François Rastier Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #295

François Rastier is Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS. This article is translated from Telos, Sept. 5, 2025.

The UN and the “Economy of Genocide”

At the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held from June 16 to July 11, 2025, Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese presented her report titled From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.

1/The accusation of genocide is not new. In 1948, Maurice Bardèche, pardoned after being convicted for collaboration, leveled it against Israel the very year of its creation, while the Arab League — supported by volunteers from Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Muslim Brotherhood — launched the first war. The charge resurfaced regularly, as Léon Poliakov once cataloged in detail. It now takes on renewed weight since October 7, 2023, echoed from Mediapart to Rivarol, from Libération to La Croix; even MAGA extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has repeated it.

It is up to international justice to determine whether events fall under war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide. Yet Ms. Albanese, on behalf of the UN, enshrines this accusation in the very title of her report, where the words “genocide” and “genocidal” appear 71 times across 39 pages. Anyone expecting a minimum of analysis of the political and military situation, however, will find no mention of “Hamas,” “Iran,” “Qatar,” “Muslims,” “Brotherhood,” or “Hezbollah.” A text also signifies through what it omits.

From its summary onward, the report denounces the fact that “far too many corporate entities have profited from the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide,” and concludes with the demand to “end the genocide and dismantle the global system that has allowed it.” Throughout, this global system is condemned — but since Israel itself is included in it, does this not imply dismantling Israel? Incidentally, that is precisely what the Hamas Charter envisions.

The report’s opening line clarifies its theoretical, or at least lexical, framework: “Colonial endeavours and associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector. Commercial interests have contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous people of their lands — a mode of domination known as ‘colonial racial capitalism.’” In the language of decolonialism, this implies several established theses: genocides are tied to colonial ventures; colonization is reduced to settler colonies that entail dispossession or extermination of “indigenous populations”; colonization is inherently bound to capitalism and racism — in short, “colonial racial capitalism.” Thus, Jews, as colonizers, are cast as both capitalists and racists.

2/The decolonial thesis holds that capitalism was born with the conquest of South America and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. From this follows that capitalism is confined to the West, while non-Western colonizations are ignored.

The question of democracy becomes irrelevant, as it would stem from the original sin of the West. Hence activist Houria Bouteldja could argue: “When I hear 1789, I answer 1492,” a slogan she repeated before Nicolás Maduro during the second conference of Venezuela’s Institute for Decolonization — though Venezuela has been independent since 1811.

Reading Albanese’s latest report, one wonders why a genocide would generate profit rather than loss; or why, even before the creation of Israel, many Jews in the Middle East counted among the “indigenous” — and thus feared the creation of the Jewish state.

These theses echo familiar tropes in “leftist” Islamist discourse. By merging the anti-Zionist and anti-capitalist tropes of late Stalinist propaganda with old Third-Worldism, the decolonial narrative has enabled Islamist propaganda to rally a significant portion of student youth, as seen in recent pro-Palestinian protests that repeat Hamas’s eliminationist slogan: “from the river to the sea.”

3/Extending the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign — which targeted activities in illegal settlements — the report’s central argument is to criminalize as complicit in genocide all foreign firms, especially American ones, that do business with Israel, from IBM to Google to Caterpillar. The comparison is driven home by invoking I.G. Farben: “The post-Holocaust industrialists’ trials, such as the I.G. Farben trial, laid the groundwork for recognizing the international criminal responsibility of corporate executives for participation in international crimes” (§14).

This threat extends beyond companies to universities, Israeli and foreign alike: “Universities – centres of intellectual growth and power – have sustained the political ideology underpinning the colonization of Palestinian land, developed weaponry and overlooked or even endorsed systemic violence, while global research collaborations have obscured Palestinian erasure behind a veil of academic neutrality” (§25). They are portrayed as state ideological apparatuses, recalling Althusser’s Marxist determinism.

Even the Jewish National Fund, established 47 years before Israel’s creation, is not spared: “The Jewish National Fund, a land-purchasing corporate entity founded in 1901, helped plan and carry out the gradual removal of Arab Palestinians, which intensified with the Nakba and has continued ever since.” Anachronistically conflating purchase with spoliation, century-old acquisitions are presented as anticipating an ongoing genocide.

Taken together, these disparate elements coalesce into an underlying narrative: a plutocratic conspiracy revives the age-old stereotype of Jewish greed. For years, figures condemned for antisemitism, like Dieudonné and Soral, have denounced the so-called “Shoah Business”: the extermination of Jews, they claim, was merely a fraudulent pretext for extorting reparations.

Here, Jews have conveniently replaced the Nazis. No longer merely the supposed victims of a past genocide, they are cast as the actual perpetrators of a present one — still driven by their “immemorial greed.”

4/As early as January 2024, South Africa revived the traditional genocide charge in its case before the International Court of Justice, which did not uphold the accusation. Soon after, Albanese’s report to the 55th session (Feb. 26–Apr. 5, 2024) was nevertheless titled Anatomy of a Genocide.

South Africa’s complaint also took on a political dimension. During a recent visit to Iran, the South African Chief of Defense Staff praised Iran’s special forces as “exceptional and unique.” Referencing South Africa’s apartheid past, he denounced Israel’s “aggressions and crimes” as a “new apartheid,” declaring: “We stand with the oppressed of the world in their defense” (IRNA, Aug. 14, 2025). It is established that Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s October 7, 2023 attack was organized with the prior support of Iranian special forces. The goal is thus to reinforce the alliance that Ayatollah Khamenei calls the “Axis of Resistance” — officially anti-Zionist, unofficially antisemitic.

5/Yet as early as December 2023, Albanese faced embarrassment when past writings resurfaced. In 2014, while working for UNRWA, she had written: “America and Europe, the former dominated by the Jewish lobby and the latter by guilt over the Holocaust, remain aligned in condemning the oppressed — the Palestinians — who defend themselves with the only means they have (imprecise rockets), instead of holding Israel accountable under international law.” The mention of a “Jewish lobby” clearly invokes the global conspiracy theory central to the Hamas Charter, which itself draws on the Qur’an and, in Article 32, the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Her publication was meant to raise funds for UNRWA — later revealed to have been infiltrated by Hamas, with at least a dozen employees involved in the October 7 pogrom. These revelations did not prevent her reappointment in 2025 as Special Rapporteur, with backing from Islamic states.

6/Already on Oct. 22, 2023, she told L’Humanité that Israel had no right to counterattack: “Israel invokes Article 51 of the UN Charter, which refers to the right of states to defend themselves when attacked. But Israel is not being attacked by another state. That could happen in the future if the situation continues to deteriorate. But here, the attack and crimes against Israeli civilians were committed by an armed group, part of a resistance to Israeli occupation, now lasting fifty-six years.” Thus, jihadists are reframed as legitimate resisters.

Her denial extended to the October 7 pogrom itself and the systematic rapes that accompanied it, despite video evidence from the perpetrators themselves. On Oct. 11, 2023, she even cautioned on X: “Hamas’ crimes, including rape, have not been confirmed, and said that divulging information about the perpetration of rape by Hamas risks escalating tensions and endangering lives in a volatile context.”

It was only on July 15, 2025, that a UN Secretary-General’s report on conflict-related sexual violence finally named Hamas — while adding, for balance, that “a preliminary annex also warns certain armed forces – Israeli and Russian – of possible inclusion in the next report due to suspicions of sexual violence in detention” (§36).

7/The word “genocide” has thus become a catch-all term, sowing confusion. Putin, for example, used it in his February 24, 2022 declaration of war, invoking the “genocide of Russian-speakers by Ukrainian Nazis” — led, ironically, by a Jew.

Israel’s prime minister is already indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Netanyahu government does indeed include extremists with whom he has allied to preserve his political survival amid corruption cases — which, incidentally, confirms Israel’s democratic status, as the only democracy in the region.

Israeli society itself, including the army, is deeply divided. The left-leaning writer David Grossman once used the term “genocide” in an interview with La Repubblica. Two months later, in Le Monde (Aug. 14, 2025), he clarified: “We will emerge from this demonic circle where Israel can be described with those terrifying words.” He had realized that this circle is sustained above all by media discourse.

Notes

[1] Repeated on the last page of the report, which demands: “ending the genocide and disassembling the global system of racialized capitalism that underpins it” (§95).

[2] For this admirer of Mohamed Merah, that date could also have evoked the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

[3] See Article 22 of the Hamas Charter: “The enemies have amassed enormous fortunes which they devote to the realization of their objectives.”

[4] Let us recall these lyrics from Dieudonné’s cult song Shoahnanas: “We must not forget / There’s a chance for a little cash (…) We demand reparations, may it be granted to you / A country in the sun and millions of dollars.”

[5] This kind of inversion is characteristic of the perverse use of a mythical schema. Genuine reparations are therefore necessary; and, as if to confirm our interpretation, Ms. Albanese includes among her recommendations: “To pay reparations to the Palestinian people, including in the form of an apartheid wealth tax along the lines of post-apartheid South Africa.”

[6] Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Provisional Measures, Order of 26 January 2024, I.C.J. Reports 2024, p. 3.

[7] click

[8] The Charter draws on the Qur’an, Surah 3, verse 151: “We shall cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers (…) Their abode will be the Fire. / What a dreadful dwelling for the wicked!” The evocation of fire is hardly allegorical anymore since the crematoria of the extermination camps.

[9] On March 28, 2025, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) and around forty French MPs called for Francesca Albanese’s mandate not to be renewed.

[10] “Israel’s fury and rage must be stopped,” online

[11] These statements were repeated: “In the West, the mainstream media has replicated and amplified lies. We have heard, and I said, sometimes I look at politicians and journalists who have repeated lies, but what’s the need to talk about mass rapes? There is no evidence of rape.”; and “there were fabrications attached to it, like the mass rape and other horror stories.” (see the video).

[12] See here

[13] The lexical pattern -cide has thus become particularly productive: femicide, ecocide, etc.