(JNS) When a public intellectual arms herself with a lexicon of genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing and broadcasts those terms as incontrovertible facts, culture and history die a little.
The recent interview of Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, contained more than misinformation; it was a manifesto for the erasure of the Jewish state.
I have long refused to dignify Albanese with a formal debate—not out of timidity, but out of principle. To breathe the same air as someone who repeatedly traffics in demonstrable falsehoods is to concede a moral equivalence that does not exist.
Her latest claim—that Zionism itself is “the problem” because it created the State of Israel, which she sees as an apartheid state occupying a land once called Palestine—collapses decades of history into a single, dishonest sentence.
It is worth reminding readers of the simple facts that Albanese elides. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews called themselves Palestinians; former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir...
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