Francesca Albanese has reached celebrity status, relatively speaking, as the UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She is adored by many for her work and her values, embodying, as she does, the struggle for human rights and for social justice in an increasingly unjust world. And speaking, as she does, to the frustrations that many harbour about global inaction in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Since Donald Trump’s administration sanctioned her nine months ago, her star power has gone stratospheric.
In When the World Sleeps, her writing skills add to her profile. This is a beautifully crafted book, weaving together the legal work she undertakes to achieve justice for Palestinians, with her personal story of a relationship she has built with that part of the world and the people who live there. Human rights lawyers don’t always succeed in making their work accessible but Albanese draws the reader into her story with humility, compassion and honesty, and then permeates it with the hard facts and analysis from her UN reporting work.
She schools us effortlessly on the intricacies behind the headlines and statistics. For example on anti-Semitism: “ ... by making improper equations between anti-Semitism and criticism of the State of Israel, one fails to focus on the real anti-Semitism that is repugnant and still exists.”
When the World Sleeps is made up of 10 chapters, each titled with the name of a person in Albanese’s life or work, and each capturing an element of life in Gaza. Her reporting work covers childhood, detention and displacement, along with more unexpected angles of the Palestinian story; the architecture of occupation, and anti-Semitism and its weaponisation. In its totality, it is a detailed picture of modern occupation, apartheid and genocide.
READ MORE
In the chapters covering her time in Jerusalem, we meet a cast of characters and explore the city. In doing so, Albanese vividly brings to life the specific ways in which apartheid has been imposed on the Palestinian people. For example, the four different categories that Palestinians are ranked in, and what that means for their access and permissions. Or the ways in which Palestinians are removed or blocked from their own homes through forced eviction and intimidation.
This concept of home is part of Albanese’s meditation throughout the book and how, for Palestinians, home is where you flee from, not a place you go to for safety. The control imposed by the Israeli state over the places that Palestinians inhabit – homes, schools, hospitals – has been in place for many decades. But now, since October 7th, 2023, it has moved up the gears to impose the devastation we now witness. “Genocide ... does not start from scratch, it does not consist of sudden escalation, but is grafted onto pre-existing structures and mechanisms.”
This is, at times, a very intimate story. We learn that Albanese is called Franci by her husband and Frenci by her Palestinian friends, that she’s an early riser (this is how she ends up exploring Jerusalem over multiple breakfasts with her new neighbours) and how she dealt simultaneously with the twin grief of the loss of life in Gaza, and her mother’s dementia setting in. In the first chapter, she describes the juxtaposition of remote interviews with the children of Gaza while on holiday with her own children in Sicily. The final chapter is entitled Max, for her partner who has supported her throughout this challenging career and has shared her life and experiences in the Middle East.
Living in a time of such horror, no matter where we are on the globe, affects us all. We process it, we feel the tragedy, and in this, our social media era, we witness it in harrowing detail. This book, this testimony, even with Albanese’s proximity to such grief and suffering, brings hope. Because she refuses to allow it to die. “For some time now, I have sensed a growing feeling of renewal almost everywhere, as if the seeds of a revolution were germinating, preparing to rise up against political dissatisfaction.”
In a paragraph that gave actual goosebumps, she recounts the role of an Irishwoman in setting off a chain reaction that contributed to bringing down the system of apartheid South Africa many decades ago. “It began in Ireland in 1984, when Mary Manning, a twenty-one-year-old supermarket cashier, in accordance with the directives of her union, refused to handle grapefruit from South Africa.” We know what happened from here.
If you think this book might be too hard to read, think again. It will genuinely help you to understand the “how did we get here?”, the gritty details. Because we all have to be a part of making it stop, and we all must make sure that it never ever happens again.
Sinéad Gibney is a Social Democrat TD for Dublin-Rathdown.
