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In a new report submitted at the recent session of the UN General Assembly, the organization’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, described the policy of Israel towards the Palestinians as “genocide as colonial erasure”.
On Wednesday, during a press conference in which she answered questions about the report, Albanese recommended suspending Israel’s membership in the United Nations until the country’s leadership brings its policies in line with international law and the provisional measures granted against it by the International Court of Justice.
Over an hour’s discussion, she also claimed that the impunity granted to Israel by “a small number of influential states” had allowed it to become a “serial violator of international law,” and called on states to formally label Israel as an “apartheid state”.
She said the first thing Israel should do is comply with the provisional members granted by the court.
“The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to withdraw, unconditionally, totally, rapidly as possible its military presence, dismantling the colonies, stopping the seizing the exploitation of natural resources on the occupied Palestinian territory and making also reparations,” she said.
Albanese expressed that it was with reluctance that she took on the role of “chronicler of a genocide,” and in her opening address to the reporters, it was clear she was deeply affected by the work, both by documenting intent to commit a genocide, which must have involved witnessing human suffering of the worst degree, but also by her obvious disillusionment by efforts at UN to try and at least interrupt, if not force Israel to cease its actions altogether.
Genocide, minions, and intent
“Genocide is a complex and insidious crime; proving destructive intent is an onerous task—yet not when it is so ostentatious,” Ms. Albanese wrote on X.
As Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Albanese plays the role essentially as the chief fact finder for the United Nations General Assembly. Her report is full of other reports—hundreds of references detailing what she describes as the complex “composite” nature of the crime of genocide and of establishing genocidal intent.
“When direct evidence of intent is unavailable, inferring intent requires a complex assessment of facts, statements, and circumstances,” she writes. This was similar to the approach that South Africa took on the floor of the ICJ when it won its case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza—that unconnected, genocidal statements made by leaders were being made into policies by battlefield commanders and lawmakers, before being acted upon by soldiers and administrators.
In her report, which includes material dating back to 1967, Albanese describes the formation of the state of Israel as deeply disrupting to the Palestinian national identity. They have been increasingly segregated, suppressed, and unrecognized since then, with the latest genocidal increase in violence being only the continuation of policies that were already in place “to destroy the people as such” which she claims “could not be more evident”.
“The violence that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinians post-7 October is not happening in a vacuum, but is part of a long-term intentional, systematic, State organized forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians,” the introduction of the new report states, “This trajectory risks causing irreparable prejudice to the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine. Member States must intervene now to prevent new atrocities that will further scar human history”.
She recognized that this new, accelerated chapter of the genocide of the Palestinians was preceded by a Hamas attack, but pointed out that lockstep escalations of killing, conquest, torture, and destruction of infrastructure are going on in the West Bank, where no such attack originated from.
“How do we explain the over 700 Palestinians killed in the West Bank?” she said in her opening statement. “We see a total collapse of the international order, the order that was constructed on the ‘Never Again’ that was promised after the Second World War”.
Among the aspects of her report and her time in Palestine that she seemed exceptionally keen to communicate to the reporters was the shielding of Israel by a “small cohort of member states”.
“Israel is by no means the only state that violates international law, and it’s not even the only state that violates the right to self-determination of a people, but it’s surely unique in the protractedness of its conduct and the fact that Israel has never faced any consequences”.
There is a small cohort of states, she said, who are like “an army of minions at work” reproducing material meant to distract citizens of member states from what’s happening in Gaza, which she said should have ended several times in the past, but which failed to manifest because of the influence of these states that “nurture the hubris that leads Israeli conduct as we speak”. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Francesca Albanese answers questions at the United Nations on October 31 PC: UN Media / screengrab.
