A small subset of just about any population somehow manage to escape national or ideological conditioning, writes Lawrence Davidson. An example of such a person is U.N. Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese.
Girl in Gaza on her way to get food, Aug. 25, 2024. (Jaber Jehad Badwan / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Lawrence Davidson
TothePointAnalysis.com
Most folks are caught up in points of view shaped for them by others.
These others can vary from parents, teachers, religious figures, writers of various persuasions, podcasters and ideologically driven politicians of right or left who, in their worse manifestations are wolves in political clothing — a recent example of which now resides in the “Oval Office.”
In other words, there are plenty of would-be sources of inspiration out there, but it is always a good thing to look before you leap.
It is interesting that once a charismatic ideologue becomes a powerful “world leader,” a large number of other less powerful national leaders, to say nothing of their millions of constituents, fall into line.
If there is a political or ideological interest to be served, the less powerful might offer excuses and rationalizations to accept the most barbaric of policies of the principal in power.
This is the case of those Western European leaders going along with the policies of the American-Israeli leadership cabal. A principled stand, or even a stand based on the most cursory knowledge of history, seems to be beyond these subalterns. Yet, taken one by one, they are all “normal” politicians.
‘Normal’ Politicians
Many of the politicians who rotate as elected leaders of democratic nations must learn to reflect an established party line even if it no longer reflects reality. That is, even if it means lying about the present and/or de-contextualizing the past.
Take, for example, the reaction of otherwise normal politicians to the Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian incursion into Israel. The reaction of Israeli politicians was predictable and a good example of ideological distortion.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the incursion as “the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.” His claim follows the national Israeli narrative that asserts nothing Jewish Israel does can justify such an attack by Palestinians. It must be due to anti-Semitism.
In truth, the 2023 Palestinian incursion and the violence associated with it, had nothing to do with the Jewishness of the majority Israelis, but everything to do with the behavior of the Israeli state: the colonialist dispossession of the Palestinians and the discrimination practiced toward them by an entity that choses to call itself a Jewish state.
The anti-semitic charge might fit into the Israel = home of the Jews narrative believed by just about all Jews in Israel and some in the diaspora, but it is nonetheless misleading.
Until now, the Israeli narrative has been accepted by the West’s “normal” politicians. They have interpreted Oct. 7, 2023, as an anti-Semitic act.
For instance, the British prime minister at the time, Rishi Sunak, called the incursion a “pogrom.” French President Emmanuel Macron called it an “unspeakable horror” which “feeds on anti-Semitism and propagates it.”
U.S. President Joe Biden labeled the attack “unadulterated evil” and connected it to a global surge in anti-Semitism. The U.S. secretary of state at the time, Antony Blinken, condemned the incursion as a horrific dehumanization of Israelis.
Keir Starmer in the U.K., the current prime minister who was then the leader of the opposition Labour Party, termed the attack the “darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for solidarity against a “new wave of anti-Semitism,” while European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the incursion was a unique horror and pain inflicted upon the Jewish people.
Biden getting briefed in the Oval Office by Blinken on Oct. 9, 2023, about the Hamas assault on Israel two days earlier. (White House)
The subsequent revelation of Israel as a racist, apartheid state with a now realized proclivity for genocide may have shocked some of these “normal” politicians but with few exceptions (Spain) none have moved from tut-tut to action.
This is because their political consciousness has been shaped by, and remains focused on, their local geographical and social setting. This might entail Jewish and Christian Zionist voters and lobbies, as well as economic interests tied to the U.S. and Israel. These politicians are also those who usually help shape the “beyond the local” notions of what is going on.
Behind the scenes, historically what helps establish “normality” is devotion to some form of ideology. Certainly this was the case during the Cold War and now we might be in a period of transition (to what is unclear).
Often such traditionally accepted ideologies shapes the application of law.
Depending on what form the ideology takes it can cause high levels of paranoia rooted in the narrative the population has literally been raised on. Certainly this is the case in Israel.
This pertains to both the national leadership and the general population. The basis for this is a standardized educational program and structured mass media information.
Important is carrying on this education and information flow generation after generation. In this way, a particular point of view, even if expressing a racist and sectarian worldview, can become normalized and appear natural.
Hero
U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese addressing the Emergency Conference on Palestine in Bogota, Colombia, on July 16, 2025. (La Presidencia de Colombia/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Surprisingly, there exists a small subset of just about any population who somehow manage to escape national or ideological brainwashing.
At some point these individuals overcome mainstream prejudices and stereotypes. This allows them to potentially see the importance of law, both local and international, based on universal humanistic principles.
From the point of view of the “normal majority,” these individuals are sometimes seen as “social mistakes.” And yet, I repeat, they can be found in every population. An example of such a person is U.N. Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese.
The exact early experiences that led to Albanese’s sympathetic feelings for persecuted and discriminated groups is hard to pinpoint from the published literature. However, it no doubt is connected with the evolution of a profound respect for law and universal human rights. This led her to become a human rights lawyer who now has over two decades of experience in human rights law.
She was appointed to the U.N. post of special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2022. As special rapporteur, she “submits two reports annually, one to the Human Rights Council in Geneva and another to the General Assembly in New York City.” Here are some of her findings:
— In October 2022 in her first report, Albanese recommended that U.N. member states develop “a plan to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime under which Palestinians lived.” A regime that was “intentionally acquisitive, segregationist and repressive and designed to prevent the realization of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”
— in July 2023, at a meeting of a regular session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Albanese said: “There is no other way to define the regime that Israel has imposed on the Palestinians – which is apartheid by default – other than an open-air prison.”
— In February 2024, when many Western leaders were following Netanyahu’s lead and labeling the Palestinian incursion of Oct. 7, 2023, “the largest antisemitic massacre of our century,” Albanese gave a more nuanced view: the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre were killed not because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression. She insisted that “labeling these crimes as ‘anti-Semitic’ obscures the real reason they occurred.”
— In March 2024, Albanese reported to the U.N. Human Rights Council that “Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide.”
— In June 2025, the U.N. published a report by Albanese describing how “many corporate entities, including Microsoft, Alphabet Inc., and Amazon, were enabling and profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories and the Gaza genocide.”
Soon thereafter, President Donald Trump laid down sanctions on Albanese and her family, “Forbidding all U.S. persons and companies from doing business with her.” Essentially, Trump was accusing her of abnormal behavior.
Antihero
Tzipi Livni, while serving as Israeli justice minister, briefing the Israel Project in May 2013. (The Israel Project/ Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Humanitarian heroes can be recognized in comparison with their allegedly normal opposites. So it is in the case of Francesca Albanese. Here we will chose the former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Why? Because she appears to be principally dedicated to situational heartlessness and a disregard for international law.
Livni was born in 1958 to Polish-Israeli parents. Both of her parents had been members of Irgun Zvai Leumi, a rightwing radical party that eventually evolved into Likud. Brought up in the Israeli historical narrative and its peculiar hard-edged tribalism, Livni’s worldview became very different than that of Albanese.
In 2008-2009, Israel waged war against the Gaza Strip Palestinians in an operation known as “Cast Lead.” The Israeli violence also included a closure that strictly controlled what could enter and leave the Gaza Strip. This last part consisted of a sped up practice of the de-development of Gaza.
The Palestinian resistance used primitive, often homemade missiles directed towards Israeli territory directly across the border. At this time, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (a normal Israeli politician) laid out what an adversary could expect from Israel:
“Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing.”
A bit later she elaborated on Israeli behavior during operation Cast Lead: “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded.” She was here articulating not only her own, but the nation’s war doctrine.
As Ramzy Baroud notes in a piece published in The Middle East Monitor, “The idea was simple: overwhelming, disproportionate, and seemingly uncontrolled force would deter adversaries by making the cost of confrontation unbearable.”
This doctrine is not original with either Livni or Israel. In the 1930s and 40s, a similar doctrine was practiced by Nazi Germany under the name of blitzkrieg. More recently, the Americans have developed their own version which they refer to as “shock and awe.”
“Normal” is no longer working for Western societies in particular. Those in control of national governments (some considered world leaders) and the politicians who are party-dependent on them are the ones who are considered normal by their constituents.
Yet they are the ones who are either actively destroying any stable basis for international relations, or are acquiescing in such policies.
The local voter hardly knows what is going on beyond official proclamations of politicians and what they learn in the mass media. Social media is not a substitute for these flawed sources because it’s full of conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated opinion.
In this atmosphere the public ceases to be able to recognize a hero from the anti-hero. In most places, Israelis move about as members of a respected group while their critics are met with vitriol, and Palestinians are seen as terrorists.
The politicians who demonize Francesca Albanese and the media moguls who aid and abet this are not really normal. Like Oscar Wilde’s character Dorian Gray, their claim to normalcy is an illusion. The longer their constituents fail to recognize this fact, and in what direction their leaders are taking them, the world as a whole will also become an evermore abnormal, irrational place.
Lawrence Davidson is professor of history emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He has been publishing his analyses of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, international and humanitarian law and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010.
This article is from his site, TothePointAnalysis.com.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
