[dropcap]U[/dropcap]nited Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese is now on the hit list of the American administration. It is for the first time that the US administration has openly and unashamedly targeted a UN official who was doing her job.
Francesca Albanese is an Italian by birth and was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The American administration was unhappy with her because she asked the European governments not to allow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fly over their territories. Her point was that the International Court of Justice in Hague has issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu, and all states that are signatories to it must follow the UN mandate.
American President Donald Trump has welcomed Netanyahu as a ‘war hero’ and, in turn, the Israeli Prime Minister handed a letter to the American President regarding nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Ironically, another friend of Donald Trump who has already nominated him for the coveted prize is Asim Munir, the field marshal of the Pakistan Army. How Americans can bring these hatemongers together is a ‘classic’ case of their double-speak on international policy matters.
Anyway, I don’t believe the American administration was unhappy with Francesca Albanese for demanding the arrest of Netanyahu. The same kind of demand has been made by European leaders many times against Russian President Vladimir Putin. I don’t trust these ‘international courts of justice’, which are a Western idea to dominate and intervene in the internal affairs of Sovereign countries. It only reflects the hypocrisy of the Western world, who consider Vladimir Putin and Russia as the biggest evil the world has ever known, but keeps shameless silence on the crime against humanity by Israel and Netanyahu.
The war cries against Francesca Albanese are actually for her powerful report on Palestine, which she presented during the 59th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. This report will open your eyes to how the greedy corporations have profited from the crisis in Gaza. For the first time, someone at that big level or one can say at the United Nations, brought the issue of big corporate money minting at the cost of the Gaza Genocide. This report provides minute details of big corporations and their linkages with the Military Industrial Complex of both Israel and the United States.
Over the last 30 years, we have seen UN platforms used to legitimise the corporate entries everywhere in the name of inevitability. This report on Palestine shows us the darker side of corporate interests. Last year, when I interviewed a Palestinian farmer, Abbas Milhem from the West Bank, he had informed me how the European and American settlers are occupying the land and threatening the Palestinian farmers. He had told me at that time that the fight was not for Gaza alone, but Israel wanted to occupy the West Bank too, because of its rich mineral resources. All big companies in the US and Europe are interested in that, and all their rule-based talks are only meant for the oppressed people and not meant for the colonisers and powerful countries.
Corporate interests have cleverly merged with national interests, and with media and academia in their control, a new narrative will soon be out. The global crisis was created out of colonial rivalry and business interests. They settled and removed people and communities from one place to another. Even after three hundred years, the politics of extraction and settlement continue to fulfil their economic interests, even at the cost of misery and catastrophe to local communities everywhere. The politics of ‘settlement’ is not over yet, and the new ‘peace deal’ or propaganda is to resettle Palestinians to some alien land in Africa so that the corporations can ‘peacefully’ extract the rich mineral resource there, even if people suffer and vanish from the place.
Francesca Albanese deserves kudos for her forthright views and powerful exposure of corporate participation in aggravating the human crisis and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
