Gaza genocide debate sparks rift in South Africa after Albanese visit: Marika Sboros
Key topics:
Albanese’s SA visit fuelled BDS support and ICJ case vs Israel.
Her lecture condemned Israel repeatedly, sparking Jewish community split.
Experts criticise her genocide framing as legally and factually flawed.
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By Marika Sboros
Francesca Albanese’s whistlestop visit to South Africa has ended less like the lecture tour, as it was billed, and more like a political rally.
One main aim was to bolster South Africa’s flagging International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel on a charge of genocide in Gaza. Another was expressly to support the global BDS (Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction) movement.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation invited Albanese, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to deliver its 23rd Annual Lecture on October 25, 2025 in Sandton.
It did so at the behest of its Chair, former Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor.
Albanese also spoke in Cape Town on October 26 at the Groote Kerk. She released her latest UN report remotely at the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation headquarters on October 28.
Her visit quickly widened existing divisions in South Africa’s Jewish community. It raised concerns over appropriateness – or lack thereof – of the NMF inviting a person sanctioned in the US for ties to terror groups to deliver its prestigious annual lecture.
Wendy Kahn, national director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) released a statement saying that the NMF had “betrayed its founding values” in hosting Albanese, “a figure globally condemned for antisemitic rhetoric and Holocaust inversion”.
Under Pandor’s chairpersonship, the NMF, once an institution that symbolised unity, integrity and reconciliation had become a “platform for division and hate”, 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”, she said.
Albanese’s lecture title was Enhancing Peace and Global Cooperation. As a speaker, she was charismatic, articulate, passionate and lyrical in equal measure.
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There was little peaceful in her delivery and content. Nor was there any 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.
Albanese chose her words carefully and described the NMF invitation as a “call to destiny”. She opened by declaring that “the world is watching its conscience collapse”.
She mostly called Gaza “Falasteen” throughout. Falasteen is the Arabic name for Palestine. It carries significant cultural, political and emotional weight.
Albanese drew direct lines between Nelson Mandela’s ideals and “the cruellest injustice of our time” – her synonym for the “genocide” she claims Israel has perpetuated in Gaza.
She used the word, Jew, just once in her lecture.
Albanese repeated the word, genocide, not just once in her 60-minute lecture. She intoned it 21 times, with increasingly demagogic intensity. At every single mention, she enunciated every one of genocide’s three syllables.
She called Israel’s war in Gaza a “textbook case of genocide”.
She called South Africa’s ICJ case “a moment of historic resonance” and warned of “huge repercussions from the (US)”.
Albanese framed genocide as a money-making venture for Israel, the US and other countries.
She said the “genocide” had pierced the “veil of Maya” and revealed the “underlying geopolitical calculation of the world’s most powerful nations”. The veil of Maya is a Hindu philosophical concept that describes the illusion obscuring true reality, making the world of appearances seem real while concealing the ultimate unity of existence.
Albanese spoke of genocide in overblown terms as “the dormant gene of an apartheid regime rooted in settler-colonialism”. Apartheid was another leit motief in her lecture’s threads.
She omitted any mention, even the slightest, of the event that started Israel’s war against Hamas: the genuine genocide aimed at Jews in Israel that Hamas intended by invading southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and attacking mostly civilian targets.
The October 7 massacre was so unprecedented in savagery that it quickly slipped into the annals of history as the worst terror attack in Israel and in modern history.
Details are known but bear repeating, since denialism is still rampant and in light of Albanese’s omissions in her lecture:
More than 1200 people were murdered and more than 5000 injured, most of them civilians, including children, babies, and the elderly.
Terrorists mass-raped women and children, the youngest, a girl aged just eight years, some of them so violently that their pelvises shattered.
They tortured, burnt alive and shot to death children in front of their parents, parents in front of their children.
The terrorists kidnapped more than 250 people, most of them civilians, and took them back to Gaza as hostages. Among those was young mother Shiri Bibas, and her sons, 10-month-old Kfir Bibas and Ariel, aged four. Terrorists murdered all three in captivity.
Captured terrorists revealed orders to kill, rape and kidnap as many Jews as possible. Hamas’s charter remains explicitly genocidal against Israel and Jews. Its leader vow publicly to repeat October 7 “again and again, until Israel is annihilated”.
Albanese’s UN report, entitled Gaza Genocide: Collective Crime, continues genocide claims. It highlights the complicity of over sixty governments, including Western and Arab states, through military, economic, diplomatic and humanitarian support.
She has support from legal experts, including eminent Jewish legal scholars and human rights advocates. Many equally eminent legal experts, Jewish and non-Jewish, vigorously disagree.
Each has offered legal critiques implicitly or explicitly challenging Albanese’s framing of genocide in Gaza. Each refers to 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” underscores that intent, not scale alone, defines the crime. It stresses a legal threshold that legal experts say Israel has not met in its military response to October 7, as it targets Hamas, not Gazan civilians.
Together, these analyses form cross-institutional rebuke of Albanese’s genocide rhetoric.
Legal scholars likewise criticise Albanese’s repeated invoking of apartheid and starvation claims, supported by human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, echoing such framing.
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They argue that collapsing genocide, apartheid and starvation into a single narrative politicises international law and weakens its deterrent power.
Albanese resolutely ignores Hamas’s role in deliberately precipitating and maximising civilian deaths in Gaza by using human shields as a propaganda tactic and to create starvation hoaxes.
Former UN official Richard Falk has admitted that Hamas’s control of aid distribution and use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes “complicates the picture”.
In her own words, Albanese’s antagonism to Israel and Jews who support it is well-documented.
She has indulged in Holocaust distortion, trivialisation and Nazi comparisons. On October 14, 2024, Albanese likened the systematic extermination of Jews under the Nazi’s “pure race” policy to Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza.
She has spread antisemitic tropes about Jews, money and power. She has denied or diminished October 7 atrocities and justified Hamas violence as “resistance”.
Still, she has fans globally and in South Africa.
Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi formally apologised to Albanese for being “irregularly served” with US court papers on a defamation charge connected to her claims during her visit.
Kubayi said the incident “did not reflect the values of justice and dignity South Africa stands for”.
Reverend René August, of SA Christians for a Free Palestine, called Albanese’s presence “a moral reckoning”. August apologised on “behalf of civil society” for the legal harassment she faced.
NMF Ceo Dr Mbongiseni Buthelezi, said that Albanese “embodies” its mission and annual lectures that are “meant to stir trouble, not comfort”.
The NMF invited some Jews to have private, round-table meetings with Albanese. Among those were the Jewish Democratic Initiative (JDI) and South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP).
Predictably perhaps, neither the SAJBD nor the South African Zionist Federation received invitations.
Anton Harber, veteran journalist, former professor of journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand and JDI board member, has described Albanese as “powerful, passionate and interesting”.
Harber attended the JDI’s round-table meeting with Albanese and found her “gracious, open and highly intelligent”. He did not attend Albanese’s lecture but listened to it on YouTube.
It contained nothing new, he said, and expressed “surprise” at her use of “non-legal, non-diplomatic language”. However, Albanese “expresses views that the Jewish community should engage with, not close their ears to”, Harber said.
Dr Max Price, former Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town and a JDI member, also attended the round-table and found it productive.
He had read Albanese’s recent report on how companies globally were benefitting from the war in Gaza and “occupation of the Palestinian territories” and wanted to “engage her views on questions of sanctions”.
She came across as” balanced”, he told me via email. “She showed understanding and empathy with the impact that the Hamas massacre had had on Israeli society.
“She also is clearly well read about Fascism in Europe and the Holocaust and appreciates its impact on Jews ever since, and the lessons for the world.”
He described Albanese as “an important voice globally”.
Such engagement is often “especially productive with people with whom, on some issues, you disagree.”
Price said he found her lecture disappointing and one-sided.
“As a rapporteur on human rights, I expected her to comment also, and in fact to condemn, the war crimes committed by Hamas and their historic genocidal goals and statements,” he said.
Albanese had condemned Hamas atrocities in the past, Price said.
“Not to have done so in the context of this lecture, compromises her credibility.”
Harber has dismissed criticisms of the NMF event, saying it was “shameful” that the SAJBD “should shun” the NMF.
The JDI is “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’s important because it is imperative to open up and face hard issues in debate about Zionism, Israel and Jewishness.”
He said that JDI’s involvement with the NMF Foundation was only in accepting the invitation to hold a round-table meeting with Albanese.
Buthelezi, in his opening remarks at the Annual Lecture event, thanked all sponsors, including Gift of the Givers, whose 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, he thanked SAJFP and JDI.
It is hard, if not naïve, to ignore the propaganda advantage for the NMF and the media blitz and support that followed Albanese’s visit.
The reality is that Jewish support for genocide claims against Israel and Jews is not always principled dissent or polemical discussion. It can create legal, moral, emotional landmines detonated from within.
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US-Jewish atheist, neuroscientist philosopher Sam Harris is not a Zionist. He noticed the same phenomenon I noted on October 7: The genocide charge was being lobbed even before Israel had dropped a single bomb in response to the massacre.
“That tells you something about the moral confusion we’re dealing with,” he says.
Harris warns that Jewish endorsement lends false moral authority to genocide claims that collapse under legal scrutiny.
Likewise, Canadian anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein has described the genocide claim as a “weaponised identity” tactic that fractures Jewish solidarity.
By default or design, Jewish support for genocide claims risks creating a halo of ideological cover to movements that at best, want Israel and Jews globally vilified and terrorised.
At worst, they want Israel and Jews wiped clean from the earth’s face.