This article originally appeared on JNS.org on February 9, 2026.
Humanity, we are told, now has a “common enemy.” That enemy, according to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, is Israel—the Jewish state itself.
Albanese delivered this revelation Saturday night via video link at an Al Jazeera forum in Qatar, during a panel titled “The Palestinian Cause in a World Moving Toward Multipolarity.” She appeared on the same conference program as Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. This setting alone should have disqualified any claim to neutrality or moral authority.
Israel, Albanese explained, is the force destroying the world, peace and the lives of all humanity. It is the “common enemy” against which the global community must now unite. A familiar accusation, recycled endlessly through history, merely stripped of its older theological language and repackaged in the jargon of international law.
This is not an analysis; it is a caricature. Israel is a country of roughly 10 million people—seven million of them Jews—so small it barely fits its name on a map. It is surrounded by states that have spent decades and billions of dollars attempting to erase it.
Those states have failed to produce a fraction of Israel’s scientific, agricultural, technological and democratic achievements. To Albanese, this is proof not of vitality or resilience, but of diabolical intent.
She invokes, approvingly, the language of Iran’s supreme leader, who has openly called Israel a “cancer” that must be removed, while financing Hamas and Hezbollah, building nuclear weapons and firing missiles at Israeli cities. Iran, she suggests, should not distract us with its own crimes—tens of thousands of Iranian citizens killed for demanding freedom. No, the Jews are worse. They are the universal enemy.
This is not accidental rhetoric. It is ideological training. Albanese presents herself as the authoritative voice of truth, speaking “in the name of the United Nations,” urging audiences to expel Jews—from schools, workplaces, social life and, ultimately, from Israel itself. The familiar progression is there for anyone willing to see it.
Israel’s repeated offers to share the land are dismissed as propaganda. The Oslo Accords, the withdrawal from Gaza, the steady growth of the Palestinian population—none of this matters. Israel’s real crime, in Albanese’s telling, is that it is still alive.
Her appearance in Doha was particularly revealing. Sharing a platform with Hamas’s leader and Iran’s foreign minister, she condemned countries that maintain relations with Israel or engage in arms trade with it, accusing the West of amplifying a “genocidal” narrative. Yet she insisted that this moment also presents an “opportunity,” because, she claimed, international law has been “stabbed in the heart.”
What Albanese calls the last “peaceful toolbox” for freedom is, in practice, the weaponization of international law against the Jewish state. It is law drained of evidence, context and moral clarity, deployed selectively to justify terror and absolve those who celebrate it.
No, Francesca Albanese. The common enemy of the West—and of all those who genuinely seek peace—is not Israel. It is those who abuse international law to launder propaganda for Hamas, who distort the Holocaust, who deny documented atrocities, and who sit comfortably alongside jihadist leaders and Iranian officials while pretending to speak for human rights.
History has seen this story before. What is new is not the accusation, but the brazenness with which it is now delivered—under a U.N. title, on a Qatari stage, to applause. This is what should convince us to continue fighting until we destroy our enemies.
