Sara Dowse

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Articles

How Israel Lost its Soul

Dec 14, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Sara Dowse

If anyone still believed that political Zionism’s objective was anything less than ethnic cleansing The Fall of Israel would surely disabuse them of that delusion. The English edition of Max Ghilan’s How Israel Lost its Soul appeared in 1974, not long after Israel’s ignominious defeat by Egypt in October 1973. I didn’t know much about Ghilan at the time, and his brief Wikipedia entry doesn’t leave me much the wiser.
Resisting resolution • Sara Dowse

Dec 2, 2024 | insidestory.org.au | Sara Dowse

Isabella Hammad is a British-Palestinian writer voted one of the Granta Best Young British Authors in 2023. She has published two novels, The Parisian and Enter Ghost, neither of which I have read, but on the strength of her latest, essay-length book I’ll be seeking them out. Recognising the Stranger began as a lecture Hammad delivered at Columbia University just days before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.
How Zionism proselytises

Oct 15, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Sara Dowse

In her recent acceptance speech as recipient of British PEN’s Pinter Peace Prize, writer Arundhati Roy made special note of President Biden’s words on his visit to Israel shortly after 7 October 2023. I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, Biden declared, and I am a Zionist. It was a statement of America’s undying loyalty to Israel which, like many such statements, papered over what is in fact a far more complicated set of issues.
Antisemitism, Zionism and the war in Gaza: Sara Dowse, Author

Sep 29, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Michael Lester |Sara Dowse

Sara Dowse, Northern Beaches resident and author, discusses the rise in antisemitism in the context of the Israel Gaza war and the ways in which the latest definitions of the term, including in Australia, are weaponised to silence opposition to, and consideration of, pathways to peace and justice by conflation with Zionism and lack of a full appreciation of the history of Israel statehood since establishment in 1948 and subsequent dispossession and dehumanisation of the people of Palestine.
A cautious optimism despite the savagery in Gaza

Sep 26, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Sara Dowse

Last night I finished reading Paul Ham’s The Soul, his 856-page history of the human mind. Ham is an esteemed Australian military historian whose moving chronicle of Passchendaele secured his reputation. But with The Soul he has ventured into broader territory, and I was curious. After nearly a year of Israel’s relentless genocide in Gaza, I was swirling into depression, and was tempted to follow him through time.
What happened to the surfers in Gaza?

Aug 29, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Sara Dowse

Sometime in 2016 , soon after I’d joined the Northern Beaches Committee for Palestine, a group of us visited the then premier of New South Wales in his Manly electorate office. It would be safe to say that there weren’t many people on the Northern Beaches then who knew much about Palestine, or cared, but there was a Second World War connection.
Pearls and Irritations

Jul 22, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Sara Dowse

Eighty-six years ago Europe’s Jews suffered the most catastrophic event in their history, ending in a systematic, industrial-scale slaughter. Six million was the body count, its physical manifestation. But the Shoah, or Holocaust, as it is also known, delivered a psychic wound that cannot be so easily measured. Nor has it ever truly healed. Studies of its history can enlighten us, as has Zionism’s history. But to fully grasp the extent of the Shoah’s effects perhaps we should turn to psychology.
Because of Israel, Jewish people are no longer ‘safe’

May 11, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Sara Dowse

In this seemingly topsy-turvy world we live in, the charge of ‘antisemitism’ and its offshoot ‘antisemite’ have been hurled at anyone who dares suggest that there is something deeply flawed about the State of Israel. Likewise branded are those who have been protesting against Israel’s winner-takes-all retaliation for the Hamas October 7 massacre. Strange too, are those who resort to these charges, and the etymological mishmash that’s been made of them.
The wall • Inside Story

Apr 23, 2024 | insidestory.org.au | Sara Dowse

Ever since my review copy of Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama lobbed onto my doorstep, I’ve been thinking of synchronicity, that twentieth-century psychoanalyst’s term for the uncanny appearance of a cluster of coincidences. For Carl Jung, synchronicity is a sign of what he chose to call humanity’s collective unconscious. I was in the middle of reading Apeirogon, the Irish writer Colum McCann’s novel based on the lives of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan.
Four months since October 7

Mar 10, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Sara Dowse

As I write, it’s exactly four months since October 7, 2023, when Hamas breached the border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and, with others following, Islamic Jihad or simply enraged civilians, embarked upon what was undoubtedly a killing spree. Yet in its aftermath, it is not too farfetched to assert that we in the watching world have been witnessing a catastrophe beyond any previous imagining.