This beautifully written and compelling May article on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, by Dr Kim Sawyer, has won first prize* in our IA Writing Competition Most Compelling Article 2024 — read on to discover why.
Judge Ranald Macdonald's comments
It was a privilege and a considerable challenge to select the winning entry this year. Thank you to all the writers as each should be proud of their compelling and powerful contributions.
It makes me feel confident about the essential role writing has to play at this concerning time of AI (not IA because THAT is a badge of honour) where ethics, fairness and integrity in what is being presented are essential.
I found it interesting, but understandable, that so many entries concerned the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. Though human rights, race relations, the environment , the fate of whistleblowers and a powerful piece on scam victims, also featured.
On "scamming" there are a couple of lines in victim Kim Sawyer’s piece which will remain with me: 'Scammers need a facilitator, that facilitator is a bank. Banks may not be the thieves, but they do drive the getaway car.'
But the best and most evocative article in my judgement is another article by Kim Sawyer — 'The perils of indifference: History repeats itself on Gaza'.
Beautifully written, it features some excellent and apposite quotes from the remarkable Nobel prize winner, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. One, in particular, is worth highlighting: 'Indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred… indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. Indifference is the friend of the enemy.'
Dr. Sawyer for me is a worthy winner in the Most Compelling Article category. Certainly, I was compelled!
*****
The words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel ring truer than ever now as the ongoing Israel-Hamas war shows inhumanity and indifference at its worst, writes Dr Kim Sawyer.
IN A SPEECH at the White House in 1999, Elie Weisel, the renowned defender of human rights and co-founder of Washington’s Holocaust Museum reflected on his past:
Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember and bear witness.
We now bear witness to a calculus of destruction to which most do not want to bear witness. We are witnesses to Gaza. We tap into the compassion that soldiers at Buchenwald tapped into. We are not robots.
Awni El-Dous is one story to which we bear witness, a boy who found YouTube fame in death.
In August 2022, Awni posted a video with these words:
"So now folks, let me introduce myself — I am a Palestinian from Gaza, aged 12 years old. The aim of this channel is to reach 100,000 subscribers, or 500,000, or 1 million."
He ended saying "peace out" to his 1,000 subscribers. Awni and most of his family were killed by an Israeli strike on 7 October, hours after Hamas gunmen had stormed across into Israel. His video now has millions of views. The story of the annulment of the innocent.
Awni has many brothers and sisters — more than 25,000 women and children have been killed, more than 100 journalists have been killed, and members of aid organisations have been killed.
War is destruction of the human spirit where the unjustifiable is justified by semantic argument — that Hamas are terrorists, Israel is prosecuting a war, and women and children are human shields. The balance sheet of disproportion.
This reporter has often written of the bystander problem where evil prevails when good people do nothing.
Elie Wiesel identified the perils of indifference:
For the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbour are of no consequence.... Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction…In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred… Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. Indifference is the friend of the enemy.
It is easy to be indifferent to those we don’t know, to reduce them to a number and not a name. Hannah Arendt understood the importance of identity. Awni El-Dous was never a number. Dror Or, an Israeli murdered by Hamas on October 7 in Kibbutz Be’eri, was never a number.
None of us want to be the non-person in Buchenwald or the non-person who lives in Jenin. When this reporter watched the film Jenin Jenin, a liberal democracy that had enshrined stories of Elie Weisel, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein and Simon Wiesenthal – yet had reduced a Palestinian girl to be a number and not a name, with none of the rights of those in Tel Aviv – was reflected upon.
The inhumanity done to us should not be leveraged to justify the inhumanity we do to others.
In The Palestine Laboratory, Antony Loewenstein reflected on his experience as a Jew whose grandparents fled Nazi Germany and Austria in 1939 to come to Australia.
He observed Israel through the eyes of an outsider who was not indifferent to the suffering of others:
I lived in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020 and regularly saw Israeli police harass and humiliate Palestinians. The daily grind of occupation was oppressive for those who weren’t Jewish. It made me ashamed of what was being done in my name as a Jew. Today I support a one-state solution to the conflict where all its citizens can live equally.
No person committed to human rights can be indifferent to the suffering of the oppressed.
The war in Gaza is the prosecution of vengeance, continuing a cycle of retaliatory violence. Hamas was born out of acts like the Hebron massacre of 1994 that led to the deaths of 29 Palestinian Muslims praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque.
Ensuing clashes resulted in the deaths of another 26 Palestinians and nine Jews. The Hebron massacre led Hamas to change its strategy. They targeted civilians, they became the mirror of those they hated.
The war in Gaza is a war that Oxford Professor Karma Nabulsi calls "scholasticide" — a war that targets the young, a war that targets their future. The war has destroyed or damaged all of Gaza’s 12 universities and 400 schools. It has killed 5,000 students, 250 teachers and 100 Professors.
By January, the UN assessed that over 75 per cent of Gaza’s educational infrastructure had been damaged. Israel appears to be intent on the elimination of the present but also the elimination of the future. Academics have petitioned their universities, but the indifference of the powerful is too strong.
Australia can do more, much more. The young are showing the way, they are shaming us all. Australia offers ten scholarships to Palestinian students. We can offer much more.
Guru Nanak, the first Guru of Sikhism, famously said that there is no Hindu and no Muslim, just as there is no Jew and there is no Palestinian, for Awni El-Dous and Dror Or are the same.
They look into the same mirror.
* IA Writing Competition First prize winner Dr Kim Sawyer has won $1,000 cash and a 12-month Independent Australia subscription.
You can read the work of all the outstanding finalists in our IA Writing Competition Most Compelling Articles and Most Enthralling Creative Works HERE.
Dr Kim Sawyer is a senior fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.
Related Articles
- IA Writing Competition 2024 WINNERS!
- IA Writing Competition: The shortlist is in!
- POEM: The Odours
- POEM: Sonnet on a failure
- POEM: The Holy Creed of Carbonus Rex
