The new U.N. Special Rapporteur on Palestinian issues has justified violence against Israelis for the second time in her short stint.
In a June 9 interview with the Italian magazine Altreconomia, Francesca Albanese claimed that “Israel says ‘resistance equals terrorism,’ but an occupation requires violence and generates violence,” adding that the “Palestinians have no other room for dissent than violence.”
Albanese also repeated long-running accusations of Israeli apartheid and suggested that Israelis holding dual citizenship could be tried for crimes in the countries of their secondary citizenship if they live in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, or any other location deemed “occupied Palestinian territory.”
Albanese, a lawyer, also told an Italian national television station in May that “Palestinian violence is inevitable because the right to exist of the Palestinian people has been denied for 55 years—almost three generations.”
Albanese has accused Israel several times of apartheid, genocide and war crimes, and has equated Palestinian suffering with the Holocaust. In 2019, Albanese addressed an event by an organization linked to the terrorist Hamas group that controls the Gaza Strip.
The U.N. Human Rights Council announced the appointment of Albanese in April. She recently replaced Canadian Michael Lynk, who, despite his mandate of impartiality, was recently awarded the “Order of the Star of Jerusalem” by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas after publishing countless anti-Israel reports during his tenure.
Albanese recently started a six-year term as Special Rapporteur in a position whose mandate hasn’t changed since being established nearly 20 years ago.
On her application for the job, Albanese denied holding “any views or opinions that could prejudice the manner in which [she’d] discharge the mandate.” Albanese herself admitted last year that was untrue, saying that her “deeply held personal views” on the Palestinian issue “could compromise my objectivity.”
Among her notable past statements, she has said that “just as tragic, terrible, unspeakable is the tragedy that befell the Jewish people in the [Holocaust], so for the Palestinians, the nakba [“catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment] represents the crumbling of the connective tissue of a people,” in comparing the experience of Arabs during and immediately after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence to the Holocaust.
