Albanese Cannot be Allowed to Hijack South Africa
Albanase clearly doesn’t want peace. She wants Israel to curl up and let Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran run roughshod over the Jewish state with impunity.
In her article, Hasina Kathrada heralds the visit of Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur as providing direction for the way South Africa should act.
Albanese, and the article, ultimately calls for South Africa to be consistent in its lawfare against Israel. Either it must economically sanction Israel completely, or face accusations of hypocrisy. But by hosting Albanese, South Africa’s government is continuing to choose the wrong side of this conflict and continues to support the precedent that terrorism will be rewarded by institutional support and lawfare by naïve states.
That South Africa had to call in the “big guns” in the form of Albanese to help bolster its flagging case, is indicative of the extent that it feels it needs re-enforcement. Yet, her visit may in fact be counterproductive. In reality Albanese is no friend to human rights. She has a history of using antisemitic tropes. In 2014, she wrote that the United States and Europe were “subjugated by the Jewish lobby,” language indistinguishable from the antisemitic propaganda that once justified persecution and real genocides.
Albanese cannot hide behind the tired old excuse that she is “anti-Zionist”, not “antisemitic”. Her repeated use of the term “Jewish lobby” singles out a religious ethnic group as supporters and perpetrators of genocide. Her habit of spreading misinformation is also not new. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015, she posted an article accusing the CIA and Mossad of carrying out the terrorist attack.
She is, of course, correct when she describes herself as “anti-Zionist”. Here, in fact, she outdoes herself. Long before her appointment as UN Special Rapporteur, she repeatedly demonstrated hostility not towards violations of human rights, but towards Israel
In July 2025, Albanese was sanctioned by the United States for her continued attacks on Israel. While many have condemned these sanctions as, on the face of it, restricting a human rights advocate from adequately doing her work, in reality Albanese is no friend to human rights.
During her tenure at UNRWA, a body found to have been working closely with Hamas to imprison civilian hostages, she openly advocated for the dismantling of Israel through a Palestinian “right of return” that would end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
Her reports as Special Rapporteur have consistently excluded mention of Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians, torture of dissenters, or use of human shields, while framing Israel’s self-defence as a crime against humanity. Albanese has turned a mandate meant to uphold universal human rights into a platform for ideological warfare, using the UN’s imprimatur to legitimise a campaign of lawfare that singles out one democracy while excusing the atrocities of its enemies.
Further, Albanese’s claims that Israel is committing a genocide are not just patently false, but hatefully offensive.
Albanese claims that the Gaza conflict fulfils the criteria of the Genocide Convention. Notably, intent. As quoted from the article, “The Genocide Convention requires evidence that destruction is deliberate.”
Yet, she provides no evidence, at all, that there is intent to commit genocide. Her evidence is “mass civilian deaths, the collapse of essential infrastructure and the dehumanising rhetoric of senior Israeli officials”.
Evidence of mass civilian deaths is not sufficient in and of itself. Especially considering that the Gaza death toll has been proven, repeatedly to be very suspicious. Not only is the number thumb sucked and reported by the Hamas owned Ministry of Health, but the total death count also vastly conflates combatants and noncombatants.
And even if numbers alone could prove genocide, the Gaza conflict is not that destructive by the standard of other genocides.
Even if we take the death toll of 68,858 people at face value, true genocides really put that number into perspective.
Two years into the Holocaust, the same amount of time that the Gaza conflict has been going on, approximately 4 million Jews had already been killed. In two years, around 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman government. In merely 100 days, between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans, mostly Tutsi, were slaughtered.
These are real genocides. Israel has far better technology and military dominance at its disposal than the Nazis, Ottomans or the Hutus, yet it has killed a tiny fraction of these examples. If the IDF wanted to commit genocide, it could. Which completely dismantles not only the argument around numbers, but also intent.
The claims that infrastructural destruction is tantamount to genocide is also bogus. The Allies were not committing genocide by firebombing Dresden. If Hamas is hiding in or using a building to wage its war of terror, then that building must be destroyed. It is naïve and unreasonable to argue otherwise.
Finally, rhetoric by Israeli officials does not qualify as intent by the entire government of Israel. Malema is a member of South Africa’s government, and he has openly called for the killing of Afrikaans farmers. Is the South African government therefore guilty of genocide?
The invitation of Albanese to the 23rd Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture by the Nelson Mandela Foundation is a betrayal of the late president’s memory. Mandela may have sympathised with the Palestinian cause, but he also expressed support for Israel’s continued existence and wished for peace.
Albanase clearly doesn’t want peace. She wants Israel to curl up and let Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran run roughshod over the Jewish state with impunity.
Alternatively, and ideally, South Africa should abandon this fruitless and morally bankrupt crusade against a country trying to defend itself against terror. We have more to gain from a friendship with Israel than this continued support for hate and violence. And the sooner we abandon ties to hatemongers like Albanese, the better.
Nicholas Woode-Smith is a political analyst and author. He is the managing editor of the Rational Standard and writes in his personal capacity.