The United Nations' Human Rights Commission's (HRC) Oct 21 report on the plight of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories must be the boldest ever. Call it the HRC's October War on the Zionist regime and UN.
In the report, the first for special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, a no-nonsense Italian academic jurist, says Tel Aviv continues to flagrantly violate all the rights of the Palestinians and the UN refuses to hold the regime accountable.
To her, justice for Palestinians is only possible if they are given the right to self-determination. Albanese's point is this: if the Palestinians are not free to determine their political status and pursue their economic, social and cultural development as a people, other rights will almost certainly not be realised.
The Zionist regime is furious and is spinning yarns about HRC and Albanese being anti-Semitic. Unsurprisingly, Tel Aviv's allies are too willing to buy it.
The United States even paralysed the UN Security Council into inaction. We must give it to the Zionists.
They are great storytellers, even if their narratives are inconsistent with international laws and norms. Facts are plenty in the report, but expect Tel Aviv's fiction to cloud the foggy minds of the willing.
Two facts will do. One, the UN Charter of 1945 is clear when it declares that one of UN's primary objectives is guaranteeing the "equal rights and self-determination of peoples".
The UN General Assembly's 1960 resolution (1514 (XV) gave flesh to this principle, thus: "All peoples have an inalienable right to complete freedom, the exercise of their sovereignty and the integrity of their national territory."
Two, is the use of international law to end illegal occupation and forms of subjugation as in Namibia in the 1950s and Ukraine this year. If the international community can take the two cases to international tribunals, such as the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and ad hoc tribunals, the General Assembly or the Security Council, why not do the same for the illegal occupation of Palestine?
To Albanese, "under the law of external self-determination, the Palestinian people are entitled to and must enjoy comparable international cooperation and determined action". If history is needed as a proof, the 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations provided such a right to the Palestinians.
Yet, why the more than a century of subjugation and occupation of the Palestinians? In an apparent response to such a question, Albanese takes the Zionist regime to task.
Tel Aviv's continued defiance of UN resolutions, she argues, has made Palestinian resistance legal. The nature of its occupation is "intentionally acquisitive, segregationist and repressive" and "designed to prevent the realisation of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination".
As for the UN, it stands guilty of repeatedly failing to hold the Zionist regime accountable.
Albanese message is this: the Zionist regime must dismantle its settler-colonial occupation and apartheid practices immediately and unconditionally, and make reparations for all its wrongful acts. About time someone spoke truth to power.