Under the banner of the Mandela name, the visit of the UN’s Special Rapporteur to South Africa platformed less of promoting ‘unity, integrity and reconciliation’ and more in spewing hate against the Jewish state.
By Marika Sboros
(First published in BizNews and updated by events)
Francesca Albanese may be an Italian citizen but that hasn’t stopped Italy’s government, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, from distancing itself publicly from her.
Albanese, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been haemorrhaging support in the wake of her recent whistlestop visit to South Africa.
It turned out to be more political rally than the lecture tour as the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) billed it.
Her main aim, in her own words, was to bolster South Africa’s flagging International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel on a genocide charge. It was also to rally support for the global BDS (Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction) movement against Israel.
The NMF invited Albanese, to deliver its prestigious 23rd Annual Lecture on October 25, 2025 in Sandton. It did so at the behest of NMF Chair and former Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor.
Pandor is one of South Africa’s most vocal critics of Israel. She played a pivotal role in launching the country’s landmark genocide case against the Jewish state at the ICJ in December 2023.
Albanese visited Cape Town on October 26 to speak at a rally held in a church. On October 28, she released her latest UN report remotely at the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation headquarters. It is titled: Gaza Genocide: Collective Crime.
On October 29, Italy’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Maurizio Massari, dismissed her report as “entirely devoid of credibility and impartiality.”
He went further during the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee session. Massari criticised her for disregarding the UN Code of Conduct for Special Rapporteurs, which mandates “integrity, impartiality, and good faith.” He called these “the foundation of any credible report… and of the UN itself.”
In South Africa, Albanese’s visit raised concerns in the Jewish community over appropriateness of the NMF inviting a person sanctioned in the US in July for ties to terror groups, including Hamas, to deliver its annual lecture.
Albanese has indulged in Holocaust distortion, trivialisation and Nazi comparisons. She has spread antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories about Jews, money and power.
In a statement, Wendy Kahn, national director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), described Albanese as “a figure globally condemned for antisemitic rhetoric and Holocaust inversion.”
She said that the NMF had “betrayed its founding values” in hosting her. Once an institution that symbolised unity, integrity and reconciliation, the NMF had become a “platform for division and hate” under Pandor’s chairpersonship, Kahn said.
Pandor and Albanese “both repeatedly accused of antisemitic bias, now stand together under the banner of the Mandela name, not to bring South Africans together but to unite them in hate.”
Albanese’s lecture was titled Enhancing Peace and Global Cooperation.
As a speaker, she was charismatic, articulate and passionate.
There was little peaceful in her delivery and content. Nor was there the reasoned, calm and fact-finding demeanour one normally associates with officials working on behalf of others at her elevated level.
Her lecture was overblown, rich in moral urgency, light on legal and factual nuance and heavy on emotion – and emotional blackmail.
It was remarkable as much for what she did not say as what she did say.
She chose her words carefully. Albanese described the NMF invitation as a “call to destiny.” She declared that “the world is watching its conscience collapse.”
Throughout, she called Gaza “Falasteen” – the Arabic name for Palestine. It carries significant cultural, political and emotional weight.
She linked Nelson Mandela’s ideals to the fight against “the cruellest injustice of our time” – her words for the “genocide” she claims Israel perpetuated in Gaza.
Albanese did not mention the word, Jew, once.
She repeated the word, genocide, not just once; she intoned it 21 times in her 60-minute lecture. At every mention, with increasingly demagogic intensity, she enunciated each one of genocide’s three syllables.
She called Israel’s war in Gaza a “textbook case of genocide” and South Africa’s ICJ case “a moment of historic resonance”. She framed genocide as a money-making venture for Israel, the US and other countries.
Albanese called genocide “the dormant gene of an apartheid regime rooted in settler-colonialism.”
She omitted any mention of what started Israel’s war against Hamas: the terror group’s genuine genocidal attack on mostly civilian targets in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Details of the attack are well-known but bear repeating, since denialism, including by Albanese, is rampant.
On October 7, terrorists murdered more than 1200 people, including children, babies, the elderly, and injured more than 5000, most of them civilians. They mass-raped women and children (the youngest aged just eight), some so violently that their pelvises shattered.
They tortured, burnt alive whole families and shot to death children in front of their parents, parents in front of their children. The terrorists also kidnapped more than 250 people, mostly civilians, and took them back to Gaza as hostages.
Among them were Shiri Bibas, and her sons, 10-month-old Kfir Bibas and Ariel, aged four. All three were murdered in captivity in Gaza.
Captured terrorists revealed orders to rape, kill and kidnap as many Jews as possible. Hamas leaders have since vowed publicly to repeat October 7 “again and again until Israel is annihilated.”
Albanese gave Hamas a free pass. She ignored its charter that is explicitly genocidal against Jews. She ignored its deliberate strategy of maximising civilian deaths in Gaza by embedding among civilians and using civilians as human shields as a propaganda tactic to win sympathy.
Albanese has support for the genocide claim from eminent legal experts and scholars and human rights advocates globally, some of them Jewish.
Globally, equally eminent legal experts and scholars and human rights advocates, Jewish and non-Jewish, vigorously disagree.
They offer legal critiques challenging her framing of genocide.
They stress the Genocide Convention requirement of proof of dolus specialis – the legal term for specific intent “to destroy a protected group in whole or in part.”
The phrase “in whole or in part” is critical. It underscores that intent, not scale alone, defines the crime. It emphasises a critical legal threshold that legal experts say Israel has not met in its military response to October 7, as its army targets Hamas, not Gazan civilians.
Together, these analyses form cross-institutional rebuke of Albanese’s genocide rhetoric.
Apartheid and deliberate starvation of Gazan civilians were more leitmotifs in Albanese’s rhetoric in South Africa.
On October 21, while visiting Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum, she tweeted: “It reminds me that Apartheid Israel could morph into genocidal machinery (because) no one stopped it.”
Tim Flack, a Cape Town-based PR strategist and military specialist, responded that Albanese was visiting “not to learn but to hijack history.”
Calling Israel an apartheid state “is an insult to those who lived under real apartheid,” Flack said.
Nelson Mandela’s granddaughters, Zamaswazi and Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway, would agree. After their recent visit to Israel and Gaza, they said:
“Apartheid was government-mandated racial separation. What we saw in Israel and Gaza is very different. There is no comparison.”
Legal scholars have criticised Albanese’s invoking of genocide, apartheid and starvation claims. They argue that collapsing these into a single narrative politicises international law and weakens its deterrent power.
Still, Albanese has fans globally, including in South Africa.
Reverend René August, of SA Christians for a Free Palestine, called her presence “a moral reckoning.” NMF CEO Dr Mbongiseni Buthelezi, said she “embodies” its mission.
The NMF invited groups to have private, round-table meetings with Albanese. Among these were the Jewish Democratic Initiative (JDI) and South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP). Both groups support the genocide claim.
Predictably perhaps, neither the SAJBD nor the South African Zionist Federation received invitations.
Anton Harber, veteran journalist, JDI board member and former University of the Witwatersrand journalism professor, attended the JDI’s round-table meeting with Albanese and found her “gracious, open and highly intelligent.”
He listened to her lecture on YouTube and said that it “contained nothing new.” He expressed “surprise” at her use of “non-legal, non-diplomatic language.”
Albanese “expresses views the Jewish community should engage with, not close their ears to,” Harber said. He dismissed criticisms of the NMF for hosting her and said it was “shameful” that the SAJBD “should shun” the foundation.
The JDI was “proud to associate with the NMF and what it represents,” he said.
“We feel we have to create open debate as it seldom happens within the community. It is imperative to open up and face hard issues in debate about Zionism, Israel and Jewishness.”
Dr Max Price, JDI member and former University of Cape Town Vice Chancellor, attended the round-table and lecture. Via email, he said he had read Albanese’s report on how companies globally were benefitting from the Gaza war and “occupation of the Palestinian territories” and wanted to “engage her views on questions of sanctions.”
She came across as “balanced,” he said and showed “understanding and empathy with the impact the Hamas massacre had had on Israeli society.”
Albanese was “clearly well read about fascism in Europe and the Holocaust, and appreciates its impact on Jews ever since, and the lessons for the world,” Price said. He called her “an important voice globally.”
Such engagement was often “especially productive with people with whom, on some issues, you disagree,” he said.
He found her lecture “disappointing and one-sided.” As she is a rapporteur on human rights, Price “expected her to comment also, and in fact, to condemn the war crimes Hamas committed and their historic genocidal goals and statements.”
Albanese had condemned Hamas atrocities in the past, he said. “Not to have done so in the context of this lecture compromises her credibility.”
Buthelezi, in his opening remarks, thanked sponsors, including Gift of the Givers. Its founder and CEO Dr Imtiaz Sooliman remains mired in claims that his charity has been a conduit for funding to Hamas and other terror groups.
In the same breath, Buthelezi thanked SAJFP and JDI. The latter’s involvement was limited to round-table private meetings.
It is hard, if not naive, to ignore the propaganda value for the NMF of Jewish support, even if only from a vocal minority. And in a country where the vast majority of Jews (around 90%) are staunchly Zionist.
The reality is that Jewish support for genocide claims against Israel is not always principled dissent or polemical discussion. It can create legal, moral and emotional landmines detonated from within.
US-Jewish atheist, neuroscientist, philosopher Sam Harris is not a Zionist. He has warned that Jewish endorsement lends “false moral authority” to genocide claims that quickly collapse under legal scrutiny.
Harris noticed the same phenomenon I noted on October 7: the genocide charge was being lobbed globally even before Israel had dropped a single bomb in Gaza in response to the massacre.
“That tells you something about the moral confusion we’re dealing with,” he said on a podcast.
Likewise, Canadian anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein has criticised the genocide claim as a “weaponised identity” tactic that is “ideologically driven, not evidence-based,” and fractures Jewish solidarity.
The reality remains that Jewish support for genocide, apartheid and starvation claims risks creating a halo of ideological cover to movements that, at best, want Israel and Jews demonised and terrorised.
At worst, these movements want Israel and Jews wiped clean from the earth’s face.
*Feature photo: UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese delivers the 23rd annual Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Sandton Convention Centre in Sandton, Johannesburg. (Photo: AFP)
About the writer:
Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).