In her hybrid memoir 58 Facets, lawyer and legal anthropologist Marika Sosnowski traverses time and societies to reveal intricacies of law enacted by states to control, suppress, displace and, in some instances, erase people. For myriad reasons, these people do not possess the legal documentation to survive.

Many of us take the law for granted, or at least, do not have to think much about how it intersects with our daily lives. Similarly, many of us may not think about the pulse of revolution and resistance, or how significant revolutionary acts are, especially in this current moment.

Review: 58 Facets: on law, violence and revolution – Marika Sosnowski (Melbourne University Press)

This book is part of Sosnowski’s postdoctoral work as a research fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. Her main proposition is that violence and the law are inherently linked in all societies.

Violence and the law flow through time and space like a river. They eat tributaries into people’s bodies and minds. They stream easily from one generation to the next, crafting and shaping.

Sosnowski carries with her a family history of displacement and violence, which is threaded through other stories she has collected from her fieldwork and travels, from Amsterdam to Syria, Turkey to Berlin.

She begins by reflecting on her experience at a checkpoint in Melbourne during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The encounter with this checkpoint in my homeland of Australia triggered me in ways I was completely unprepared for, that were both ethically and morally challenging.

This kind of control, with the requirement to verify identity with documents by an agent of the state, writes Sosnowski,

is something that happens ‘over there’ to ‘others’ in places where I travel to do fieldwork and then have the privilege to leave. Checkpoints like this do not, I had felt quite sure up until then, happen ‘here’.

Of course, camps and checkpoints pervade much of Australia’s history and present moment, depending on who you are. Sosnowski defines a camp as “anywhere that the state of exception manifests, and, perhaps surprisingly, you need not look far for these spaces of strange oxymorons”.

She quotes academic Suvendrini Perera’s idea of “not-Australia”, a legal construction aimed at enabling people to “arrive, yet not arrive”.

Conceptions of camps here might be offshore detention of asylum seekers or, in a colonial context, the continuing impacts of First Nations displacement and surveillance: settlements, reserves, foster homes, boarding schools, “gross acts of violence in the name of ‘protection’”.

The granddaughter of Polish and Dutch Holocaust survivors, Sosnowski takes a long historical lens, back to her own family’s emigration through a checkpoint on the French/Spanish border in 1940. The crossing was “legal” due to a bribe paid by her great-grandmother to the border guards. They went on to Portugal and the Dutch East Indies. After three years “starving in a Japanese internment camp in Java”, Sosnoswki’s grandparents eventually settled in Melbourne in 1947.

Possessing the right legal document or personal identifier can be the difference between freedom and internment, survival and death, granting access through checkpoints. This reality echoes through time, as Sosnowski encounters others who are caught in the nexus of state violence and law.

Melbourne University Publishing

In Berlin in 2022, for instance, she meets a woman, Noura, who is stuck in Germany because she is blacklisted by the Syrian regime as an activist and is unable to apply for a passport.

A few years earlier, Noura had been able to secure a blank passport from the Syrian opposition in Istanbul, untraceable to the Syrian government and accepted by the United States, European Union and United Kingdom.

In the years since, these states withdrew their support for the Syrian opposition and Noura’s passport was confiscated as a fake, her freedom of movement lost.

In Amman, Jordan, in 2017, Sosnowski meets a man called Hosam. He tells her his story of revolution in Syria in 2011; how he organised some of the first peaceful protests, demonstrations and agitations against the Syrian regime.

Hosam continued to resist and aid the people of his hometown, Daraya, when troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad massacred civilians in 2012, imposing sieges and forced starvation until the city’s evacuation in 2016.

The edge of the unsayable

Sosnowski’s family history is not an easy one. Her great uncle Charles, later named Chaim, survived the Holocaust and served in the Dutch, then British, army. He went on to become a leading figure in the Haganah, “an early Zionist military organisation and precursor to the Israel Defense Forces”. The Haganah, she writes, went on to “ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1947-?”.

The question mark here implies an indefinite end to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In 1956, Charles/Chaim became Lieutenant Colonel Military Commander of the Gaza Strip as part of Operation Kadesh or the Israeli invasion of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. She includes a letter written by a US Lieutenant Colonel, R.F. Bayard, chairman of the Egyptian/Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission, to Colonel Byron Leary of the UN Truce Supervision Organisation. Bayard writes

I have come to the conclusion that the treatment of civilians is unwarrantedly rough and that a good number of persons have been shot down in cold blood for no apparent reason.

These murderous crimes, overseen by Sosnowski’s great uncle, as well as the contemporary crimes of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), pervade Sosnowski’s present, as she is a “tangle of emotions”, contemplating her own complicity. She quotes poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Words gently end at the edge of the Unsayable.”

We encounter this line delineating what is said and what is unsayable a few times throughout the book. Sosnowski writes she is “not a person who is inclined to take a position, choose a side, argue a point”. In this sense, she presents to the reader these fragments of history, facets of political upheaval and crimes against humanity, and asks the reader to confront the reality of these interconnections.

Tangle of emotion

Sosnowski traverses Israel’s implementation of laws that control people across time, including the Citizenship Law of 1952. While the law does not explicitly state this, Sosnowski writes that this law “and many others like it, was enacted to strengthen the legal infrastructure behind the exclusion of Palestinians from Israeli citizenship”.

The state’s power to “impose itself into the fabric of peoples’ lives comes not only in the form of violence, but also through bureaucracy and the implementation of administrative systems”. She uses the example of a notice given to residents in Gaza by the IDF in November 1956, which read:

All governmental, administrative and judicial authority over the region of Gaza and its residents is from now invested in me and will be executed by those acting on my orders or by those I have appointed to do so.

The letter is signed by Sosnowski’s great uncle Charles/Chaim.

Sosnowski writes of a press conference in Tel Aviv on 17 November 1956, during which Chaim detailed “the story of killing Palestinians under his command while he was re-establishing law and order on Israel’s borders”.

She quotes an American journalist, Don Cook, who later reports in the New York Tribune that Sosnowski’s great uncle is one of the main players in a “complicated process of restoring some semblance of order and control to this miserable little spit of land”.

Sosnowski qualifies that

this miserable spit of land is of course Gaza, where I guess the Israeli Army is still trying to restore some semblance of law and order.

The nonchalance in Sosnowski’s language here is surprising, given the vexatious nature of this sentence and her earlier expressed “tangle of emotion” around Israel’s historic and current crimes against the Palestinian people.

Given this book went to print two years into Israel’s well-documented genocide in Gaza, it is unfortunate that the harrowing reality of what “restoring some semblance of law and order” actually means is left unscrutinised.

Written in fragments of memoir and archival exploration, 58 Facets is an expansive study of how law, violence and revolution intersect throughout human history. Framed by family history, the tendrils of meaning and inherent similarities across time are clear, as Sosnowski shows how state control, from camps to checkpoints to legal documents, cannot exist without the threat of violence.

Sosnowski leaves us with these words:

Law and violence are inevitable. The words and stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we come from, our pasts and our futures, are indeed powerful […] but they do nothing on their own.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Tess Scholfield-Peters, University of Technology Sydney

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Tess Scholfield-Peters does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.