The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” has issued his annual report, accusing Israel of “inhuman acts” and “apartheid,” and has called on the UN to support a “legitimacy war” against the country.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone. First, because the 47-member council, which includes in its membership Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia, has consistently singled out Israel for condemnation. Secondly, because Richard Falk, author of the document, has a history of anti-Israel statements.
Falk, the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Ivy League Princeton University, is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Human Rights and State Sovereignty; Religion and Humane Global Governance; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; and The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics.
So how did a well-regarded Jewish professor of international law and political science become an inveterate enemy of Israel?
Falk, radicalized in the 1960s, was more than an “ivory-tower” scholar. He has described himself as a “citizen pilgrim” working towards “the gradual construction of a new world order that assures basic human needs of all people, that safeguards the environment, that protects the fundamental human rights of all individuals and groups without encroaching upon the precarious resources of cultural diversity.”
This led, as has been the case with so many on the left in recent years, to a fundamental opposition to America’s role in the world — and also to the activities of Israel.
Following his retirement from teaching, Falk became more active in the pro-Palestinian movement. In 2008, he was appointed to a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur. His reports have consistently been one-sided.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch, noted that Falk’s latest 22-page document “makes no mention of war crimes or human rights violations by Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the word ‘Hamas’ appears nowhere in the report.”
In 2007, Falk wrote “Slouching Towards a Palestinian Holocaust” for the Swedish-based left-wing Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, where he asked, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
Falk blamed the Boston Marathon Bombing of April 15, 2013 on the United States and Israel. In an article for the journal Foreign Policy, he asserted, “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” He added, “As long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”
Susan Rice, the then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that she was “outraged” by Falk’s “highly offensive” comments. “Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN.”
British and Canadian diplomats also objected to his remarks.
Falk has even given qualified support to the so-called “Truthers,” conspiracy theorists who have suggested that the destruction of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001 was the work of George W. Bush and his neo-conservative advisers.
In 2004, he wrote the foreword to the book The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, by David Ray Griffin. “There have been questions raised here and there and allegations of official complicity made almost from the day of the attacks, especially in Europe,” wrote Falk, “but no one until Griffin has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account.”
Perhaps the most respected scholar who lent his name to the Palestinian cause was the late Edward Said, a Palestinian American professor of English at Columbia University. As an icon among an entire generation of teachers of literature, Said’s critiques of Israel have been disseminated far and wide.
So it was only appropriate that it was Falk who, on Feb. 18, delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton, “Edward Said’s Legacy and the Palestinian Struggle.” One of the co-sponsors was the Princeton Committee on Palestine. Previous speakers included anti-Zionist scholars Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky.
There is something strange about all this. While the head of the Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas, seems like a relative voice of reason, declaring that he would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel, with perhaps NATO troops serving as a buffer between them, the forces in the international community represented by people like Falk are playing “bad cop” to his “good cop.”
They sound more like Abbas’ fundamentalist enemies in Hamas-ruled Gaza, even though most would consider themselves secular leftists.
This is a cautionary tale, as Falk’s anti-Israeli political trajectory is also being repeated by other, lesser-known, academics, many of them now supporters of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, which seeks, according to its critics, to weaken, and perhaps eliminate, the Jewish state.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
