This July 9, the Trump administration targeted Francesca Albanese for sanctions. Executive Order 14203 listed the forty-eight-year-old UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel as a “specially designated national,” thereby forbidding US citizens and companies to have any dealings with her. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated. . . . We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.”
That same month, the eighth edition of Albanese’s 2023 book, J’Accuse, appeared. Only available in Italian, it presents her indictment of the ongoing Israeli war crimes in Gaza, leading up to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Its title comes from a famous 1898 newspaper article by the French novelist Émile Zola. He called for “the truth above all” in the case of the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely accused of treason. Albanese makes the same demand for the truth about today’s genocide in Gaza.
Trained in international law and human rights at the University of Pisa and at the de-colonialist seedbed of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Albanese lived in Palestine from 2010 to 2012. She had long written extensively on the Israel-Palestine question, most notably Palestinian Refugees in International Law, together with Lex Takkenberg. The appointment to the UN Special Rapporteur position in May 2022 brought her into daily contact with the worsening situation in Gaza. She had exceptional opportunities to gain insight into the crises leading up to October 7.
In J’Accuse, Albanese intelligently frames the Gaza war in its proper historical context going back to the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, when the British government announced its support of a “national home for the Jewish people.” She focuses on the period beginning in…
Auteur: Richard Drake
