A family reckoning on law and violence in the Middle East

In this powerful episode of Late Night Live, legal scholar Dr. Marika Sosnowski reflects on the intertwined legacies of law, violence, and revolution through the lens of her own family history and her research on Syria and Israel. Her book, *58 Facets on Law, Violence and Revolution*, uses the metaphor of a diamond’s facets to explore how stories—personal, historical, and political—reflect and refract one another, revealing deeper truths about power, identity, and trauma. Central to her narrative is the revelation of her great-uncle Charles, a Holocaust survivor who later served as governor of Gaza in 1956 and was implicated in war crimes during the 1956 Suez Crisis. This personal reckoning forces a confrontation with the duality of identity: how victims can become perpetrators, and how systems of law and bureaucracy—like civil registries and checkpoints—enable both control and survival. Sosnowski draws parallels between the Nazi-era identity cards of Jacob Lentz, the Israeli Names Law of 1956, and modern AI targeting systems in Gaza, illustrating how bureaucratic mechanisms of documentation evolve into tools of violence. She also shares stories from Syria, including a woman who used her Alawite identity to save her boyfriend at a checkpoint, and a man who resisted a bribe at military security, highlighting how everyday acts of resistance are revolutionary in their quiet courage. Ultimately, she argues that violence is not only carried out by bombs and bullets but by the invisible architecture of law and administration—and that empathy is essential, because we all carry inherited trauma and hidden burdens.