Fig tree after devastation by locusts, Palestine (1915) | G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
In the wake of the Gaza War, a place in time that has become its own world-historical moment, the invocation of international law as a means of remedying Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians rings hollow. After all, did bombs not continue to fall on Gaza even after South Africa brought its genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)? Did the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) issuing of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant do anything to stop thousands more civilians from dying? Did Israel heed any of the ICJ’s provisional measures to furnish Gazans with desperately needed aid? Despite these legal mechanisms, Israel continues to impose its will on the Palestinians almost unimpeded. This February, Israel’s cabinet approved measures making it easier for settlers to acquire land in the West Bank, a move many decry as “de facto annexation.”
And yet it is this very system of international law to which Francesca Albanese appeals in her forthcoming book, When the World Sleeps (Other Press, 2026). It’s a culmination of her work as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a role she has held since 2022, and given her institutional affiliation, it’s not surprising the faith she still places in the international legal system.
She organizes each of the book’s ten chapters around individuals who helped shape her understanding of Palestine and the Israeli occupation, and the variety of ages, professions, and nationalities found among them speaks to her roving curiosity and intellectual agility. They range from Hind Rajab, the 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed in a car along with her family by the Israeli military in January 2024, to Eyal Weizmann, an Israeli forensic architect who investigates state and corporate violence using spatial analysis.
Throughout the book, Albanese displays her capacity to listen and observe, readily admitting the shortcomings of her Western perspective in reckoning with the history of Palestine. On life in Jerusalem, for instance, she turns a beautiful phrase—whether a poetic flourish or a happy translational accident, I can’t tell—to convey her ignorance: “Expatriates, a group that also included [my husband] and myself, rather than ineffable bearers of peace, are often so detached from reality that they do not feel the breath of the land they live on.”
When she does offer her legal perspective, Albanese—a lawyer by training—takes care to acknowledge the people who tempered it. In her chapter devoted to the late Alon Confino, an Italian Israeli historian, she makes the point that the case of Palestine has too often been reduced to a humanitarian crisis or “conflict,” rather than “being dealt with as a political issue to be resolved in accordance with international law.” She contends that many in the West have normalized Israel’s injustices by confining themselves to merely giving aid to the Palestinians, rather than addressing the structural issues that created the need for aid in the first place. Such conduct enables Israel’s colonial practices. For Albanese, these unchecked aggressions touch on one of the cornerstones of the international order: that “it is the rule of law that must govern relations between states and not the arbitrary will of the strongest.”
But has Israel not made a mockery of the rule of law? How can one look to international humanitarian law (IHL) as an effective way to deal with Israel’s decades-long occupation? Doesn’t the case of Israel (and its alliance with the United States) present a compelling case for a might-makes-right understanding of international relations?
I asked myself these questions again and again as I read this book—my incredulity sometimes fed by Albanese’s lack of engagement with this sort of critique. I found it odd that she seemed to overlook the apparent impotence of the international legal system. To her credit, she mentions it briefly in Chapter Six, writing, “Israel has continued systematically to pave over not only the territories but also international law, distorting the very essence of law and justice,” but nowhere does she consider Israel’s impunity as an existential threat to IHL.
Perhaps, I thought, I was viewing it all wrong. I started to look elsewhere and came across a February 2026 column from The Guardian by Kenneth Roth, who, like Albanese, seems less concerned with Israel’s conduct amounting to a death knell for IHL than he is with the weakness of international responses to its atrocities in Gaza. Responding to a new study on armed conflicts across the globe, Roth’s argument relies on an evaluation of the international community’s reaction to violations of humanitarian laws instead of an assessment of the existential status of such laws. To illustrate his point, he uses an analogy:
When an ordinary murder is committed on a city street, is that a serious crime or a license to kill? If the authorities investigate, arrest and prosecute the suspect, we consider the murder an unfortunate offense but don’t question the status of the law against it. But if the authorities were to ignore the killing, suggesting that they are just as happy to be rid of the victim, it would be another matter entirely.
For Roth, the case of Israel falls into the former category. Though some might want a more robust response from the international community, Roth contends one cannot brush aside the efforts made by actors across the globe. In addition to the pending ICC and ICJ cases already mentioned, condemnations have come from the UN general assembly and the UN human rights council. On top of that, the council’s monitoring mechanisms have issued “regular reports” and have found that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Though the international legal system has not exactly thrown the book at Israel, its agents have, like the dutiful authorities in Roth’s analogy, taken the proper steps in addressing its violations of the law.
Perhaps I misinterpreted Roth’s comparison, but it struck me that there is an important difference between the real and the hypothetical scenarios he presents. In his analogy, the hypothetical authorities do, in fact, “investigate, arrest and prosecute the suspect,” whereas in the real-world case of Israel, one can—at best—say that international authorities have only carried out the first of those three procedures. At best, because Israel has refused to cooperate and even sought to stymie investigations into its conduct in Gaza. As far as arrests and prosecutions go, Netanyahu is still at large, in part thanks to the evasive maneuvers he’s taken to avoid ICC jurisdiction. Meanwhile, according to a December 2025 report, Yoav Gallant has spent a good deal of his post-government life living rent-free in a billionaire’s seaside villa.
Need prosecution even be discussed? In January 2024, the ICJ made a hazy preliminary ruling on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, stating that if some of the acts South Africa listed in its complaint were proven, they could fall under the UN’s Convention on Genocide. Whether genocide actually occurred is something the court has yet to determine. And while it also issued provisional measures two months later to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which included “the unhindered provision” of basic services, and a call to increase “the capacity and number of land crossings,” Israel blockaded Gaza well into 2025, in direct defiance of the court’s measures. While Roth is right to point out how reactions to a violation of law often indicate the legitimacy of a legal system, his analogy falters.
In the first chapter of her book, Albanese details an episode from her time living in East Jerusalem from 2010 to 2012. She noticed the local children had a habit of sliding under the fence near her house to collect mulberries from a big tree next to her garden. One day, as a gesture of kindness, she told the kids they were welcome to go through her gate to spare themselves from sliding under the fence. Most didn’t understand her English, except for one, “a little boy with dark eyes.”
“No, thank you,” he replied. “We will continue to take [the berries] like this, slipping under the fence, as we always have done.” Only later would she learn that this boy’s family had been one of the first in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to have their home expropriated by Israeli settlers (in violation of international law).
Defiance, it seems, is an enduring trait of this boy, Mohammed El-Kurd. He’s 27 now. Just last year he published Perfect Victims (Haymarket, 2025), a polemical work detailing the West’s double standards and hypocrisies when it comes to Palestine. Though he recognizes the importance of the work done by human rights lawyers, his view of legal systems expressed in the book is less than optimistic:
Having been born and raised in Palestine, I did not need to be particularly astute to understand the law as often the most lethal weapon in the oppressor’s arsenal. While I admire the extraordinary efforts made in that field … I do not believe it to be the only language through which we advance the Palestinian cause.
Albanese, on the other hand, continues to have faith in the international order. In a recent interview, she admits the West’s failure to respond to Gaza in any meaningful way has “shaken many of [her] convictions,” but makes clear it has not broken her “trust in humanity” or her “trust in international law.”
Where the two do agree is on the matter of changing public opinion and the multifaceted approach needed to further the Palestinian cause. In that same interview, Albanese says,
I’m convinced that, if all those who have the capacity to act—the legal community, the NGO community, journalists—then something will change. I already see the cracks in the system. We are standing on a thick layer of ice and many of us are banging our heads against it.
For El-Kurd, there is a “new dawn” emerging: “Zionism, behind the facade of the impenetrable superpower it purports to be, is more vulnerable today than ever.”
Though the mechanisms of international law continue to spin, the two discuss more local avenues to placing pressure on Israel’s colonial regime. Albanese references the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, describing it as “the immune system of a healthy society that respects universal rules, both nationally and internationally.” El-Kurd calls readers to personal sacrifices—quitting a job, attending a protest, choosing integrity over promotion—making the point that “Gaza cannot stand alone in sacrifice.” These are small measures, ones along the lines of voting for officials not beholden to the Zionist lobby, or speaking out against revisionist propaganda. Head banging, as Albanese calls it. Perhaps she’s not fully aware of all the connotations that phrase bears in English. In any case, it’s fitting in more ways than one.
