“J’Accuse!” novelist Emile Zola declared in 1898 in an open letter accusing the French government of antisemitism for its prosecution of a Jewish officer framed for treason, Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

That exhortation is now being used by the United Nations’s Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, as she castigates and mocks Israel for its response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre. “J’accuse!” serves as the title for her forthcoming book.  

It is a move which, one can speculate, would have Zola seething. An avowed foe of the Jewish state, Ms. Albanese has co-opted a phrase that has long telegraphed outrage at antisemitism and slapped it on the cover of her new book. The monograph’s subtitle promises to expound on “The October 7 Attack, Hamas, Terrorism, Israel, Apartheid in Palestine and the War.”

Ms. Albanese, who was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, a bastion of anti-Israel sentiment, claims to illustrate the “indisputable” reality of “apartheid and neocolonial occupation with thousands of victims.” Israel objected to her appointment last year, calling her “unfit” and accusing her of “endlessly voicing anti-Israel libel.”  

The expropriation of Zola’s phrase is part of “a campaign against Israel and the Jewish people to try as much as possible to co-opt our terminology,” a director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, tells the Sun. “Campaigners on behalf of Hamas and the Palestinian cause always try to invoke and evoke imagery of Jewish suffering and transpose it to them.”

In 1894, Dreyfus was convicted in France of selling military secrets to the Germans. We now know the true culprit was an aristocrat, Ferdinand Esterhazy. While large swaths of the public were quick to think the worst of Dreyfus, Zola was convinced of his innocence. He wrote a letter to that effect to the president of the French Republic, Félix Faure. The controversy, which lasted years and split French society in the years before World War I, became known as L’Affaire Dreyfus. 

“Spirits of social evil” is how Zola described the French officials who were complicit in Dreyfus’s persecution. “The act I am hereby accomplishing is only a revolutionary means to hasten the explosion of truth and justice,” he wrote in his letter, published as “J’Accuse” in the French newspaper L’Aurore.

To avoid jail for his act of libel against the Third Republic, Zola fled to England, where he continued to defend Dreyfus, who was finally exonerated in 1906, but not before enduring a second conviction and a long spell as a prisoner on the French penal colony of Devil’s Island. 

The degradation of Dreyfus  — he was publicly stripped of his rank before a braying and hostile crowd  — also outraged the Viennese journalist and father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who covered the affair as Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse. It is thought that this exposure furthered his conviction of the necessity of  a Jewish state.     

Now, it is the Jewish state envisioned by Herzl that is locked in a war — at Gaza and in the press. While Ms. Albanese’s book, published last week, is currently available only in her native language of Italian, the Wiesenthal Center warns that it “is meant to become a bestseller for the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and antisemitic camp worldwide.”

“Non-existent” is how Ms. Albanese described, in an address last month, Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas’s aggression. “What Israel was allowed to do was to act to establish law and order, to repel the attack, neutralize whomever was carrying out the attacks and then proceed with law and order measures,” she said, “not waging a war.”

In an October report to the UN’s General Assembly, she called for the protection of Palestinian children from Israeli forces, or what she calls “the tyranny of foreign military rule.” She cited the deaths of 1,434 Palestinian children between 2008 and October 6 — notably excluding Hamas’s massacre of more than a thousand Israelis on October 7.

“To address the crisis,” Ms. Albanese said, “it is imperative to comprehend what led to it. This does not mean justifying or downplaying the heinous crimes against Israeli civilians on 7 October; rather it compels us to face that horror in the context of what preceded it.”

“These are highly educated people,” says Rabbi Cooper of Ms. Albanese and her colleagues. “They know exactly what they’re doing.” As a special rapporteur, “she’s just using her diplomatic posts,” he says, “in order to pummel Israel,” not to harness the platform of the international community to help Palestinian Arabs, as her job as a so-called independent expert commands. 

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights did not immediately respond to the Sun’s requests for comment.