US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a dazzling Orwellian display, inverted reality by slapping sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the much-embattled UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. If the sanctions are implemented against this extraordinary citizen of Italy, in the face of strong UN objections, Albanese will be barred from entering the US, presumably even to discharge her annual UN duty to present a report to the Third Committee of the General Assembly. Additionally, as a vindictive feature of the sanctions, whatever US financial assets she or her immediate family happens to possess, including real state, will be frozen. It is relevant to take notice of the facts that not only is Francesca Albanese a non-citizen, but she is the first UN unpaid officeholder to be sanctioned and also happens to be the first woman to be named UN Special Rapporteur of Occupied Palestine.

Relying on an earlier Trump Executive Order 14203 (“Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court”), which is a stretch when it comes to the SR role specified by Albanese’s mandate, Rubio resorts to this malicious lawfare ploy to connect her with an analogous sanctions imposed this February on five members of the ICC for their involvement in the issuance of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli former Minister Defense, Yoav Gallant. The only link between the ICC and Albanese derives from her most recent SR report that explores the connections between the profits earned by some 60 named corporations in the US and European defense sectors and her carefully documented allegations of Israel’s criminal responsibility for genocide in Gaza. The recommendation in her report to the UN urging an investigations and indictments by the ICC of these corporations provides the grounds on which to accuse Albanese of waging ‘economic warfare’ against the US and Israel. As might be expected, big tech and arms dealers are presumed to have exerted their own insider pressures for the US to strike back, and strike it has.

Anyone familiar with the vicious Israeli campaign against Albanese since her appointment in 2022, fully seconded by the US and Zionist-funded NGOs (UN Watch, NGO Monitor), will jump to the plausible conclusion that these objecting countries were waiting for just such a setting to take punitive action against this fearless scholar and passionate advocate of human rights for the Palestinian people. Rubio acknowledges as much when he departs from the technical rationale for sanctions, giving voice to the deeper roots of US hostility to Albanese. Rubio’s words read as if scripted by the most militant of AIPAC or loyalists: “The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur.” His statement goes on falsely contending that “Albanese has spewed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.” Hardly a word of this defaming allegation is true beyond the possible, principled exception of the ‘open contempt’ phrase. What seems relevant is that the sanctions were imposed days after the release of Albanese’s report that focused on corporate complicity with Israel’s criminality in Gaza in which a series of prominent corporations that profited from supplying weapons and other military equipment to Israel facilitating the genocide. Rubio’s formal statement signaled the policy context by the unusual reference to ‘economic’ as well as ‘political’ interests.

The last three Special Rapporteurs on Palestine, of which I was one, were each subjected to harsh pushbacks in the form of character assassinations, death threats, and smears. These were similar unseemly tactics to what Albanese experienced during her three years of SR service prior to the July 9 sanctions. We earlier SRs were much less visible and influential than Albanese, in part due to her public prominence and even more to her well- documented confirmation of what the West dismissed as inflammatory........

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