Francesca’s Colonialism |
Francesca Albanese has emerged as the UN’s loudest activist, not because she has uncovered anything new, but because she applies a single academic framework to every conflict she addresses. Her method is simple. History is reduced to two roles, colonizer and colonized, and once those labels are assigned, the verdict follows automatically. Israel is cast as the settler-colonial aggressor, Palestinians as the indigenous victims, Europe as the ever-present imperial engine behind it all, and the United States, “subjugated by the Jewish lobby,” in her words, and under Trump, merely saying “out loud” what Israel commands, as the muscle that makes it possible.
And so, suddenly, she feels she has the mandate to dress the oldest national liberation movement in history in the uniform of its persecutors.
In an international environment predisposed to see Israel through a colonial lens, Albanese’s arguments gain traction that they would never earn on evidentiary grounds alone. Remove the academic jargon and the stock villains, and the structure collapses under the weight of the history she chooses not to confront.
She frequently invokes global examples of indigenous dispossession, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and First Nations, to situate Palestinians within a universal narrative of colonial injustice. The word indigenous is the keystone of her entire framework, remove it, and the colonial analogy falls apart.
Yet for one people, in one land, Albanese never uses the word at all.
In all of her work, she has never once acknowledged the documented, continuous, archaeological, linguistic, and historical connection of the Jewish people to that land. Not a footnote. Not a caveat. Not a subordinate clause. The omission is too consistent to be accidental.
But it is not merely an omission. She has answered the question herself.
In her book When the World Sleeps, she recalls a walk near the Colosseum with the late Israeli historian Alon Confino. Walking past monuments built by the very empire that conquered Judea, she asked him: “Don’t you believe that European Jews went to Palestine because they had nowhere else to go, and not because they really felt they had a connection with that land?” The Jewish connection to the land, she writes, seemed “a bit flat” to her.
This is not silence. It is a verdict, delivered casually, steps from the Forum, near stone carved by the same civilization that destroyed the Second Temple, enslaved the Jewish population of Judea, and renamed the province to sever a people from their own history. It is almost too precise to be accidental.
This matters because the Jewish connection to Judea is not a matter of religious belief or nationalist assertion. It is among the most........