Acceptable Colonialism
Francesca Albanese Lectures the World on Colonialism. She Might Want to Visit the Arch of Titus
Francesca Albanese has emerged as one of the UN’s most confident moral commentators, not because she has uncovered anything new, but because she applies a single academic framework to every conflict she addresses. Her method is simple. History is reduced to two roles, coloniser and colonised, and once those labels are assigned, the verdict follows automatically. Israel is cast as the settler-colonial aggressor, Palestinians as the indigenous victims, and Europe as the ever-present imperial engine behind it all. The result is moral clarity achieved at the expense of historical complexity.
The approach is effective because it caters to an audience already inclined to accept it. In an international environment predisposed to see Israel through a colonial lens, Albanese’s arguments gain traction they would struggle to earn on evidentiary grounds alone. Remove the academic jargon and the stock villains, and the structure collapses under the weight of the history she chooses not to confront.
She frequently invokes global examples of indigenous dispossession, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, First Nations, to situate Palestinians within a universal narrative of colonial injustice. Yet one indigenous history is conspicuously absent from her analysis. That of the Jewish people, whose past is literally carved into the city in which she lives.
If Albanese is serious about confronting colonial erasure, she could begin with a short walk through Rome to the Arch of Titus. Its reliefs depict, in unmistakable detail, the Roman conquest of Judea. The plunder of the Second Temple, the enslavement of its population, and the triumphal celebration of a crushed revolt in the Jews’ own homeland. Few monuments offer a clearer record of imperial domination. Rome did not merely conquer Judea. It renamed it Syria Palaestina in an explicit effort to sever Jewish ties to the land. If that episode does not qualify as colonialism, the term has little analytical meaning left.
This history, however, plays no role in Albanese’s narrative. Nor does the continuous Jewish presence in the land over millennia, the indigenous origins of Hebrew, or the survival of Jewish communities through successive empires. Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, British. These facts complicate her preferred storyline, so they are set aside.
Instead, Zionism is presented as a purely European project, as if Jews appeared in the region for the first time in the nineteenth century with no prior connection to it. That framing requires ignoring the destruction of the Second Temple, the Bar Kokhba revolt, and the forced dispersal that followed. It depends on treating 1948 as the beginning of history, rather than one moment in a much longer and more painful arc.
This is not historical analysis. It is ideological reductionism. The application of a single theory to a far more complicated reality, with little regard for what does not fit.
The irony deepens when one considers Albanese’s own background. She is from Ariano Irpino in Campania, a region whose Jewish presence exists precisely because of Roman colonial violence. After Jerusalem fell, Jews were enslaved, displaced, and forcibly resettled across Campania. Pozzuoli, Nola, Capua, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Naples. They did not arrive as settlers. They arrived as captives and exiles.
This is not conjecture. Inscriptions, funerary markers, communal symbols, and archaeological strata document Jewish life in these towns from the first century onward. The diaspora in Campania is not metaphorical. It is the product of a documented imperial project aimed at breaking a people’s connection to its homeland.
That context makes Albanese’s claims all the more striking. A UN mandate holder from a region populated by Jews because Rome uprooted them from Judea now lectures those same people, or their descendants, about being settler-colonial interlopers. The irony is almost geological in its precision. Displacement upon displacement, preserved in stone.
Intellectual honesty demands more serious engagement with history than a binary morality play. History is layered and contested, and it does not submit to ideological templates.
If Francesca Albanese wishes to continue lecturing the world on colonialism, she might begin by acknowledging the most thoroughly documented case of it in the region, the one Rome immortalized in marble. The Arch of Titus is still standing. The evidence has not vanished. It does not require interpretation, only recognition.
If she chooses not to look, that decision is no longer academic. It becomes moral. At some point, the refusal to acknowledge Jewish indigeneity, history, and displacement stops being a blind spot and starts looking like intent.
And if that intent persists, critics will continue to draw their own conclusions. Not that she is merely careless with history, but that she is engaged in something older and uglier. A modern, credentialed version of a tradition that portrays Jews as perpetual impostors, eternal interlopers, uniquely undeserving of the rights granted to every other people. A narrative polished for contemporary audiences, but rooted in something far from new.
She can dispel that charge easily. All it would take is intellectual honesty and a glance at the record carved into stone.
If she will not do even that, she should not be surprised if others conclude that the accusations she dismisses are not smears at all, but descriptions.