On March 15, the United Nations published a report in which “scholarly inquiry” claimed to prove with “overwhelming evidence” that Israel was in fact an apartheid state. It was a breathtaking, heavy claim and one that got the attention of UN Secretary General António Guterres. By Friday, two days later, the report was removed from the UN’s official website and disavowed by the secretary general.

Condemnation of the report from the United States and Israel came swiftly. Daniel Danon, Israel’s UN ambassador, said, “The attempt to smear and falsely label the only true democracy in the Middle East by creating a false analogy is despicable and constitutes a blatant lie.” Nikki Halley, America’s ambassador, called it “anti-Israel propaganda.”

And yet, in the two days while the report remained on the UN’s website, it caused significant damage.

The Washington Post picked up the story and ran the headline “Is Israel an ‘Apartheid’ State?” The answer, apparently dogmatic, was that “This UN Report Says Yes.” The Independent told its readers that “Israel is imposing ‘apartheid regime’ on Palestinians,” according to a “UN agency.” Al Jazeera gloated that although the report was removed, the “questions raised … will become impossible to avoid.”

UN Under-Secretary General Rima Khalaf, who led the report, resigned after it was disavowed, saying she felt it was her duty to stick by her personal views. “We expected, of course, that Israel and its allies would put huge pressure on the secretary general of the UN so that he would disavow the report,” she told Agency France-Presse. In recognition of her “courage and support” of his people, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas awarded her with the Medal of the Highest Honor.

The report was commissioned by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (escwa), which represents 18 countries in the region. To those unfamiliar with the process, it would seem to be very official, weighty, representative of the entire region, and (with the most effective adjective of all) “scholarly.”

You can find “scholarly” treatises “proving” the necessity of using eugenics, that the Holocaust never happened, that the Earth is flat, that communism would have irresistible benefits, or pretty much anything else. Nevertheless, we turn to Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin for a defense, who argued in a National Review article that:

[The report] dismisses the obvious differences between what happened in South Africa—where a tiny white majority denied all rights to the black majority—and Israel, a Jewish-majority country where the Arab minority has full rights, including suffrage, representation, and equality under the law. It similarly considers irrelevant the fact that the standoff over the disputed territory of the West Bank is the result of Palestinian unwillingness to recognize Israel’s right to exist within any borders, stubbornly maintained through repeated refusals of peace offers that would have created a Palestinian state.

In reality, the report is merely the opinions of the two people who wrote it. Yes, two people. They also happen to be Americans: Richard Falk, a Princeton law professor emeritus, and Virginia Tilley, from the University of Southern Illinois. Falk is a 9/11 truther and was one of the many duped by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, where he wrote that Khomeini’s “entourage was uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.” Tilley’s book The One-State Solution suggests that Israel should give up its commitment to maintaining a Jewish-majority state.

When Democracy Now! interviewed Mr. Falk on the report, it brought up the fact that it had been commissioned by a number of overtly anti-Israel nations:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: … The membership of this agency, there are 18 Arab members, a number of whom don’t recognize Israel. So, do you think that that might raise questions about the legitimacy of the report?

RICHARD FALK: Well, all the—these Arab members of escwa did was to ask that such a report be prepared. And Virginia Tilley, professor at the University of Southern Illinois, and myself were asked to prepare this report on a contract basis. … And there is a kind of disclaimer that the UN—this UN commission made, that the report doesn’t necessarily represent even escwa’s views. It is the views of the two of us who prepared the report.

Thus, what looks like a comprehensive UN report (and don’t expect journalists to explain the disclaimer) was instead the escwa appointing two scholars, wholly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, to smear Israel with the accusation of apartheid. Even Falk admits it was just the views of “the two of us who prepared” it.

In the meantime, prestigious newspapers like the Washington Post run pieces that take the UN report at its word, and Palestinian propagandists gather more ammunition, accusing those who demanded that the report be taken down of covering up the truth.

Tobin continued, predicting the future uses of the report:

[Palestinians] unwillingness to make compromises will only be strengthened by a report that encourages them to regard Israel as having no rights whatsoever. They are likely to make Falk’s and Tilley’s findings the basis for renewed efforts to sue Israel in the International Criminal Court, as well as for renewed provocations in other UN bodies such as the Human Rights Council or even unesco, which in the past year has taken up measures that denied the historical Jewish ties to Jerusalem and some of Judaism’s holiest sites.

At the end of the day, a UN report that was pulled won’t be the straw that breaks Israel’s back. The UN, which is not an institution the Trumpet has praised much in the past, did the right thing in withdrawing it from its website. However, the damage is done. Al Jazeera is right to suggest the false analogy of Israel and South Africa will continue to haunt the Jews. Falk and Tilley’s “research” gives Israel’s enemies another bullet in their magazine.

In the March issue of the Trumpet magazine, we posed the question, “As united Jerusalem turns 50 … will it make it to 51?” See our answer from our Jerusalem correspondent in “City of Pieces.”