- by FK
- The Guardian
- Issue #2192
Most people who know of Francesca Albanese will know about her situation rather than her views or writing. A high-achieving human rights lawyer, Albanese works as a UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. In that role, she has been outspoken and precise. There’s no shortage of people who describe, accurately, what Israel is doing to Palestinian people as a genocide, but Albanese can give clear legal reasons why the description is the right one, and can quote reliable authorities on the subject. What’s more, she does it for free – UN Rapporteurs are not paid.
Unsurprisingly, Albanese has been vilified as an antisemite and terrorism supporter, which she isn’t. There have been strenuous and sometimes successful efforts to prevent her addressing public forums in Germany and elsewhere. Most notoriously, Albanese has been the subject of US sanctions, leaving her unable to use bank accounts or travel. Fortunately a US judge has stopped the sanctions, pointing out that Albanese just gives her opinion and doesn’t harm anyone, and saying “please” in exasperation when confronted with some of the Trump administration’s more preposterous charges.
Albanese is a powerful public speaker who doesn’t waste a word. It has been a delight to hear her brush off the evasions of Australian journalists who are used to describing Israel-Palestine using the ‘both sides’ approach. They squirmed at the use of the word ‘genocide,’ but Albanese would have none of it.
In this book she explains why the term ‘conflict’ is misleading, implying that there are two equal sides and that the Palestinians had a choice. “Conflict,” she writes,” requires two vaguely comparable sides. Israel and Palestine are not comparable antagonists: one is the occupier and the other the occupied.”
With all this in mind, the reader is primed to want While the world sleeps to be brilliant from end to end. It isn’t. It’s a book well worth reading, but there’s a fair bit of flab.
What makes this book worth getting into is that it presents intimate and caring portraits of the lives of individual Palestinians Albanese has met through her work living in Jerusalem and visiting other parts of Palestine in person and electronically. We meet Mohammed, who she first meets eating mulberries from a tree outside her house. We meet Kassim, a lawyer she works with, who helps her explain the definition of genocide as it applies to what Israel is doing in Palestine.
Albanese tells of the plight of Malak a Gazan artist who struggled to produce her art and to move out of Palestine to present it to the world.
We also meet a lot of Palestinian children in a heartrending section in which every vignette ends with the words “this is childhood in Palestine.” These are children who see family members killed or imprisoned on a regular basis, children who can be imprisoned for years on the say-so of Israeli magistrates. As Albanese says, “a legal system that treats an entire people as a collective threat can have no legitimacy.”
The parents’ plight reminds Albanese of the Roberto Benigni movie Life is Beautiful in which the hero uses his imagination to keep children happy in a concentration camp.
So what’s not to like? Well, there’s a lot of Albanese herself in it, unavoidably so. She’s justly proud of her phenomenal work ethic and successful legal career, but there are times when the reader would like more of the people whose stories she’s telling and less Albanese being successful enjoying life in Jerusalem. It’s not the whole story, but there’s a bit of smugness here.
There’s a certain banality in her use of quotations and material. The introduction tells us breathlessly that Orwell’s “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is force” line has “never been more topical and pertinent” than in the debate about Israel and Palestine. There is certainly a massive amount of hypocrisy, bad faith and doublethink in relation to Palestine, but doublethink existed a long time before Orwell did.
She also cites the blockbuster movie Avatar as a perfect illustration of the Palestinian situation, which seems to be stretching it a lot. Besides Avatar was an awful piece of sugary oversimplification when it came to oppression.
There’s a fair amount of what we could call woolly liberalism in Albanese’s overview of the situation. She misunderstands the ‘butterfly effect’ to suggest that if we all take action big things will happen. The actual ‘butterfly effect’ is more complex than that and draws a different moral, but we see what she’s getting at. It’s a nice idea and this review is certainly not suggesting that individuals shouldn’t take action, but the hand-waving stuff is annoying.
Overall the book is worth reading for bringing the situation of actual Palestinian people to life and for the clear-eyed and detailed understanding of the exactly how what Israel is doing to Palestine and its people is illegal and genocidal.
Seven out of ten red stars. J
