Adalah (funded by the NIF, Oxfam-Novib, Open Society Institute) and Al Haq (Ford Foundation, Diakonia, Norway, the Netherlands) were centrally involved in preparing a pseudo-academic publication, initiated by anti-Israel ideologue John Dugard, entitled “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel´s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.” Commissioned by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, which is funded by the South African government, the study falsely and tendentiously asserts that Israel’s “occupation of these territories has become a colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.”

Officials of Adalah and Al Haq, and Iain Scobbie of Diakonia’s IHL International Advisory Council, were the “principal contributors” and “contributing researchers,” and Hassan Jabareen (General Director, Adalah), Daphna Golan (Minerva Center at Hebrew University), Michael Sfard (lawyer for Yesh Din, Al Haq’s director, and Peace Now), and Gilbert Marcus (Diakonia’s IHL International Advisory Council) consulted on the document.

Contrary to the “academic” and “legal” claims of the authors, the report advances the Durban Strategy seeking to vilify and even criminalize Israel’s existence, and delegitimizing self-defense measures as “inhumane act[s] of apartheid…perpetrated in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another” (emphasis added). Both the underlying premise of the research, the attempt to turn the conflict – a political dispute – into one involving race, and the published conclusions are immoral and without basis in international law.