UNITED NATIONS – As Jewish organizations called for the dismissal of a United Nations human rights official, the U.N. distanced Secretary-General Annan from him and a report he is due to deliver today to the General Assembly.

The man at the center of the storm, John Dugard, is appointed by the Geneva-based human rights commissioner, and is a rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”

His latest report, which was leaked last week to the press, is an extremely harsh assessment of Israel’s anti-terrorist activities. “Israel’s defiance of international law poses a threat not only to the international legal order but to the international order itself,” he wrote. “This is no time for appeasement on the part of the international community.”

Israeli officials and Jewish organizations were indignant. “John Dugard has clearly demonstrated bias against the state of Israel by using his official position as a U.N. fact-finder to present his personal anti-Israel views,” said the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman.

Calling on Mr. Annan and Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, to “immediately dismiss” him, Mr. Foxman told The New York Sun that the bias might be affected partly by Mr. Dugard’s South African origins.

In his report, as well as in previous statements, Mr. Dugard makes numerous comparisons between Israel and the Apartheid regime. In the current report, expected to be delivered by Mr. Annan to the General Assembly today, he opines that Israel’s policies are “beyond the scope of apartheid law.”

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric noted that Mr. Dugard is appointed by the Human Rights Commissioner and not by Mr. Annan.

“He reports in his personal capacities and not on behalf of the U.N.,” Mr. Dujarric told the Sun. The fact that the Secretary-General transmits such reports to the assembly “does not in any way imply a judgment by him on their content,” he added, stressing that Mr. Annan’s positions are “reflected in his [own] statements as well as of those of his special coordinator for the Middle East.”

But Mr. Foxman argued that the ultimate responsibility is Mr. Annan’s. Mr. Dugard “didn’t write a novel,” Mr. Foxman said. “He wrote an official document, which he is paid for to prepare to make judgments on.” His salary, he added, is paid by the U.N.

Mr. Dugard is only the latest Human Rights Commission “rapporteur” to raise the ire of pro-Israeli organizations. The Geneva-based organization “U.N. Watch” recently reported to Ms. Arbour that Jean Ziegler, a rapporteur on the right to food, has “repeatedly abused his mandate by unfairly singling out Israel.”

Mr. Ziegler, a Swiss university professor, has been accused by “U.N. Watch” and others of attempting to advance a political career by bashing Israel, even calling for an economic boycott against the Jewish state. In his latest report Mr. Dugard doubts the merits of the Israeli reasoning for the barrier it is building around the West Bank. Instead of fending off would-be suicide bombers, Mr. Dugard suggests, there is a “more convincing explanation.”

The real reasons behind the erection of what he calls “the Wall,” he writes, are “the incorporation of settlers within Israel, the confiscation of Palestinian land, [and] the encouragement to Palestinians to leave their lands and homes by making life intolerable for them.”

Israeli diplomats told the Sun they were concerned that the report would add to the pile of anti-Israeli resolutions at the General Assembly in the wake of last June’s opinion from the Hague-based International Court of Justice that the security fence is illegal and should be dismantled.

Mr. Dugard’s report “has nothing to contribute to any serious discussion about finding the right balance between security and human rights,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry legal adviser Daniel Taub told the Associated Press.

Mr. Dugard is especially dismissive of Prime Minister Sharon’s disengagement plan. “Israel does not plan to relinquish its grasp on the Gaza Strip,” he wrote. “It plans to retain ultimate control over Gaza by controlling its borders, territorial sea, and airspace.”

In Israel, however, some settlers are concerned that Mr. Sharon indeed intends to evacuate Gaza settlements, and, according to numerous recent statements, some settlers might use extreme violence to prevent it.

“I am very fearful of the incitement, of the harsh things that are being said,” the head of the dovish opposition Labor party, Shimon Peres, told the Israeli daily Maariv yesterday. “I fear that someone will try to assassinate the prime minister.”

Responding to statements by rightwing rabbis urging soldiers to disobey orders by the army to evacuate settlers, the defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, said in a speech that such disobedience would “tear us apart, and that is exactly what our enemies want.”