Person of the year: Francesca P. Albanese

It took a while before I could settle on my own personal Person of the Year.  In reality, I wanted to put forward a feisty maid at Buckingham Palace, who, at a staff party, got motherless drunk, created chaos, and insulted the King, the Queen, and all their ancestry.  She ended up for the night in jail, sleeping it off.   If only she could do it without the veil of the alcohol and eventually trying to beat up the other party goers, she would have been my choice.

But then I became more serious.  My person of the year is Francesca P. Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. 

Francesca epitomizes humanity, Palestinian humanity.  She has stood steadfast against all the accusations, threats and dirty tricks of the current zionist regime.  Nothing would stick to her, showing that true humanity still exists and even out of the muck of the fetid swamp of the UN, flowers can still be born.

Since the onset of Israel’s exterminationist war on the people of Gaza thirteen months ago, Francesca Albanese, United Nations (UN) special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, has acquired international renown as a public chronicler, legal anatomist, and political opponent of genocide. Appointed to the role in May 2022 — the month Israeli forces assassinated Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin — the Campagna-born international human rights lawyer has produced a succession of official reports detailing Tel Aviv’s apartheid regime, its renovation of the West Bank into a “constantly surveilled open-air panopticon” crisscrossed by colonial settlements, and, since last October, its crimes of genocide against the Palestinians.

Her last two UN reports were titled:  “Anatomy of a Genocide” (March 2024) and, more recently, “Genocide as Colonial Erasure” (October 2024).

Spearheading the urgent demand within international fora for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire, and for the mobilization of all forms of global pressure upon the Israeli state, Francesca has been subjected to the same rote and violent defamation campaigns familiar to all supporters of Palestinian liberation. Now, in the face of recent pleas from Israeli advocacy organizations to bar her from Western college campuses, she undertook a speaking tour of London universities, addressing Israel’s present genocide and the role (and limits) of international human rights law in resisting it. As the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) so-called Generals’ Plan to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza proceeds, and as more Palestinian and Lebanese children join the thousands upon thousands slaughtered, it was recognized by all attending Albanese’s Monday night address at SOAS University of London that the hour could not be graver.

As Francesca continues with her speaking tours, she finds gates blocked by pro-Zionist demonstrators — brandishing Israeli flags and posters reading “BAN FRAN” and chanting “I-I-IDF!”.  What keeps her going is that the student population is considerably larger, louder and younger, standing up with drumbeats and cheers.  In the face of personal attack, she epitomizes humanity and walks right through the threats.

“Imperialism, Colonialism, and Human Rights: The Litmus Test of Palestine” was the title of her last major public appearance at the SOAS University of London.  Here is her opening description:

Allow me to put the situation of the Palestinian people, as it is now, squarely in our minds. In Gaza, for 401 days, we have watched Israel’s constant bombing, fire, and artillery fire continue to spare nothing and no one. Warfare has shown its most ruthless face. Large-scale indiscriminate bombing; the use of artificial intelligence selected-targeting systems; the persistent surveilling of unmanned drones overhead; automatic snipers firing at people as they shop at markets, collect water, seek medical help, or even as they sleep in tents; soldiers bunkered down in tanks attacking unarmed civilians. Burned alive, left to die agonizingly slow deaths under the rubble, whole generations of families [are] crowded in homes that are bombed and razed in a single instant; hospitals and refugee camps now turned into cemeteries, full of journalists, students, doctors, nurses, [and] persons with disabilities that once inhabited these now-decimated lands.

Francesca in an interview: 

First of all, what constitutes genocide is not defined by personal opinions or personal stories or by comparison with what has happened in the past, although the past has a lot to tell us about what a genocide looks like. What constitutes genocide from a legal point of view is established by Article II of the Genocide Convention. Genocide consists of a series of acts which are criminal in and of themselves, like acts of killing, acts of infliction of severe bodily or mental pain, the creation of conditions of life leading to the destruction of a group, the forced transfer of children, the prevention of births. These are acts of genocide recognized by the Genocide Convention.

In order to have genocide, the critical element is the intent to destroy a group — in whole or in part — through even one of these acts. You could have, like happened in Australia or Canada, genocide implemented primarily, even though not only, through the transfer of children, so without killing. So here’s the first issue: that a number of people dispute that the label “genocide” can be affixed to what Israel is doing because Israel has only killed 45,000 people, as if it were normal, while it has destroyed the entirety of Gaza.

Some people see the brutality of this and still defend it as “self-defense.” The point is that this extreme destruction, this violation of basic rules to protect civilians and civilian premises and civilian life in international law, has been completely leveled by the Israeli logic that everyone was killable, either as a terrorist or a human shield or as collateral damage, and everything was destroyable. And this is why, 402 days later, we have a Gaza that is no longer livable. Gaza is destroyed.

“If this is not an ostentatious genocide, what else is it?”

We also need to understand the context in which this genocide is taking place. This is why I wrote the latter report [“Genocide as Colonial Erasure”]: the acts of killing, rendering life impossible, forcibly displacing the Palestinians while bombing them north to south, west to east, forcing them to live in the most inhospitable places in Gaza after having destroyed everything that could allow them to access livelihood, after depriving them of water, food, medicine, fuel for over one year — one year! — and also arbitrarily arresting, depriving of liberty, torturing, and raping thousands of Palestinians.

Do we see the reality?

And the thing is that this didn’t start just one year ago. The Palestinians have been oppressed, repressed, mistreated, and made the object of abuse, indignities, humiliation, and egregious violations of international law for decades. Israel does so in the pursuit of the realization of a “Greater Israel,” a place for Jewish sovereignty only between the river and the sea. This is why I say that this is a genocide that is being conducted not just because of ideological hatred transformed into a political doctrine, as has happened through the dehumanization of “the other” in other genocides; this genocide has been committed because of the land, for the land. Israel wants the land without the Palestinians. And for the Palestinians, staying on the land is part of who they are as a people. This is why I call it genocide as colonial erasure.

You may have another Person of the Year and please feel free to nominate in the comments. For me, Francesca needs to be on the covers of all decent journals in the world!