Executive Summary

Commissioned by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) from the authors, Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, but withdrawn by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on March 16, 2017.

Professor Falk (LLB, Yale University; SJD, Harvard University) is currently a research fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice Emeritus at Princeton University. From 2008 through 2014, he served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. He is author or editor of some 60 books and hundreds of articles on international human-rights law, Middle East politics and environmental justice.

Dr. Tilley (MA and PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison; MA, Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University) is professor of political science at Southern Illinois University. From 2006 to 2011, she served as chief research specialist in the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa and from 2007 to 2010 led its Middle East Project, which undertook a two-year study of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. She is author of The One-State Solution (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005) and editor of Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Pluto Press, 2012).