What “Never Again” Left Out

A Palestinian-American student re-examines Elie Wiesel's “The Perils of Indifference”

Tap, tap, tap. My pencil whispered, scribbling annotations onto the paper. Then, my eyes flickered to the title: “The Perils of Indifference.” This White House address, delivered by the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, warned of the dangers of the world’s indifference and expressed hope humanity could grow after the Holocaust. In Texas, I was taught to revere this state-required English reading as a universal blueprint of empathy.

When our curriculum later explored his memoir, Night, I—a soprano vocalist—was deeply touched by the resilience of Wiesel’s friend. In the middle of the night, against a pile of dying men, Juliek retrieved the violin he had managed to keep hidden and played a fleeting Beethoven concerto. By morning, he was found dead, his violin crushed beside him. Reading this scene sparked my rage: how could the world ignore such suffering?

That scene brought me to question the dilemma at the heart of Wiesel’s speech: what allows the world to choose the ease of indifference over justice? But as I traced Wiesel’s recollections from Auschwitz during his speech, my pencil’s tapping trance abruptly came to a halt. As a vocalist, my shoulders tense when the wrong keys clash between my ears. I experienced a similar feeling of dissonance reading the address’s vision of “the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil,” and his plea for “Israel’s peace.” These lines introduced a jarring juxtaposition between his framing of the world’s moral progress and the violent realities Palestinians still endured on the ground. In that moment, the global symphony of empathy Wiesel conducted—the one my teachers and peers still hummed along to—sounded fractured and out of tune. My teeth gritted with betrayal at a moral authority whose insistence on humanitarianism I had fully trusted. I looked down at my highlighter-painted palms. The flashes of neon were more than ink; they marked the boundaries of whose suffering the address allowed me to see within its frame of human rights. The “empathetic imagination” I learned from Wiesel—the capacity to step outside one’s own suffering and grasp another’s—seemed to stop at the borders of Palestine.

But history refuses to be constrained by the boundaries of empathy drawn from a single speech; it spills through the cracks Wiesel left unexamined. Reading his celebratory framing of the “rebirth of Israel,” I gripped my pencil tighter, scribbling Nakba—the death of 15,000 Palestinians and the destruction of 530 towns and villages as well as the displacement of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes—into the margins. I felt my inherited history and my syllabus collide at my desk. As the classroom walls closed in, I imagined my grandfather’s shrinking figure: a man who still winced at the thought of leaving his home decades after the Nakba. The sunlight from the nearby window attacked my eyes, transporting me back to visiting Palestine—sitting on Sidi’s rugged stone patio, where grapevines conducted the sunbeams’ dance on my skin. My father had enveloped him in a warm embrace, suggesting they visit his favorite restaurant, but my grandfather’s gentle smile quickly twisted into a trembling frown. As they argued back and forth, their words dissolved into the buzz of a fly circling my ear. The Nakba had reduced my grandfather into a shell of himself, a devastating feat considering this was the very man who raised eight children while carrying an entire farm on his back. Now, one summer later, across an ocean, I sat at a Texas desk at a crossroads: Open my mouth and bear the label of “crazy,” or sit in silent betrayal of my grandfather’s legacy?

The irony was not lost on me. The speech that taught me that “to be indifferent to…suffering is what makes the human being inhuman” made me hesitant to speak up in defense of my own blood. To understand why, I had to reexamine the words teaching me empathy in the first place. By portraying the creation of Israel through only the lens of its hopeful “rebirth” after the Holocaust, Wiesel’s text frames its founding primarily as the triumph of the Jews survival, leaving out the Palestinian people’s forced displacement. This omission orchestrates a heartbreaking paradox: Wiesel asserted that “indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor—never his victim.” The text which was designed to challenge the audience’s bystander passivity maintained a deafening silence towards the mass expulsion of Palestinians within its moral framing. How are audience members meant to effectively apply the lessons from the Holocaust to empathize with suffering across contexts if one particular group is left outside of the scope of suffering they are asked to recognize? By failing to acknowledge the true weight of the Nakba, Wiesel effectively alienates me and possibly other sympathetic audience members who could have otherwise deeply engaged with his humanitarian message. In a classroom setting, questioning his narrative felt extremely taboo—as if raising any doubts towards his arguments is inherently irrational, or even insensitive given the extremity of Jewish suffering. It was this fear of appearing “indifferent” which contributed to the isolating silence I endured when I could not argue the omission of my own grandfather’s legacy.

Beneath the fear of appearing “indifferent” lay something quieter: this skewed image of a decades-spanning conflict made expressing my grandfather’s testimony become reduced to political provocation instead of raw, personal truth. His mere existence as a Nakba survivor exposed the limits of the speeches’ historical scope through which my peers and I had been taught to understand “Never Again.” Whatever Wiesel’s intentions may have been, his position as an influential global moral figure—and his audience’s trust in him—risks making his narrative framing harder to critically assess when he is treated like the default authority to understand human rights. When we teach students to passively absorb texts which selectively uplift the historical memory of some groups and exclude others, they may take away an unintended message: that empathy is universal in theory but conditional in practice in relation to whose suffering most comfortably fits into our pre-existing beliefs. However, questioning Wiesel’s authority did not mean abandoning the universal principles his address taught me. His work as a humanitarian advocate made care enough to scrutinize how consistently his ideas were actually applied. If a moral leader asks his readers to recognize suffering beyond their own, he too should be expected to uphold that exact same standard. Ultimately, when Wiesel left the Nakba outside of his “empathetic imagination”, he compromised his universalism’s ability to transcend the very boundaries he asked us to rise above.

But the boundaries I encountered in Wiesel’s speech did not stop at the end of the page. They leaked into the classroom which first taught me to understand “Never Again”—and, increasingly, the policies governing where it could be applied. What started as an internal struggle over whether I could advocate for my grandfather’s memory morphed into something far greater: what happened when the very institutions teaching empathy placed perimeters on where students could apply it?

The boundaries gatekeeping where empathy could be applied extended from my classroom to state policy. In 2017, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the Anti-BDS law prohibiting state entities from contracting with anyone who boycotts Israel. I encountered its consequences through Bahia Amawi, a Pflugerville ISD educator whose 2018 contract renewal required her to pledge she would not boycott Israel. Amawi refused, citing peaceful economic boycott and Palestinian human rights. Consequently, she was fired soon after. Amawi sued, and a federal district court later found that she was likely to succeed in arguing that the restriction violated the First Amendment, issuing a preliminary injunction against its enforcement.

Years later, I would encounter that unease not in a courtroom, but in my own quiet struggle, drowned out by the hum of the classroom air conditioner. As the smart board blared, my teacher allowed us to create argumentation posters on any topic of our choosing. My eyes flickered toward my friend, lashes fluttering in unspoken partnership.

“We should do Palestine.” She insisted.

I nodded solemnly.

“Sure, but we have to be smart about it.”

The tap of my teacher’s flats against the floor tiles made me wince as she approached.

“What topic are you both doing?”

“Palestine,” my friend blurted.

My shoulders briefly loosened under my teacher’s gentle gaze—until her eyes into silent apology.

“We can keep the poster inside the classroom, but I can’t display it in the hallway.”

Seeing the slight tremble of my teacher’s jaw, a small, nervous laugh escaped my lips.

”It’s okay, we’ll do something generic like AI.”

I understood what my teacher had left unspoken: she wasn’t terrified of the Palestine poster itself but of the boundary it might cross. A slow, crooked smile cracked between her teeth. The teacher nodded at me, exhaling a shaken, relieved breath. As she disappeared into the hallway, my friend’s eyes widened, nudging me hard in the arm.

”What just happened?”

When I opened my mouth to speak, the words became trapped inside the prison of my teeth. I could only stand to shake my head silently.

I carried that discomfort for weeks into the end of our Holocaust unit. To wrap up everything we learned, our teacher projected a video on the smartboard alongside a questionnaire. The first line read:

“Could you ever imagine something like the Holocaust taking place again?”

Staring at the blank page, I debated swallowing my grandfather’s pain; should I parrot the familiar, neutral script of healing after tragedy to secure the grade I wanted?

Then, I gripped my pencil tighter—this time not from anger, but from an emerging clarity. My spine straightened. As students stood one by one to turn in their work, I wrote:

“I don’t need to imagine it. I watched it live in Gaza.”