Francesca Albanese and the lonely road of defiance |
The UN special rapporteur investigating Gaza is sanctioned, blacklisted and treated as a criminal. The response reveals how power reacts when accountability is applied to the powerful.
Nice, France – it is a late November afternoon. I am driving to Genoa, Italy with Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. We are traveling to join striking dockworkers. The dockworkers call for a moratorium on weapons bound for Israel and a halt to the Italian government’s plans to increase military spending.
We speed past the inky waters of Baie des Anges on our right and the razor-backed French Alps on our left. Châteaus and clusters of houses with red-tiled roofs, shrouded in the fading light, are perched on the rolling hillsides. Palm trees line the seafront road.
Francesca – tall with flecks of grey in her hair and wearing large black-framed glasses and hoop earrings – is the bête noire of Israel and the United States. She was placed on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of the US Treasury Department – normally used to sanction those accused of money laundering or being involved with terrorist organisations – six days after the release of her report, From economy of occupation to economy of genocide.
The OFAC list – weaponised by the Trump administration to persecute Francesca and in clear violation of the diplomatic immunity granted to UN officials – prohibits any financial institution from having someone on the list as a client. A bank that permits someone on the OFAC list to engage in financial transactions is banned from operating in dollars, faces multimillion-dollar fines and is blocked from international payment systems.
In her report, Francesca lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.
The report, which includes a database of over 1,000 corporate entities that collaborate with Israel, demands these firms and institutions sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes. It describes “Israel’s forever-occupation” as “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech – providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability – while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.”
You can see my interview about the report with Francesca here.
Francesca, whose previous reports including _Gaza Genocide: a collective crime_ and _Genocide as colonial erasure_ along with her empassioned denunciations of Israel’s mass........