Sara Dowse
Sara Dowse is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist. Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications.
Recent articles by Sara Dowse
4 March 2025
Why I signed an ad urging rejection of Trump's Gaza plan
In the swirl of horrendous news following the US president-elect’s taking his oath of office, there’s been one shining light. On 13 February, an ad boldly declaring No to Ethnic Cleansing appeared in the New York Times. More than 350 American rabbis, creatives and activists put their names to it, protesting against the president’s blithe announcement that Gaza could be changed from a pile of rubble to the Middle East’s Riviera – that is, if neighbouring countries would agree to accept the remaining Palestinian inhabitants who have managed, miraculously, to stay alive.
15 December 2024
How Israel lost its soul
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.
16 October 2024
How Zionism proselytises
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.
27 September 2024
A cautious optimism despite the savagery in Gaza
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.
30 August 2024
What happened to the surfers in Gaza?
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.
23 July 2024
War, words and denial
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.
12 May 2024
Because of Israel, Jewish people are no longer ‘safe’
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.
10 March 2024
Four months since October 7
As I write, its 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. I wouldnt be the first to declare that Israels brutally disproportionate response to the attack and the taking of hostages constitutes, for Gazas civilian population, a twenty-first century holocaust.
14 November 2023
The Sabra transformed
On October 7, when Hamas prosecuted its unholy massacre it did more than slaughter human victims. It punctured as well Israels image as a sophisticatedly-armed, righteous military power that over the years the world has come to share.
27 October 2023
What good comes from Israel silencing criticism?
Born in 1938, two days after Kristallnacht, I grew up during a period of rabid American antisemitism. In response, two relatives helped found the Anti-Defamation League. Learning of the atrocities Hamas committed in southern Israel, I was aghast like everyone. But I was not surprised. Israel has been hoisted on its own propaganda, regardless of the consequences. It has almost succeeded in silencing its critics, even - maybe especially - its Jewish ones, of whom there are many.