“Palestine is a revealer,” says Francesca Albanese. The Italian lawyer and academic, who is the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territory, is on a videocall from her home in Tunisia and is speaking about US policy towards Israel and Palestine.
The second Trump administration is “wildly and fastly contributing to the dismantlement of the world order that was established after World War II, in the sense it is acting manifestly above and against the law,” Albanese says.
“The US has always been behind the legal policies that Israel has enacted against the Palestinians: the apartheid, the forever occupation and now the genocide. However, never before Trump was the forced displacement of Palestinians announced as a foreign policy goal.
“The system might not resist this huge affront – this huge assault – unless all the other members of the United Nations stand united against this. It’s really the united people of the world against the government of the United States of America.”
Albanese has published widely on the forced displacement of Palestinians and the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa). In May 2022, she was the first woman to be appointed to the special rapporteur position, and was recently reappointed for a second three-year term. She has reported on the human rights situation in the land occupied by Israel (Gaza and the West Bank) since the Six-Day War in 1967. She and her team are volunteers.
Albanese has emerged as a prominent critic of the Israeli government. Last March she delivered a report to the UN in which she concluded there were “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met”. “One of the key findings,” she wrote, “is that Israel’s executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles [the ethical guidelines for conduct during armed conflict], subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimise genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.”
“A big challenge,” she says now, “is that Israel doesn’t allow me to enter the occupied Palestinian territory.”
Albanese grew up in Ariano Irpino, a mountainous town about a 90-minute drive inland from Naples, in the south of Italy. “We are the outcome of our initial endowment,” she says. Growing up in what was a conservative society, in which women and men were not treated equally, “you have to prove yourself all the time and hold your ground”.
The Italy in which she was raised was “plagued by abuses of power, corruption and criminality”, she says. “I was just a young adolescent when the Mafia was killing judges, lawyers [and] journalists for speaking out. I’ve come to realise that the struggle against the Mafia has marked me and my sense of justice very much.”
How are member states, including Ireland, respecting international law if they continue to maintain economic trading relations and contribute to the transfer of weapons?
Since she began her work with the UN she has become a target of pro-Israel voices on social media and in the press. The Times of Israel, in an article last month covering Albanese’s extension at the UN, described her as “anti-Israel” with “a history of anti-Semitism and vitriol against the Jewish state”.
The Jerusalem Post, which runs a “Hate Monitor” to track “anti-Semitism running rampant around the world”, suggested Albanese had committed “blood libel” after Albanese said the Israeli army was “rotten to its core”. She was responding to an article that contained an anonymous report that an Israeli soldier saw his commander break a four-year-old Palestinian boy’s arm and leg with his hands.
Albanese has rejected accusations of anti-Semitism and condemned the actions of Hamas on October 7th, 2023. She describes the terrorist group’s actions that day as “a tragic and awful day for all Israelis”.
About 1,200 people were killed and 253 hostages abducted, according to Israel. The October 7th attacks have been used “as a pretext to annihilate Gaza”, Albanese says.
More than 52,000 Palestinians have since been killed in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry says.
Albanese has concluded that “there is an ethnic cleansing [through] means of bombs, starvation and pogroms”.
Over the last two months, Israel has blocked supplies and aid flowing into Gaza, resulting in half a million people now being at risk of famine among a population already starved of food, water, electricity and medicine. The blockade, which Israel says is in place to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages it took during the October 7th attacks, has been combined with a renewed military operation by the Israel Defense Forces inside Gaza, with the intention of staying indefinitely.
For me it’s about human rights. I find that reason of justice and respecting human rights as a pulsating light inside of me. It doesn’t let me rest knowing that there are people who are being slaughtered
The escalating situation has, in Albanese’s view, prompted a crisis of international law.
Albanese rejects claims that the UN lacks power on the world stage: “It’s not what you have, it’s how you use what you have that makes a difference in this world. Even the people in Gaza are not powerless. Look at them: they continue to impose their story over the lies of the most powerful and richest states in the world, over the biggest and strongest military powers, and their voice is still heard. One Palestinian from Gaza once told me: ‘The Palestinians in Gaza know they are dying so that Palestine will live.’ And he was not talking about fighters; he was talking about people resisting with their own pride and dignity.”
She mentions Irish woman Mary Manning, the former Dunnes Stores worker who, in 1984, sparked a global movement when she followed her union’s direction by refusing to handle South African fruit at a checkout in Dublin. “The global opposition to the apartheid South Africa started with an Irish girl in her 20s.”
[ How 11 striking Irish workers helped to fight apartheidOpens in new window ]
Ireland officially recognised the state of Palestine in May of last year. Last week Taoiseach Micheál Martin accused Israel of a war crime over blocking aid from entering Gaza, while foreign ministers of six European countries, including Tánaiste Simon Harris, signed a joint letter expressing “grave concern” about Israeli plans for a prolonged occupation.
During a two-day visit to Ireland in February, Albanese praised Ireland for joining South Africa in the genocide case before the International Court of Justice. She also referred to Ireland and Spain seeking a review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, adding that the agreement must be rescinded.
What more, in her view, should Ireland do?
“I’m not asking Ireland on its own,” she says, “but it seems every state shies away from their responsibilities because no one feels strong enough to abide by the law. We are being pulled by our hair into international lawlessness, which is very dangerous for all of us. So, what I expect Ireland to do is follow the law. Recognising the state of Palestine is huge, and providing the International Court of Justice [ICJ] with its own assessment of the legality of the occupation was huge. But now the ICJ has made its conclusion that the occupation is unlawful and must be dismantled – totally and unconditionally. And meanwhile no one can aid and assist the illegal occupation. So, the question is: how are member states, including Ireland, respecting international law if they continue to maintain economic trading relations and contribute to the transfer of weapons?”
Is she investigating any companies operating in Ireland with links to the Israeli economy, something she calls “an economy of occupation and genocide”? “Maybe,” she responds.
Would restricting US military access to Shannon Airport – a regular thoroughfare for aircraft on their way to the Middle East – be an act of implementing international law? “Yes,” she says. “With Shannon Airport, there is no transparency. No one among all the civil society actors, the academics and members of parliament I met [in Ireland in February] felt all right with the lack of transparency around Shannon Airport.”
Albanese speaks about faith: “I’ve always found myself closer to an atheist than anything else,” she says, “but probably I’m not. In the past [number of] months I have rediscovered my Christian roots. All the preaching by priests and nuns about Jesus Christ have somehow made their way inside me.
“You know, Jesus Christ was a revolutionary,” she says. “Jesus Christ was not preaching about change – he was the change. He was such an element of rupture.” She references the Biblical story of Jesus flipping tables and expelling money-changers from the Temple of Jerusalem.
“For me it’s about human rights,” she says. “I find that reason of justice and respecting human rights as a pulsating light inside of me. It doesn’t let me rest knowing that there are people who are being slaughtered ... We need to unite for something that doesn’t concern us as an individual ... I think this is where human beings are struggling today.”
A two-state solution appeared within reach when Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation engaged in discussions in the US in 2000, during the dying days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, but such an arrangement appears farther away than ever before. How could two sovereign states possibly emerge from this quagmire?
“I cannot predict what will happen,” says Albanese. “Most of us are in a really deep sleep, and we got numb by the comfort – by all the things we can buy – and we are dependent on a system that needs us. We need to understand that if we don’t stop it, we will be the next victims.”
