'We Cannot Be Clock-Worked Into Acceptance of This Brutal Violence'
Fatima Bhutto meets Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine turned internet idol, who has become a 'reluctant chronicler of genocide.'
It happened almost overnight. In late 2023, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, international law expert, and writer was catapulted onto the world stage when she simultaneously became – in her own words – “a reluctant chronicler of genocide,” an internet idol to her many admirers who study and share her press conferences and viral diplomatic interventions, and a “Hamas apologist” according to right-wing Zionists who stalk her every move. UN Watch, a pro-Israel organization whose seeming mission is to eradicate any shred of criticism of the state worldwide and for all eternity, has a particular obsession with Albanese. Their homepage displays a lurid campaign titled #firefrancesca.
Unlike her public remonstrations, Albanese laughs easily and radiates warmth and good humor. Wherever she goes, she seems to become the hive, the epicenter of attention and action, and even through this limited lens of Zoom, over the days we speak, I watch her husband, children, and children’s friends orbit her, gravitating towards her. When I mention the many enemies her outspoken defense of the Palestinian people has cultivated, Albanese doesn’t seem overly perturbed. “I have this device of hope, as we say in Italian,” she answers. “Yes, there are ideological enemies, but the moment people start engaging with me, I see that it’s hard for them to hate me. I tend to elicit sympathy face-to-face instead of hate. And this is something the haters hate.”
Our first Zoom call opens with her familiar face, which I’ve spent more than the last 15 months watching on television, across social media, and via streamed UN meetings. Albanese has just spent her first week off in months. She went on a trip to Albania with her family last summer, but that didn’t really count as she spent hours in the evening preparing a submission to the International Criminal Court. Today she’s in Valle D’Aosta in Italy, up in the mountains, and enjoying the euphoria of time with her family. “It’s been beautiful not to watch the news,” she exhales. She is wearing her trademark thick black-rimmed glasses, her salt and pepper hair perfectly disheveled, and colorful earrings that look like a red poppy in bloom.
Life at home is less intense than the public world Albanese inhabits. There are no pets because her husband “is allergic to the concept of dependence,” but plenty of books (she is rereading Anthony Lowenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory) by literary figures of inspiration, including Edward Said and Primo Levi, who she feels especially close to as an Italian, and friends whom she once loved cooking for though she rarely has the time now. She speaks five languages – Italian, French, Spanish, English, and Bahasa Indonesian – six if you consider Arabic, which Albanese doesn’t. She studied it but doesn’t consider herself fluent in it anymore. Though she is a trained yoga teacher, Albanese doesn’t have the time to teach anymore either though she practices when she can and is devoted to her daily meditation, promising that you don’t want to engage with her on the days that she misses the calming practice.
Albanese grew up in a socialist home where her father often spoke about politics and foreign policy was discussed during family meals – a nuclear scene that she now replicates with her own family. She describes the Italy she grew up in as one where Palestine was almost a domestic issue – unthinkable today in Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, where fascist salutes are raised at political gatherings and protesters are clubbed by police. One of her earliest memories of something happening outside her home country was the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, and yet, when she began studying law, Albanese didn’t intend to focus on Palestine.
It wasn’t until she was doing her Masters at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London that the question of Palestine illuminated itself to Albanese. She understood that Palestine had to be advocated for on the grounds of international law, not just street activism. She didn’t have “the impulse of the humanitarian,” at least not fully. Rather, it was a “profound sense of outrage in the face of protracted injustice” that turned her onto the path of Palestine advocacy.
“I’ve lived it,” she says in her characteristic staccato, “and I’ve studied it primarily through the experience of Palestinian refugees, and when you do that, you cannot escape the Nakba. You cannot escape the reality that Palestinians are, first and foremost, Nakba survivors. It’s unmissable, and because of that, I’m brought to challenge the mainstream narrative that dominates the debate – that of a conflict.” Beyond which, if Albanese is a believer in anything it’s the idea of justice. It comes up again and again in conversation, and she speaks of justice and international law as its guarantor with the fervor of a believer – the same way the faithful revere their prophets. That international law exists and has simultaneously been “betrayed over and over again in the name of an ideology and at the expense of the rights of the Palestinians,” Albanese shakes her head. “It’s something that I. Cannot. Stand.”
A Seismic Moment
When Albanese was 33 years old, she moved to Jerusalem to work in UNRWA’s Department of Legal Affairs. She had visited the ancient city for the first time the previous year, in 2009. It would be where Albanese and her husband lived before they were married in Stromboli and where her first child was conceived. She recalls the time there as “beautiful but also painful” and notes she was never truly comfortable working there as a lawyer. There was the home she loved in Musrara, the flower-lined West Jerusalem neighborhood founded by Arab Christians in the 19th century. Though it should have been institutional policy, in her mind, not to rent refugee property, Albanese asked UNRWA’s legal adviser to check what the story was of the home. They came back to her and said if she liked the house, she should live in it, but they couldn’t be sure the original owners weren’t displaced.' “It doesn’t matter the charm of the place,” Albanese says, “I’m happy I didn’t live there because the thought that this could have been property taken from refugees wouldn’t have let me sleep at night.”
When the Russian writer Anton Chekov said, “Any idiot can face a crisis, but it’s the day-to-day business of living that wears you out,’ he was not thinking of grocery shopping, but he could have been. Albanese and her husband – whom she calls as radical as she is on ethical matters – had “the most politicized fridge in Jerusalem.” Nothing inside it came from the settlements. A colleague recently reminded her jokingly of the moment she came into their office, flush with the realization that she wasn’t the lawyer of Palestinian refugees as she imagined she would be, but the lawyer of an institution. To meet neutrality regulations, everything had to be so depoliticized – from the agency to the plight of the Palestinians – and after three years there, Albanese was out of steam from dealing with the maze of depoliticized politics. She left towards the end of 2012, right when the Gaza war of that year had begun, and thought that she was “done with Palestine.”
“I didn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore,” she recounts, shaking her head. She was depressed and exhausted. And then Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza began.