The UN should consider suspending Israel as a member state due to its continuing “genocide” against the Palestinians, the divisive special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories has said.
Francesca Albanese was speaking to a UN committee on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in New York the day after she published her latest report alleging that Israel was not just committing war crimes or crimes against humanity in Gaza, but a genocide.
“It is time to consider suspending the credentials of Israel as a member state of the UN,” she said. “I understand the sensitivity because none of you have clean hands when it comes to human rights.”
She said no other country had defied so many UN resolutions for so long.
In her report, Albanese claimed: “Israel has pursued a pattern of conduct ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’.”
She is a divisive UN rapporteur, and was prevented from holding a briefing at the US Congress this week. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, described her in a tweet as unfit for office, adding: “The United Nations should not tolerate antisemitism from a UN-affiliated official hired to promote human rights.”
Albanese said she was right to insist on the term “genocide”, adding: “Palestinians had experienced war crimes all their lives, but this was different. It is very important to understand why this is recognised as a genocide. In the same way as international community has failed to protect the victims of genocide in the case of the Jewish people in Europe and then Bosnians in former Yugoslavia and the Tutsi in Rwanda, in the same way we are failing the Palestinians.”
She accepted that determining a genocide is complex due to the need to prove intent, but she claimed Israel’s intent was the destruction of Palestinian life.
Her report claimed: “The focus should be on whether all the acts – eg starvation, torture, killing, forced displacement, extermination – considered together in their totality form a pattern of conduct indicative of genocidal intent.”
In her report, Albanese argued: “Genocide is not a crime only of mass killing, as specified in the convention itself. The genocidal act of ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’, for example, entails no killing at all.”
The term genocide has been routinely used by pro-Palestinian protesters, as well as by many Arab leaders. The international court of justice has said there is a plausible case that a genocide is being committed, but has not gone any further.
The leadership of the UK’s governing Labour party is facing a backlash from Britain’s pro-Palestinian Arab community over its refusal to describe the Israeli attacks in Gaza as a genocide.
At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Keir Starmer said: “I have never described what is going on in Gaza as genocide, but I do agree that all sides should comply with international law”. Earlier in the week the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said he thought the use of the term was inappropriate, explaining genocides were normally associated with mass killings, such as in Rwanda.
A group of 300 UK Arab figures – including Sabah al-Mukhtar, the leader of the Arab Lawyers network, and Adnan Hmidan, the vice-president of the Palestinian Forum in the UK – in a joint statement accused Lammy of disregarding “international law standards which classify systematic targeting and destruction of civilians and the obstruction of humanitarian aid as clear indicators of genocidal intent”.
Separately, the SNP MP Chris Law said in a letter to Lammy: “Your suggestion that the way people use terms such as annihilation, extermination and genocide to describe what Israel is doing to the Palestinians ‘undermines their seriousness’ reveals blatant contempt for the fundamental rights and very lives of Palestinians. Over 42,000 people, of which 15,000 are children, have been killed by Israeli forces. It should not require 1 million Palestinians to be killed for claims of genocide to be taken seriously.”
He argued that the term genocide was not determined by the numbers killed but, as set out in the genocide convention, by the specific intent of those committing the acts.
He also pointed out that previously the UK had been willing to term the massacre of approximately 8,000 Muslims in Srebenica as a genocide, and had used the term in relation to the treatment of the Yazidi people.
