UN’s Albanese posts cartoon echoing age-old anti-Jewish spiderweb trope

The UN special rapporteur for the Palestinians, Francesca Albanese, last week posted a cartoon denouncing Israel, depicting what appears to be a global spiderweb, its strands draped with cash and weapons, in an image that experts said echoed age-old antisemitic tropes.

Albanese’s office said the cartoon was not meant to depict a spiderweb or Israel, and condemned antisemitism.

Albanese has a history of antisemitism and extremist rhetoric against Israel, according to her critics. She says she is a champion for Palestinian rights and an opponent of discrimination, including against Jews.

The cartoon, posted to Albanese’s 1.2 million followers on Instagram, shows four hands holding the corners of a globe-spanning web. Hanging on the strands are dollar bills, gold coins, a tank, a rifle and a bomb. The map depicted on the globe is ambiguous — at the center is a flame, apparently representing Israel and the war in Gaza.

Albanese posted the cartoon to advertise her latest report to the UN, titled “Gaza Genocide: a Collective Crime.”

“Israel’s genocide and settler-colonial occupation of Palestine are not isolated acts: they are the outcome of a global system of complicity,” Albanese wrote alongside the cartoon.

Authorities on antisemitism who viewed the cartoon said it was reminiscent of antisemitic tropes going back generations.

Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said Albanese’s cartoon was “unconscionable and makes a mockery of what the United Nations should represent.”

Albanese’s office denied that the cartoon depicted a spiderweb, characterizing the image as a “net.”

The cartoon was “intended to illustrate the role of Third States and the interlinkages among various sectors — diplomacy, trade, military and humanitarian,” said the UN secretariat of the mandate of the special rapporteur in the Palestinian territories.

“The image does not refer to, depict, or represent Israel or its people in any way. The illustration portrays a net spanning across these sectors to symbolize their interconnectedness. It is not meant to resemble a spider web, and we regret if it was perceived as such,” the secretariat said, adding that Albanese “has consistently affirmed that antisemitism is a scourge.”

The cartoon appears to show a spiderweb, with an irregular, ragged pattern of strands and concentric circles emanating from its center.

Albanese has also repeatedly referred to an international “web” fueling Israel and positioning Israel at the center of a global moral collapse. In the report released last week, which she advertised with the cartoon, she wrote that there was a “web of political, financial and military interests at play” in the war.

In a report released in June, Albanese also decried a “complex web” supporting Israel, and in a UN speech in July, she denounced a “global web” and a “web of corporate actors” for the war.

As a special rapporteur for the Palestinians, Albanese releases periodic investigative reports, and is granted a platform and authority to promulgate her views on the conflict.

Antisemitic imagery has long depicted Jews as spiders, or manipulating global affairs through a spider web, including in anti-Jewish propaganda distributed by the Nazis and the Soviet Union.

A 1934 edition of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an antisemitic forgery that has had a devastating impact on Jews worldwide, showed a Jewish spider straddling the globe.

Other old antisemitic tropes have cropped up among anti-Israel activists today, with Israel or Zionism replacing Jews, such as depicting Israel as an octopus, equating Zionism with disease, insinuating that Israelis killed Jesus Christ, or signs that intertwine a Star of David with a swastika, a motif that emerged in anti-Zionist propaganda Soviet Union.

Bloomfield, of the Holocaust museum, said of Albanese’s cartoon, “Portraying Jews as hidden manipulators of world events is an old antisemitic trope, one that long predated the Nazis and that they skillfully used in their propaganda to horrifically murderous effect.”

“Using images of spiders and spider webs to perpetuate this lie of Jewish secret control dehumanizes Jewish people, portraying them as something to be reviled. That these images are increasingly being mainstreamed is very dangerous,” Bloomfield said.

Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, said: “The identical motif has been used again and again in antisemitic Soviet propaganda; however, it has also been used by Nazis, and by antisemites in Japan, France, Portugal and undoubtedly elsewhere around the world.”

“I saw this image also in far-right Russian antisemitic press in the early 1990s in Russia. The point is that this is an image relating to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ The web is the world conspiracy. The spider, of course, is the Jew,” Brent said.

Last year, another UN special rapporteur released an anti-Israel cartoon that critics called antisemitic. Michael Fakhri, the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, released a cartoon focused on the Palestinians that showed a monstrous, multi-headed creature hoarding gold, bearing the labels “imperialism,” “capitalism” and “racism,” and attacking Palestine. A text bubble said, “Israel is not ‘defending itself’ against a ‘terrorist organization,’ but it is attacking the indigenous Palestinians as a people.”

Albanese, who is Italian, has been sanctioned by the US government for her “unabashed antisemitism” along with other anti-Israel international legal figures.

The Italian envoy to the UN called her most recent report “entirely devoid of credibility and impartiality” and that Albanese had “blatantly” violated the terms of her UN mandate.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reportedly called Albanese “a horrible person,” according to former US special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt.

Albanese has also come under legal pressure from civil groups. Last week, she was served in a US lawsuit while attending an event in her honor at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa, according to legal filings.

In the lawsuit, two pro-Israel Christian groups in the US sued Albanese for defamation and libel after she sent them threatening letters and condemned their ties to Israel in a UN report.

Speaking from South Africa last week, Albanese said Israel had no right to self-defense immediately after the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel; said Israelis should be “considered suspect” and investigated when they are abroad; said other countries should halt pharmaceutical exports to Israel; characterized Israel as a “genocidal society”; and positioned the Jewish state as an impediment to global justice.

“The Gaza genocide has turned Palestine as the epicenter of global reckoning,” she said.

“The Palestinian struggle for freedom stands at the heart of the movement toward a truly decolonized world order,” she said. “Palestine will increasingly stand at the center of all struggles for justice worldwide.”