UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese, October 27, 2022 (Photo: Screenshot)

Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur “on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967,” does not believe in history. She doesn’t even pretend to believe in it.

She also doesn’t believe in facts or reality, which explains her latest report, released on Monday to the United Nations, which reads more like a dystopian fantasy novel than a supposedly serious, objective study commissioned by an international world body.

The report is a laundry list of falsehoods and libels against the Jewish state, which could easily have been written up by Israel’s worst enemies. And while a report such as this is hardly a surprise, coming from someone with a long documented and radicalized anti-Israel agenda accompanied by a healthy dose of antisemitic tropes, it nevertheless cements the UN’s continual descent into the abyss of absurdity, where the rules of critical analysis have long since been abandoned.

When you further consider that Albanese’s position is supposedly that of an objective neutral observer, well, it seems the circus has truly come to town.

As is typical among those who wish to attack Israel, the report is laced with the kind of emotive language designed to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state.

She refers to Israel as a “settler-colonial,” state implying that Jews have no ties to the land under their sovereign control. This is a deliberate ploy, as it portrays Israel as a foreign entity and Israelis as having stolen the land and subjugating the local residents in some kind of colonial project from the 19th century.

More importantly, by entirely erasing the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel — a connection that goes back almost 4,000 years — she is deliberately promoting a revisionist view of the world that any serious and credible student of history would or should emphatically dismiss, and which existentially challenges the historic bases of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This very much falls in line with other UN organizations like UNESCO or the General Assembly, which often pass resolutions ignoring Jewish history.

Using this falsehood as a basis, the report further asserts that Palestinians have “the right to resist an illegal foreign occupier.” By making this statement, she is effectively endorsing and encouraging terrorism, which again is not a surprise, as she made a speech in 2022 to a Hamas organized conference, telling the attendees, “you have the right to resist this occupation.”

As recently as last week, she gave an interview on Australian radio in which she stated the very presence of Israel in the West Bank is illegal, and again saying that any “resistance” to the “illegal occupation” is legitimate and acceptable. She notably refused to use the word “terrorism,” using instead the euphemism of “resistance.”

At the same time, she maintains that Israel has no right to self-defense, stating that the “unlawfulness of the Israeli occupation negates any legitimate title to exercise authority with respect to Gaza or the West Bank, including east Jerusalem.”

Put simply, what she clearly appears to say is that Palestinians have the right to kill Israelis in terrorist actions, but Israelis don’t have the right to resist those activities.

Her charge that the “the entire occupied territory” is an “open-air prison” is also demonstrably false. Israel left Gaza entirely in 2005, withdrawing all military and civilian personnel, including uprooting entire Jewish communities, yet Albanese still considers the territory to be under “military occupation” and that Israel still has obligations as “the occupying power.”

Bizarrely, she even suggests that Israel’s efforts at facilitating a level of Palestinian self-rule have added a layer of repression, stating that since the signing of the Oslo Accords, Palestinian authorities have “contributed to stifling Palestinians’ rights and freedoms.”

And of course, in what has become standard, she accuses Israel of practicing “apartheid,” and calls for the International Criminal Court to enable Israelis to be put on trial for the crimes of apartheid.

The entire report is effectively a hate manifesto, accusing Israel of a series of appalling crimes including torture and sexual abuse. It is characterized by a complete lack of context in regard to historical, political and military events, existing in a bubble separate from reality.

The UN’s own rules state that a Special Rapporteur has to be someone who is both neutral and independent, but Francesca Albanese has proven once again, as she has many times before, that she is incapable of serving in any kind of objective capacity in regard to Israel and the Palestinians, and this report does nothing for a lasting or peaceful resolution to the conflict. It only continues to fan the flames of hatred even further.

Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).