In reacting to the most pressing human rights issue of our age, there exists a duality.
For much of the Western world, modern history cannot exist without the Holocaust. It gives context to everything; it continues to underpin the West’s permissive attitude towards Israel and explain an internal guilt which drives such an attitude.
For the rest of the world, however, if Palestine doesn’t live, we ourselves don’t live.
This duality, however, is a self-enforced one, a dichotomous illusion. The two feelings of being are actually both underpinned by the sanctity of human life and the abhorrence of state-sponsored genocide. As such they are as two strands of hair braided together. Yet, since 7 October they have been ripped apart to the extent that we are grotesquely asked to view them as mutually exclusive. They are not.
For the rest of the world, the Palestinian issue now stands at the centre of all struggles worldwide. A life without Palestine would be so traumatic because the freedoms we thought were enjoined to all of us – the freedoms to think, to say, to be treated as equals – would actually then be proved to have been a mirage. A mirage in which grand phrases such as international justice and universal values are hollow when in practice they are selectively applied to one group over another. When one group is so shockingly being privileged over another. When murder and starvation of children is somehow justified.
For Francesca Albanese there is no such duality. Growing up in a small town in southern Italy in the 1970s, the Holocaust and its lessons were ever present. “As a child, we always read and learnt about it. We learnt that along with Mussolini’s fascism, it was the benchmark of depravity,” she told an audience of 3,500 this weekend in Johannesburg. But there was a nuance to this, she subsequently came to learn. “We Europeans seeing the Holocaust as exceptional has undermined our ability to see the same patterns of depravity elsewhere.” Her role as the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine and the Occupied Territories has given her unique access to see the same patterns of dehumanisation and depravity being wrought upon Palestinians, while others couldn’t.
But while Albanese is, in a sense, a child of the Holocaust, she is also an advocate for the international rule of law. Sanctioned by the US for her unflinching stand against Israeli illegality, it was a deeply moving experience for her to come to South Africa at the invitation of the Nelson Mandela Foundation this past weekend.
First, she told us in the audience, there was the symbolism of visiting the home of apartheid to address crowds here on the world’s new apartheid.
Beyond that, she also drew inspiration from South Africa’s courageous stance of using international law to its fullest, in taking Israel to the highest court in the world on a charge of genocide. “When most of the world looked away, you didn’t. In so doing you proved again who you are – the heirs of Mandela,” she said to rapturous applause. Since South Africa’s complaint to the International Court of Justice, more than 25 countries have announced their intention to intervene, including Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Egypt and Turkey.
And third, she spoke with obvious pride that another distinguished South African legal luminary, Judge Navi Pillay – one of the world’s foremost authorities on genocide – had headed the UN Commission on Human Rights report looking into Israel’s conduct in Gaza these past two years. Methodically documenting the evidence it had considered, the commission’s conclusion was stark – that Israel was committing the gravest of all international crimes, state-sponsored genocide.
Albanese is thus a fascinating figure – at a time when many see the abetting of genocide by the West as further evidence of the decay of an international liberal order it set up, she was at pains to stress that her struggles must always be situated within one of the cornerstones of that liberal order – the international rule of law. This probably explains a reverence which was on clear display when she spoke of South Africa’s interventions – for ironically it is Pretoria, rather than its opponents, that has made best use of the international law tools at countries’ disposal rather than try to bypass them.
Albanese’s visit to South Africa comes amid a formal ceasefire being in place. But the reality on the ground makes a mockery of the term, for no peace actually exists at present for Palestinians, either in Gaza or the West Bank, or for Arab Israelis in East Jerusalem due to continued Israeli belligerence. Instead, what we have is what was said of the 19th-century tsar, Alexander III, and his treatment of non-Russians within the Russian empire – yes, his reign was peaceful, but only as far as the grave is peaceful.
As Albanese pointed out, since the formal “ceasefire” just short of two weeks ago, more than 100 Gazans have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces, including unarmed children. In any other conflict this should be an astonishing figure, provoking global outrage and censure – except, of course, that as it relates to Palestinians, it isn’t. Palestinian deaths in detention continue, and Palestinian bodies returned from Israeli jails show clear evidence of torture. Albanese also reminded the audience that the UN has calculated that in the West Bank, 40,000 have been driven from their homes by marauding settlers since the war began – and that this has actually increased in severity over the past week as the olive season begins. As a New Yorker essay states, there is currently no peace in Gaza.
And this is why Albanese’s work is so important at this critical period. The danger now is that an unchecked Israel will still be provided with Western-made arms, under cover of a hollow ceasefire, to continue its campaign of genocide with impunity, and hope that the world’s cameras have moved on. Quite simply, that it will seek to return to what it has always been trying to do – making the visible, invisible.
The West has on several occasions since the World War 2 been guilty of sitting on the sidelines while mass violence and genocide have occurred. What makes Palestine unique is that their behaviour seems actually to be sanctioning it. Thus, in the very real danger of the visible being rendered invisible, let us hope that Albanese and people of her ilk, will continue to be brave enough to resist making it so. DM