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MEMOIR
When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine
Francesca Albanese
Hardie Grant, $32.99
It’s not easy being Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. After releasing countless reports in the last years detailing the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the corporations such as Amazon and Google complicit in it, Albanese has faced an avalanche of personal and professional attacks by her critics.
In July 2025, the Trump administration sanctioned her assets and imposed a travel ban, significantly impeding her ability to fly, spend money and conduct a normal life. She’s currently challenging these sanctions in a US court.
“The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia did not bring this mass reaction,” Albanese recently told The Guardian. “So it means that human rights are better understood now. This is a test for universality of rights and for humanity.” So far, Albanese has the right to feel isolated, with the UN failing to adequately defend or support her and the White House targeting anyone who dares oppose the illegality of Israeli actions. Many judges and officials of the International Criminal Court, currently investigating US and Israeli officials, have also been sanctioned.
But Albanese hasn’t withdrawn from public life. Instead, she’s written a powerful book, originally published in Italian, that details her personal fight alongside profiles of 10 people who opened her eyes to the brutal realities in today’s Palestine.
Although Albanese was one of the first leading international officials to call Israeli actions in Gaza genocide, now she’s far from alone. One of the world’s leading genocide scholars, Israeli-born Omer Bartov, has concluded that Israeli behaviour in Gaza has been genocidal.
He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in April that, “by May 2024, it was clear the goal wasn’t destroying Hamas and freeing hostages. The goal was to systematically render Gaza unlivable. The destruction of hospitals, schools, universities, water desalination facilities, energy infrastructure, entire housing blocks – this was an attempt to ensure that the Palestinians of Gaza could not renew their existence as a group.”
Albanese adds to this understanding by explaining how she documents Israeli violations. She interviews adults and children remotely and with on-the-ground sources – Israel refuses to allow her to access to its territory – and the picture is stark.
In an interview with Ahmed, today an adult, actor and educator in the West Bank, but a minor during the First and Second Intifadas, he laments the restrictions on his life (before October 7). “At least, when we were little,” he says, “we could go running in the hills. Now there is a wall. There are too many checkpoints. Now we don’t even have the room to run.”
Another story is that of the Palestinian artist from Gaza, Malak Mattar, now living in London. Albanese recounts visiting Gaza in 2010 and meeting Mattar for the first time, as a child, and being struck by the beauty of her work. The artist left Gaza on October 6, 2023, for London, while her family was stuck in the besieged territory as Israel began its war of annihilation. Her identity today is conflicted. She tells Albanese that her family was forcibly displaced from their villages in 1948; today there is “almost nothing left” after the Jewish state erased them from the map, and yet she grew up and developed in Gaza.
Being a female artist brings its challenges, including sexism within her own community, but she’s now an internationally recognised painter with exhibitions across Britain. Nonetheless, becoming an artist under Israeli occupation is incredibly tough.
“Do you know why they [Israel] hate us and want to destroy any aspect of art?” Mattar asks Albanese, after explaining that Israel has destroyed galleries and art supply shops in Gaza since October7. “The most shocking reality that the [Israeli] occupation has to face is that we speak with the language of art, which is the most powerful language against all forms of dehumanisation,” Mattar says. “Being able to reach other people with a poem or painting is the best way to sweep away all stereotypes. That’s why I really think that art is dangerous.”
Albanese concludes her timely book with realism and just a little optimism. After recounting a speech she gave in Rome, where she expressed hope that peace will one day break out in Palestine, she worried about the violent path to reach this current impossibility.
She then quotes Wasim Dabash, an Italian Palestinian professor of history at Sapienza University in Rome, who responds by stating that: “We Palestinians are not sustained by a thirst for revenge but for justice.”
Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of the bestselling and Walkley Award-winning book The Palestine Laboratory.
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