The work we do as activists to effect social change rarely has immediate rewards. It’s a struggle that builds gradually so sometimes, when it feels like we’ve been running in place, and injustice continues to reign, it can feel pretty bleak.
That’s how it felt last December. So, as a reminder that we’re making progress and our tireless work is not in vain, we decided to host the Mondo Awards to celebrate ourselves as a community and to appreciate the ground we’d covered over the last year.
It’s amazing how a few well placed revolutions can change everything and lift the spirits, especially for activists!
We were happy to backburner the awards and sit back and watch history unfurl so spectacularly. But the awards must go on and today, as we stand in solidarity with the revolutionaries throughout the Middle East, we’re going to roll out the winning selections. One by one, six in all, starting from the bottom, over the next few days. Oh and we’re giving the winners packages of books, including books by Susie Abulhawa, Chas Freeman, Laila El-Haddad, Alia Malek, Shlomo Sand, Anna Baltzer, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, and Saree Makdisi (and gift certificates for more books to the top three winners).
The entries we received represent an amazing cross section of stellar people and actions. The goal of the Mondos was to inspire and in the judging process Inspiration was the highest value.That means that some of our judges’ favorites, amazing literary creations such as Leila Abdelrazaq’s Why I Argued with the Ambassador, or Danaa’s Israel, an Elegy, or David Samel’s Zionism’s call to me– and my answer, didn’t get picked. But we loved em and you should read em!
We ran an incredible series of Gaza Student Writings, Gaza Two Years Later, which segued with our Awards. Due to the quality of the writing, we decided to create a special award category for this series. (Yes and how do we get the awards to the winners? This is the cruelty of the blockade).
We were thrilled by the range of response and blown away by the talent, creativity and dedication represented. A huge Thank You to everyone who contributed and participated. Words cannot fully describe the difficulty of elevating certain writings over others, therefore we highly recommend you review them all.
We’d like thank our incredible panel of judges. Every single one of these people has rocked our world over the last year giving in innumerable ways to our community. Susan Abulhawa , Omar Barghouti , Helena Cobban, Joseph Dana, Adam Horowitz, and Phil Weiss.
Ulimately the greatest inspiration of our movement are the brave people who live everyday of their lives within systems of oppression and the people on the ground working along side them. We celebrate you and dedicate these awards to you. We’re going to start rolling them out here in the words of Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, one of our entrants:
Their courage and determination in the face of tremendous adversity is admirable, but it is another quality that inspires me the most: the ability of residents to retain their generosity, humility and above all else, their humanity, in the face of ever-present challenges, destruction and hatred.
This ability is a testament to their strength of spirit. It is a beacon of hope in the otherwise devastated landscape of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, the personal, human moments – not the images of destruction or injustice (and there are many of these horrors seared into my memory to choose from) – are the ones that first come to mind when I think of al-Araqib.
