Reading has been a key continuity in the flow of my life, a primary focus since I was a child enthusiastically bringing home armloads of library books each week.
Appetizer:
This is the first printed illustration of a rhombicuboctahedron, based on an original drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. It is in the book De Divina Proportione by geometer Luca Pacioli, which was created in 1509.
Francesca Albanese, When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine
Translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti; very well narrated by Lameece Issaq
Francesca Albanese is someone I greatly admire for her clear vision reporting on the situation in Palestine in her role as UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 2022, her commitment to telling the truth, and her unwavering courage, especially in the face of organizations, politicians, and countries who have been trying desperately to silence her.
I am the eighth person, and first woman, to serve as the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967. Though the work is pro bono, the mandate is demanding.
In this role, as one among more than fifty UN independent experts (the crown jewel of the UN, as late UN secretary-general Kofi Annan used to call us), I strive to embody what Said modeled: a truthful witness. Impartiality does not mean indifference; it means investigating rigorously, judging facts against the law, and speaking truth to power – even when it's inconvenient. In Palestine, this entails exposing the deep asymmetry between occupier and occupied, colonizer and colonized, and showing how decades of dispossession have been normalized by an international community that is unwilling to act.
This powerful book she has written shares the stories of ten people who provide clarity about Palestine. She shares the firsthand experience of several Palestinians who have been witnessing and experiencing the genocide and colonial oppression, as well as several over people who provide deep context.
AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS BOOK I said that I had chosen ten people as the focal point for my stories, since from each of them I learned something essential about Palestine. The first is Hind; the second is Abu Hassan; the third is George; the fourth is Alon; the fifth is Ingrid; the sixth is Ghassan; the seventh is Eyal; the eighth is Malak; the ninth is Gabor.
The tenth is Max. My life partner, the person with whom I set foot for the first time in Palestine and the one with whom, three years later, I decided to leave Palestine. But Palestine is like that: You can also choose to leave it, but for those who have been there, have seen it and experienced it, it will not be the one who leaves you. My life is proof of this.
Despite the horrors of genocide and colonial oppression that the people of Palestine are suffering and that Albanese has been bearing witness to, she maintains an optimistic outlook.
I strongly believe in the possibility of coming together as a human family, rediscovering the true and profound meaning of solidarity.
If there is one lesson I carry with me, it is this: standing together with courage, even against entrenched power, makes change not only possible, but inevitable.
I appreciate the insights and wisdom she shares of several Jewish and Jewish Israeli scholars and experts who are colleagues and friends.
I also very much appreciate the chapter, "ALON: How do you recognize anti-semitism?
TODAY MORE THAN EVER, when Palestinians and those who defend them are accused of anti-Semitism, we must understand what is meant by anti-Semitism and what dangers can derive from the misuse of this term.
It is crucial to understand the answer to this question, especially now when many people, politicians, organizations, and governments who support Israel's actions are accusing people who criticize Israel's actions of being anti-Semitic.
And I appreciate the glimpse of what the future might look like that she shares.
What might that future look like? Though any long-term solution will need to be decided upon by Israelis and Palestinians themselves, I can say with confidence that a lasting peace will require sacrifice from everyone, most of all from Israelis—not of their rights as human beings, to live in peace, security, and dignity with their neighbors, but of their privileges as citizens of a settler colony built on the denial of indigenous self-determination. True peace can only be built on equality and freedom for all, grounded in a vision of universal justice that affords equal rights and responsibilities to all, regardless of their race or nationality.
Not to betray [author Edward] Said’s message, I resolutely include the Israelis in this rehumanizing discourse. Like the Palestinians, they are part of an anachronistic settler-colonial endeavor, of course with unequal responsibilities and suffering. Ending Jewish Israeli domination will be a rehumanizing act. No one can oppress and brutalize others without themselves experiencing a loss of humanity in the process.
And meanwhile, one thing is for certain: This future will be made possible only by the work we do today. What matters now is that the current injustice is stopped immediately and further injustice is prevented; it is up to us, international civil society, lawyers, students, and citizens of the world, to take responsibility and use our voices to demand our governments meet their obligations and protect the multilateral international order that is threatened now more than ever.
When the world sleeps, it falls on us, we the people, to wake it up—and now more than ever the world needs an awakening.
The cover of the book is a painting by Malak Mallar titled "No Words", which has come to be known as the Guernica of Gaza,".
I looked at Malak's lunar face, very sweet but marked and hardened by violence, by oppression, while she told me that even there in London many things are very difficult for her. For example, now she is looking for a house that can accommodate the whole family when her parents manage to join her, but the rents are too expensive and, with her scholarship, it's really complex. Theirs is a wonderful scenario, because they are all alive, especially when compared to the constant anguish that Malak felt before her family managed to get to Egypt, when she knew that they had no food, that they were under a rain of bombs, and that they risked death every moment. Yet, she told me that every time they could talk on the phone, her father only asked her: "So, what are you painting these days?"
At first, Malak did not understand: "But what does it matter, Dad?"
Then he explained it to her: "You are there for a reason, Malak. You have to paint our lives, our struggle, all that we are going through. You are an artist, so "you are our voice."
Those words, she told me, she will never forget. Hearing the survivor of a genocide ask her to give voice, through painting, to what her people were experiencing, was an enormous responsibility for her, and what an honor. It was from there that the idea of a monumental work took shape: a painting of almost sixteen by six feet in which she tried to convey everything she could not say in words. It came to be known as "the Guernica of Gaza," even though its real title is No Words. It is a work that was born from the heart of the ongoing genocide and is entirely in black and white, because, as she explained in an interview, "only black can reflect reality, a horrible reality that silences us." Malak no longer sees the colors of her homeland.
On the walls, graffiti shouts in Arabic and English: "Gaza will live forever" and "Gaza will persecute you." In the canvas you can see animals feeding on the corpses left to rot. In the center, a distraught man rides a donkey, his mouth wide open with pain, shock, shame. Around him, bodies and rubble: women, men, children. The composition is dense with raw details, with a violence that saturates the space. Houses, schools, mosques, cultural centers: Everything has been destroyed. No one speaks anymore in that work.
Malak has painted silence. She has painted the disappearance of journalists, artists, poets, intellectuals. A work that freezes the blood in your veins, Malak knows that.
But her art is pure expression, without filters, both when she sees the world in black and white, and when she uses colors in her own unique way, as in the painting that illustrates the cover of this book and from which we have drawn inspiration for the title: When the World Sleeps.em>
Translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti; very well narrated by Lameece Issaq