(JNS) The U.N. Human Rights Council announced the appointment of a new Special Rapporteur on Israel on April 1, a position that is a “mandate to discriminate,” according to the UN Watch NGO. Israel is the only country to which a permanent investigator has been assigned.
“Our position is that everything under the mechanism of Item 7, the special rapporteur, anything that unfairly singles out Israel, there is no point in engaging on those matters,” a spokesperson for the Israeli Mission to the United Nations in Geneva told JNS.
When asked if the mission has any dialogue or other contact with the special rapporteur, the answer from the spokesperson was a simple “no.”
Francesca Albanese of Italy will take on the post of special rapporteur; she was confirmed for the seat last Friday. Albanese, who has a lengthy, documented history of anti-Israel bias, holds a U.N. position that is supposed to be neutral and non-biased. Yet she has compared the Palestinian experience during and immediately after the Arab-initiated war against Israel of 1948 to the Holocaust.
“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,” Albanese said in a speech captured on video, in which she questioned her own objectivity on the matter.
On her application for the special rapporteur position, however, she answered “no” when asked whether she holds “any views or opinions that could prejudice the manner in which the candidate discharges the mandate.”
She added that Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian people was not a war between states, but a “colonial project that has turned into apartheid.” She has also accused Israel of committing “crimes against humanity.”
Albanese has worked on the Israeli-Palestinian issue for much of her career. She previously worked at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a body ostensibly focused on Palestinian refugees, but one that has been cited by multiple countries for incitement toward Israel and its perpetuation of the conflict.
She co-authored a book, “Palestinian Refugees in International Law,” and has also spoken of her support of the Palestinian “Right of Return” to Israel, which would be a de facto destruction of the country as a Jewish state or safe haven for Jews.
