid over another people. It is a contradiction in terms because Israel's entire society is complicit in this unjust reality.

My report asks whether this 55-year-old occupation has become indistinguishable from apartheid. Applying the accepted three-part test taken from the 1973 UN Convention against apartheid, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, I concluded in my report from last week that the political system of entrenched rule in the occupied Palestinian territory satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid.

First, an institutionalised regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination has been established. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in East Jerusalem and the West Bank live their lives under a single regime which differentiates its distribution of rights and benefits on the basis of national and ethnic identity and which ensures the supremacy of one group over, and to the detriment of, the other. The differences in living conditions and citizenship rights and benefits are stark, deeply discriminatory and maintained through systematic and institutionalised oppression.

Second, this system of alien rule has been established with the intent of maintaining the domination of one racial-national-ethnic group over another. Israeli political leaders, past and present, have repeatedly stated they intend to retain control over all of the occupied territory to enlarge the blocks of land for present and future Jewish settlement while confining the Palestinians to barricaded population reserves. Under this particular system, the freedoms of one group are inextricably bound up in the subjugation of the other.

Third, the imposition of this system of institutionalised discrimination with the intent of permanent domination has been built upon the regular practice of inhumane acts: arbitrary and extra-judicial killings; torture; the violent deaths of children; the denial of fundamental human rights; a fundamentally flawed military court system and the lack of criminal due process; arbitrary detention; collective punishment; and the desperate living conditions in barricaded Gaza. The repetition of these acts over long periods of time and their endorsement by the Knesset and the Israeli judicial system indicate they are not the result of random and isolated acts but integral to Israel's system of rule.

This is apartheid. It does not have some of the same features as practised in southern Africa before the mid-1990s. In particular, much of what has been called “petit apartheid” is not present. On the other hand, there are pitiless features of Israel's apartness rule in the occupied Palestinian territory that were not practised in southern Africa, such as segregated highways, high walls and extensive checkpoints, a barricaded population, missile strikes and tank shelling of a civilian population, and the abandonment of the Palestinians' social welfare to the international community. With the eyes of the international community wide open, Israel has imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world.

I want to address one of the most important and neglected issues dealing with the Israeli occupation of Palestine: the remarkable unwillingness of the international community to impose any accountability measures on Israel for its forever occupation, which has been conducted both in absolute defiance of international law and with the eyes of the international community wide open. The UN Security Council has adopted more than 30 resolutions in the past 50 years critical of Israel and the occupation. The General Assembly and the Human Rights Council have adopted hundreds more resolutions. According to international law, the Israeli settlements are illegal. Annexation is illegal. The denial of Palestinian self-determination is illegal. Human rights abuses are rife. The Fourth Geneva Convention applies in full and has been honoured in its absence. None of these countless resolutions have been obeyed by Israel and nothing has been imposed on Israel to bring it into compliance with the rules-based international order.

When the international community allows a member state permission to go rogue, it is going rogue itself. I would not be here in front of the committee today presenting my recent report on how an unrelenting occupation has metastasized into apartheid if the international community had taken its own laws seriously 40 years ago or even 30 years ago when the Security Council and the General Assembly began to adopt the first of their many resolutions critical of the Israeli occupation. International law is not meant to be an umbrella that folds up at the first hint of rain. Had the international community accompanied these resolutions with resolute accountability and consistency decades ago, in the same way it is doing today with great urgency in respect of the invasion and occupation of Ukraine, then we would have likely already had a just and durable resolution to the question of Palestine and no one would have to be talking about apartheid today in the Palestinian territories.