UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese Takes On Israel

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestinian Territories, Mme Francesca Albanese, has called on the UN General Assembly on Wednesday to consider suspending Israel’s membership due to its repeated violations of international law and its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. Albanese averred that Israel’s impunity has enabled it to “become a serial violator of international law.”

Albanese is convinced that by suspending Israel’s credentials at the UN will kick start an end to its violations and render it a ‘pariah’ state. A first step will have to be its unlawful occupation of Palestinian lands.

The very formation of Israel’s formation came at Palestinians like a political avalanche with a colossal penalty for the Palestinians, a cost that remains unattended to and remains at the root of the problem 76 years after Israel’s creation.

Since the 1967 occupation things have further worsened. Palestinians have faced systematic segregation and repression. Albanese knows that Israel’s so-called ‘Greater Israel’ policies aim to diminish Palestinian identity in the region.

Albanese highlights that 75% of Gaza’s population consists of refugees originally from what is now called ‘Israel’. She categorized this huge mishap as owing to colonial blunders and unilateralism, lack of vision, and absence of justice symbolizing what she characterized as Israel’s “original sin”.

Western powers maneuvered and abetted the colonial mishap out of guilt for their role in the holocaust. This leaves the world wondering why the Palestinians are punished for the holocaust – a western creation.

It is clearly not just about what took place on October 7th 2023. Western foreign companies, including European ones, are helping Israel loot Gaza’s natural gas reserves. Western neo-colonialist powers remain what they always were. This pillage and plunder must cease. So, the war is about extermination of people and loot of resources. In the final analysis, those who embezzle and plunder are equally war criminals.

Israel is taking the war forward as outlined in its own plans and long-term goals of a blueprint for Israel’s plan forced displacement, destruction, and actions to complete their ongoing genocide, in Gaza. Albanese has seen through the long-term, intentional, state-organized forced displacement and replacement of Palestinians, in pursuance of the Israeli attacks’ escalation since October 7, 2023. Albanese’s findings primarily lay bare the genocidal intent behind Israel’s expansion. It is now an unwritten and sustained policy of ethnic cleansing aimed at removing Palestinian presence from Palestine.

In fact many reliable accounts imply that Israel knew about Hamas’ plan from the day it was hatched a year before October 7th, 2023. Israel has perfected the art of creating facts-on-the-ground. Israel sought to cover up their manipulations with a mountain of lies. They needed a serious enough pretext to hit back at Gaza.

The Hannibal Directive was one of these, ordered immediately after the Hamas strike. The Directive had one sole purpose - to issue commands by the Israeli military to prevent the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by using heavy fire to stop the abductors – even if that may harm or kill those being taken. It has been used during Israeli operations during the past two decades but has come under scrutiny since the 7 October attacks and Israel's war on Gaza.

An investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in July 2024 reported that the Israeli army used the directive when Hamas attacked southern Israel. More than 250 soldiers, civilians and foreign nationals were also kidnapped and taken into Gaza following the attack. But use of the directive, it is alleged, resulted in the deaths of Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Albanese's role as Special Rapporteur has gained high opinion among political realists who now view the political reality applying radical analytical frameworks. By contrast, Albanese’s statements and reports have rankled and drawn irrational outrage from Western governments. As she plans to call on Canadian leaders, the Zionist lobby is up in arms. They have branded her as antisemitic. They are influencing Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister and Ambassador Bob Rae to overtly denounce Albanese and bar any interaction between her and people in Canada.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) in Canada (CIJA) wants Canadian authorities to take measures against her, even to the extent of denying her diplomatic immunity during her visit. They want her removed from her UN position as Special Rapporteur. CIJA has accused her of spreading harmful rhetoric by equating Israel’s crimes to those of Nazi Germany. Equating the holocaust and the genocide is increasingly viewed as an indisputable fact because many independent observers and Palestinians who have been left to watch the killings and destruction in Gaza see little or no difference between the holocaust and the ‘Gaza genocide’.

The International Court of Justice has unmistakably affirmed that Member States can also be found complicit if they aid and abet Israel’s actions. Albanese has taken the larger picture into account and has called out the legal consequences for third States for who fault in evading to prevent and punish the genocide.

The genocide convention obliges Third States to cease all financial, trade, investment and economic relations with Israel which support its unlawful occupation and apartheid. A complete embargo on the selling and transfer of arms, munitions and related equipment, has its foundations not only from the Court’s advisory opinion but also from the Genocide Convention.

The Genocide Convention defines genocide as the committing of certain acts “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” including killing members of or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Without question, Israel has debunked the provisions of the Genocide Convention.

Diana Buttu, a lawyer specializing in negotiations, international law, and international human rights law, highlighted “the axis of genocide”, which includes Israel, United States and some European States that are pushing for its continuation, supporting it or funding it, and denounced the international community’s failure to speak in one voice. She drew attention to the cases of Israeli soldiers uploading the evidence of their crimes on social media, adding that no one has been prosecuted for these crimes. “Imagine what it is like to live in a society where this is considered to be okay,” she queries.

At the UN, delegates articulated exasperation over the worsening of the war in Gaza and reiterated the call for immediate ceasefire, accountability and a long-term resolution to the Palestinian question. Many countries called for a stop to the “collective murder” of Palestinians. Others underscored the importance of adherence to international law, including UN resolutions and opinions of the International Court of Justice.

They also expressed solidarity with all UN entities and mechanisms that are working in and around Palestine issues, and urged for allocation of sufficient resources to prop up their mandates. Their efforts are vital, not only for telling the story of Gaza, but more importantly for ensuring accountability”. A speaker from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement dyed the complicity of third States, institutions and corporations, adding that funding, trading and investing in Israel is synonymous to normalizing genocide.

Israel is waging an open war on the UN. Despite massive genocidal crimes, it is shielded by the United States’ in the form of a veto anytime Israel faces a tough predicament in the Security Council.

Francesca Albanese asserted that Palestinians in Gaza have never before endured “a chapter darker” than the past year, with tens of thousands of civilian deaths, 902 families entirely wiped out, thousands crushed to death under rubble and 2 million forcibly displaced and hunted down by the Israeli occupation forces. With northern Gaza turning into the epicenter of the onslaught, those left are facing starvation and must choose between ethnic cleansing and submission to colonial domination with tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

In the midst of hopelessness and despair, political realists assert in no uncertain terms that regardless of gloomy days, the prospects for justice have never been more pressing. The liberals, who often make expedient choices, want a cease-fire and talks, at which Western mediators will thrust down an unequal treaty on the Palestinians. Palestinians are not looking for another Oslo where language of the document and intimidation in the form of major western presence gets the Palestinians to sign another immoral treaty a la Oslo. This might seem a contradiction in terms and could be dubbed as naïve by the gloomy Gus.

For those who are clear in their minds that justice and justice alone is the end goal of any negotiations, then it is imperative not to take Palestinian resilience as a permanent condition. Palestinians do not need western patronage to reject genocide. The West would look out for confining Israeli interests - at best to create a half-way-home and dump the Palestinians which allow keeping the stolen land and the unequal agreements to prevail.

Francesca Albanese addressed a UN committee on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in New York the day after she published her latest report alleging that Israel was not just committing war crimes or crimes against humanity in Gaza, but genocide. The UN should consider suspending Israel as a member state due to its continuing “genocide” against the Palestinians, the special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories asserted.

With this, Albanese has set the cat among the pigeons. Since her call for suspending Israel from the UN, there have been spurts of calls from thinkers, advocacy groups, writers and activists on this subject among those who subscribe to the idea of sanctions and a time-bound removal of Israel from the United Nations. Governments in the West and even in the Global South will, first and last, look out for their interests. The street is another story altogether, united by the call to justice.

Diana Buttu, Member of the Board of Commissioners - Independent Commission for Human Rights of Palestine, has reported that damage to Gaza is so grave that it would take more than 18 years at the least just to remove the rubble in Gaza. While almost 10 percent of the Strip’s population has been killed, injured, or gone missing. 80 per cent has been subjected to some type of evacuation, with Israel treating Palestinians like a human pinball.

The international court of justice has said there is a plausible case that genocide is being committed, but has not gone any further. A group of 300 UK Arab figures – including Sabah al-Mukhtar, the leader of the Arab Lawyers network, and Adnan Hmidan, the vice-president of the Palestinian Forum in the UK – in a joint statement accused Foreign Secretary Lammy of disregarding “international law standards which classify systematic targeting and destruction of civilians and the obstruction of humanitarian aid as clear indicators of genocidal intent. Lammy holds the line that the term ‘genocide is inappropriate, explaining genocides were normally associated with mass killings, such as in Rwanda. This is a combination of colonial mischief at work coupled with delaying tactics.

Albanese calls on all to stand up to human rights principles without fear or interests. No other country, other than Israel, has defied so many UN resolutions for so long. In her report, Albanese claimed: “Israel has pursued a pattern of conduct deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.” She emphatically urges all nations to consider suspending the credentials of Israel as a member state of the UN… I understand the sensitivity because none of you have clean hands when it comes to human rights.”

The historian Illan Pappe raises the big question for the Jewish State in his article titled, ‘The collapse of Zionism”, Pappe explores how, after more than 120 years since its inception, the US, Britain will finally be compelled to come to terms with the reality that they cannot impose a Jewish State in an Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern country.

They can stick by it and will eventually face the prospect of collapse. Pappe foresees a ‘slow process of self-disintegration’ before a relentless momentum brings down the edifice rapidly. For those who envision a new future, are convinced that in the next several years, settler colonialism will have to shut down, accept the rights of the indigenous people and co-exist with them in a “liberated and decolonized Palestine”

Ranjan Solomon is a peace activist. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.