Rebuttal

Francesca Albanese’s July 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council - grandly titled From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide — is not so much a legal analysis as it is a polemic, dressed up in bureaucratic gravitas. At 21,000 words, it is not brief. But it is breathtaking - not for its insight or legal clarity, but for its omission, distortion, and ideological zeal.

At the heart of the report is a simple proposition: that Israel, alone among nations, is guilty of a crime so grave that it requires the full weight of international censure - genocide. It is a word Albanese invokes no fewer than 57 times. The words "Hamas", "terrorism", or "hostage" do not appear once. This is no accident. It is the foundation of a carefully constructed moral illusion.

This policy paper dismantles that illusion. It exposes the report's key deficiencies - legal, methodological, and moral - and offers policymakers and parliamentarians an evidence-based corrective. What emerges is not merely a critique of poor scholarship, but a warning: that the machinery of international law is being bent to serve ideological warfare.