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 thoroughly documented cases of indigenous connection in the ancient world.

The Jewish people originated in the land historically known as Judea and Israel more than three thousand years ago. The First Temple period, stretching back to the tenth century BCE, five centuries before Roman legions ever set foot in the region, left behind a material record that has no serious scholarly competitor: the Siloam Tunnel, the Siloam Inscription, the Tel Dan Stele, the Ketef Hinnom scrolls. These are not artifacts of a people passing through. The Hebrew language itself, one of the very few tongues in recorded history to be revived as a living spoken language, was revived in the same geographic region where it originated. That is not colonialism. It is the precise opposite.

The Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE was an indigenous uprising against Roman imperial rule. Rome crushed the revolt with the full machinery of colonial violence, then committed an act whose symbolism required no interpretation: it renamed the province. Judea became Syria Palaestina. The explicit purpose was erasure to sever a conquered people’s name from their land. If that does not qualify as colonial dispossession, the term retains no analytical meaning.

If she were at all serious about confronting colonial history, she could begin with a short walk to the Arch of Titus. Its reliefs depict, in unmistakable detail, the Roman conquest of Judea, the plunder of the Second Temple, the enslavement of its population, and the triumphal celebration of a crushed revolt in the Jews’ own homeland. It has been standing for nearly two thousand years. The evidence has not moved.

None of this appears in Albanese’s work. Nor does the continuous Jewish presence in the land over millennia, through Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and British rule.

Instead, Zionism is presented as a purely European project, as if Jews materialized in the region for the first time in the nineteenth century with no prior claim to it. That framing requires treating 1948 as the beginning of history rather than as a single moment in a far longer and more painful arc.

The documented facts about the colonization of the Jewish homeland demolish her narrative.

The irony is biographical. She grew up in Campania, studied in Pisa, and now lives in Tunis, three places whose Jewish communities exist precisely because of Roman colonial violence. Jews did not arrive in these towns as settlers. They arrived as captives, deported from the land she refuses to acknowledge as theirs.

Francesca Albanese chooses to live in places where Jews arrived in chains; at the first moment of freedom, across every generation and every century, those same Jews turned back toward that land to reunite with their brethren who had never left.

It places her in direct contradiction with the foundational legal instrument of the very institution she represents. The 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, a document hosted on the UN’s own website and carried forward into the UN’s legal framework by Article 80 of the UN Charter, states explicitly in its preamble that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” This was not a contested clause inserted by one party. It was unanimously adopted by all fifty-one member states of the League of Nations. It is the legal bedrock on which everything that followed, including the UN’s own involvement in the region, was built.

Albanese invokes international law constantly and selectively. Yet the foundational international legal document of the conflict she has made her career, the document her own institution is the custodian of, explicitly recognizes the Jewish historical connection to the land. She has never once acknowledged it. She dismisses it, near the Colosseum, as “a bit flat.”

This is not a blind spot. It is a structural impossibility. Acknowledge the UN’s own recognition of Jewish indigeneity and the entire edifice collapses. So she erases.

Consider the standard she applies to everyone else. The Māori of New Zealand have a documented connection to their land stretching back roughly seven centuries. She would call them indigenous without hesitation. The Aboriginal Australians, sixty thousand years. The Cherokee, several thousand. In every case, the evidence of language, culture, continuous habitation, and attachment to a specific geography is treated as sufficient. The framework is applied generously, sympathetically, and without reservation.

The Jewish people have a documented connection to Judea stretching back over three thousand years. They have an ancient language, the only one in history successfully revived as a modern vernacular rooted in that same territory. They have an unbroken religious and cultural tradition oriented toward that land, maintained across two millennia of exile. They have inscriptions, coins, archaeological strata, and the ruins of their own destroyed temples. They have a Roman triumphal arch commemorating their conquest. They have, in short, everything Albanese’s framework requires and more.

She finds the connection “a bit flat.”

Now look at what she does find worth her attention. On October 7th, 2023, as the massacre was still unfolding, as Jewish men, women, and children were being murdered, violated, abducted, and tortured in their homes and at a music festival, Albanese posted that the violence “must be put in context.” When France’s President Macron called it the largest antisemitic massacre of the century, she replied that the victims “were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression.” France and Germany, in an unprecedented joint condemnation, called it what it was. She has compared Israel to the Third Reich. She has called Gaza a concentration camp. She endorsed a post comparing Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, commenting: “This is precisely what I was thinking today.” She described the United States as “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” She told a Hamas conference: “You have a right to resist.”

Her propaganda included a death toll of 680,000, including 380,000 infants under five. A figure that exceeds the entire under-five population of Gaza, which she later admitted she used deliberately, in her own words, ‘in a provocative way’ for the ‘shock factor.’

This is the woman who finds the Jewish connection to the land of Israel “a bit flat.”

Every other indigenous people on earth receives her sympathy, her scholarship, her vocabulary of justice. Jews receive inversion: their ancient homeland becomes a colonial project, their massacred civilians become collateral consequence, their millennia of connection to the land becomes, to her, flat.

There is a tradition for this. It is not new and it is not subtle. It is the oldest libel in European history dressed in the language of human rights: the idea that Jews are uniquely disqualified, uniquely suspect, uniquely undeserving of the rights extended without hesitation to every other people. In previous centuries it wore religious robes. In the twentieth century it wore racial ones. Albanese wears a UN lanyard. The costume changes. The function is identical.

She has been condemned by France, Germany, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, and Argentina. She has been sanctioned. She has been dropped by Georgetown University. The UN Human Rights Council, with its customary moral courage, renewed her mandate anyway.

She can disprove everything written here with a single act: acknowledge the Jewish historical connection to the land she has made her career discussing. Cite the Mandate. Name the Bar Kokhba revolt for what it was. Apply to Jews the same framework she applies, without hesitation, to everyone else.

She will not. Because the moment she does, the entire edifice collapses, the career, the mandate, the reputation, and the ideology built on the premise that one people, alone among all peoples, has no roots, no claim, and no history worth acknowledging.

That is not scholarship. It is not human rights. Whether Francesca Albanese is an antisemite is for others to judge.

But as a propagandist, she stands fully exposed.