At the risk of oversimplification, there are two Jewish responses to the current devastation in Palestine: the tribal and the humanist. Sadly we have witnessed many cases of the first, an eagerness to clamp down on critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. Marika Sosnowski is a good example of the second.
Sosnowski is based at Melbourne University’s Law School and engaged in a study of “the legal afterlife of war and revolution.” Her work brings law and anthropology together in ways that challenge the assumptions of both disciplines. Her new book, 58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution, is both analytic and deeply personal.
Any review of this book must acknowledge that it is partly a confessional story, and one that deserves a personal response. In fact, it is a more challenging and innovative book than the subtitle suggests — though “58 facets” gives us a clue. Essentially a string of short episodes and observations, it is held together by Sosnowki’s deep involvement with the Syrian opposition to the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was overthrown last year, but also by her willingness to explore her own traumas and uncertainties.
At the same time it is an exercise in family history, for Sosnowski, like many of us, is in Australia as the result of Nazi persecution. Her grandfather arrived from the Netherlands in 1947, having escaped Europe only to be imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in Java before finally landing in Brisbane. Others of her family settled in Israel, one of them governing Gaza for a short time.
Reading 58 Facets is to be confronted by the parallels between Europe in the 1930s and the Middle East today. It is Sosnowski’s strength as a writer that she lets the reader draw these parallels as she recounts her own experiences of working with exiled Syrians and hearing their hopes for a better future.
What her experience of Syria suggests — and by extension what the sad story of dispossessed Palestinians bears out — is that revolution is complex, messy and at once personal and political. “Revolutionary acts can happen at any time, any place,” she writes. “They can sneak up on you in online meetings or over lunch with a friend. This is because in every place, in every society, the law and violence are inextricably conjoined, and revolution is, in turn, inextricably looped into this triumvirate.”
I thought of these words following the weekend of neo-Nazi demonstrations in Australian cities, which highlighted the precariousness of liberal-democratic assumptions in the face of direct confrontation. Of course the thugs in black who took to our streets needed only slight bravado; the Syrians who resisted Assad risked torture and death.
There are moments of anguish in this book, as well as moments of hope it moves towards Assad’s overthrow and the unknown future facing Syrians. Sosnowski writes about the reality of camps, whether the death camps of the Nazi extermination or the moveable camps of Israel’s war in Gaza. As I read this I thought of the new moves by the Australian government to pay once again for detention camps in Nauru.
As a lawyer, Sosnowski is very aware of how our lives depend on producing the right paperwork. She gives a fascinating account of how the Syrian resistance created their own records of births and residence in preparation for a post-Assad government. Although she doesn’t refer to the United States, the increasingly brutal immigration raids under Trump only highlight the universality of her argument.
As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Sosnowski is attuned to how traumas carry across generations and how they are experienced by so many Australians, beginning, most obviously, with members of our First Nations. “We are all wounded,” she writes. “Pulling large sacks of despicable acts tied with invisible threads behind us like a ball and chain. But, she adds: “Bringing the ball and chain above the horizons of history allows us… to open our hears to the woundedness of ourselves and others, to how similar our stories really are, to the great potential we all carry for acts of everyday revolution.”
I am saddened that so many of my fellow Jews, traumatised by the legacy of the Holocaust and shocked by the Hamas attacks of October 2023, have lost the ability to see the human suffering of Palestinians, as if even young children deserve to die in retribution. There are Knesset members who have proclaimed that all inhabitants of Gaza are guilty and deserve to be killed.
Back in 1956, the year Israel colluded with Britain and France in the Suez invasion, the Knesset adopted a Names Law, essential for denying Arabs who had fled during the 1948 war while allowing Jews like me, with no connection to Israel other than a set of Biblical stories, to enter and claim citizenship.
Central to the most important ceremony of Judaism, the Passover seder, is the expression, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Some years ago I wrote an article in which I said I could not say those worlds without a sense of horror at the hypocrisy involved. Sosnowski, who is more of a practising Jew than I, has a different view: “When we say ‘Next Year in Jerusalem!’ it is not something to be taken literally… That ‘Jerusalem’ will always and ever be ‘next year.’ That the journey is the important part, not the destination.”
I wish I could share her optimism. The original UN plan for a “special international regime” for Jerusalem — a holy city for three monotheistic religions — has long vanished. Both the Netanyahu and Trump regimes see the city as firmly and forever under Israeli control.
58 Facets is a short book but a profound one. My ambition for it imagines a reading group of Palestinian and Israeli partisans who might inch towards an understanding of the common humanity without which no solution to this ongoing tragedy is possible. •
58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution
By Marika Sosnowski | Melbourne University Press | $29.99 | 199 pages
