report by Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine.
By Dina Rovner, Legal Advisor at UN Watch
Introduction
UN Palestine rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s first report to the Human Rights Council proves exactly why she should never have been appointed to the position in the first place, as we warned the Council prior to her appointment in March 2022. Albanese is incapable of serving as a neutral and independent UN expert for anything involving the Palestinians, as UN rules require, and as she herself acknowledged prior to being picked for the job.
Her report accuses Israel of the worst crimes, using academic jargon like carceral continuum and open-air panopticon, and is characterized by a complete absence of historical, political, and military context, omission of any countervailing facts, and denial that an Israeli-Palestinian conflict even exists.
In Albanese’s world view, Israel is an evil colonial regime and the settlements are its colonies-an Israeli tool to “subjugate” and “dispossess” the Palestinians and to prevent them from realizing their “inalienable right to self-determination.” (Paras 96-98). This is a complete distortion which denies the historical rights of the Jewish people in Israel and ignores Palestinian intransigence. Ironically, the colonial paradigm does to the Jewish people exactly what Albanese accuses Israel of doing to the Palestinians-it effectively negates the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in Israel by characterizing them as alien conquerors. In fact, Jews have continuously resided in the Land of Israel since Biblical times and there are numerous Jewish holy sites and archaeological remnants throughout the Land of Israel, including in the West Bank. Jews over thousands of years have directed their daily worship towards the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the Temple of Solomon and that of Herod, fervently praying to return.
In her report, Albanese stresses the need to “urgently” end Israel’s “illegal occupation,” which she asserts “cannot be remedied” (Paras. 5 and 98). However, she never discusses any realistic options for how the occupation could be ended, such as through a negotiated peace agreement which would result in agreed upon borders and two sovereign states living peacefully side by side. Even worse, Albanese denigrates the past peace attempts known as the Oslo Accords as a continuation of Israeli evil for adding “a layer of repression to Palestinian life under occupation” (Para. 11).
Instead, Albanese places all the blame on Israel, makes unilateral demands only of Israel and conveniently omits any discussion of Palestinian culpability for the current conflict. The report does not mention that the Palestinians have rejected every single peace offer ever put on the table, which would have given them an independent state, dating back to the 1947 UN Partition Plan and before.
It ignores the five-year terror campaign known as the second intifada which the Palestinians launched against Israel in 2000 to avoid having to resolve final status issues in the Oslo Accords-which would have led to a Palestinian state. Indeed, the report contains no information about Palestinian terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians at all. It’s hard to take Albanese’s claims of “urgency” seriously when her report does nothing to encourage the Palestinians to come to the negotiating table but rather completely disincentivizes them by demonizing only Israel as a criminal, apartheid state and calling for international legal prosecutions against Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Ironically, Albanese also contradicts her own claim that the occupation “cannot be remedied” (Para. 98) when she offers at least three different ways for Israel to “remedy” the situation (Para. 101) in her Recommendations.
Key Points
1. Conclusions First, Facts Later
The agenda of this report clearly is to feed into the Palestinian campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel in the international arena as an apartheid state that commits a litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians. Alleged crimes delineated in the report include institutionalized discrimination, enforced disappearance, unlawful deprivation of liberty, denial of the right to a fair trial, deportation, and apartheid. According to Albanese, Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians are so terrible that they “challenge the very foundations of the international legal order.” (Para. 103).
Albanese knows that to establish a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute certain elements must be fulfilled (Paras. 22-25). Therefore, she weaves the buzz words of these elements into her report even though they don’t really fit and are conclusory. Therefore, in the very first sentence of the introduction Albanese states that the report will look at “widespread and systematic arbitrary deprivation of liberty in occupied Palestinian territory,” and then she concludes In Paragraph 94 that “Palestinians have endured widespread and systematic arbitrary deprivations of liberty” for generations. In her conclusion, Albanese also refers to “Israel’s state policy of domination of the Palestinians as-a-people enforced through beyond-prison confinement.” (Para. 97). Moreover, throughout the report, Albanese uses key words and phrases like “domination and oppression,” “persecution,” “institutionalized discrimination,” “subjugation,” “racial domination,” etc.
