Editor’s Note: In early January, the Adelaide Writers’ Week festival cancelled writer and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah’s appearance, citing “cultural sensitivity” following the Bondi attacks, due to Abdel-Fattah’s history as an outspoken advocate for Palestine. 180 writers eventually withdrew from the festival over the move, including Jacinda Arden, Yanis Varoufakis, Zadie Smith, Masha Gessen, and more. This boycott led to the cancellation of the festival and the resignation of its board. After UK band Pulp applied additional pressure, the new board apologized to Abdel-Fattah, retracted the previous board’s statements, and invited her back for 2027.
Both Australian and international media attention on the case has been relentless, and much of the coverage has recycled a laundry list of false and decontextualized allegations against Abdel-Fattah. Here she responds to the specific allegations, putting them into the context of the gaslighting, censorship, and repression of Palestinian voices against the backdrop of genocide.
In the past fortnight, I have been defamed, smeared, and misquoted on a national and global stage. The current attacks build on two years of pro-Israel lobbyists, the Murdoch media, and Australia’s Liberal Party campaigning for my professional destruction—pressuring my university to dismiss me, triggering the suspension of my Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (recently restored after a ten-month investigation that fully exonerated me), lobby for my book contract to be cancelled and for me to be deplatformed me from public events. And now, in light of the Adelaide Writers’ Week racist fiasco, the smear campaign has escalated to policing my social media activity over the past two years.
People who have remained silent or offered hollow pieties over the industrialised, live-streamed slaughter and deliberate starvation of Palestinians for over 800 days, who have remained ‘neutral’ over more than 64,000 Palestinian children killed and injured by the Israeli regime, suddenly have thoughts and feelings about some of my social media posts. For two years I have refused to explain or defend myself because when quadcopters use the cries of babies and women to lure people out only to then kill them, 2000-pound bombs drop on tents and schools, newborn babies are left to decompose in incubators, I refuse to acknowledge the authority of those who dare to presume the right to lecture me about morality.
However, in light of the vicious and defamatory statements now circulating about me nationally and internationally, I am setting the record straight. It has become clear that the malicious pro-Israel propaganda machine I am confronting is too organised, too well-resourced, and too powerful for me to assume that truth alone will prevail without my intervention.
This is not an answer to those who care more about the feelings of people who support genocide than the people actually being genocided. It is not for those hand-wringing liberals who I beg to read Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims. It is not for those who demand Palestinians perform respectability politics, tone down their anger, background their grief, make their language palatable, ‘civilised’, offer footnotes to their social media interventions because raw passionate rage at seeing decapitated babies needs the alibi of an academic reference to be deemed authoritative speech. What I offer below is for those who do not know me except through incendiary headlines. This is for you.
Facebook Cover
Early on October 8, 2023— the year that had so far been the deadliest year on record for Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank— I changed my Facebook cover photo to a picture of a paraglider in the colours of the Palestinian flag, an image that was widely circulating on social media.
Reports indicated a coordinated breakout from Gaza culminating in the seizure of the Erez crossing. Even though what was unfolding on the ground in Gaza remained clouded by confusion and chaos (at the time I was not aware that armed paragliders had landed at the site of the Supernova rave and started shooting at civilians), what stunned the world was that Palestinians had broken free of what major human rights organisations had long unanimously described as an “open-air prison.”
Palestinians in Gaza have been living under an Israeli land, air, and sea blockade since 2007 (and still do, with the blockade now also excluding foreign media organisations). The last short-lived mass breakout was in January 2008, when Hamas destroyed part of a border wall at Rafah, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians poured into Egypt to buy staple goods denied to them by the blockade. Under military blockade and occupation, Israel bans water bikes, jet skis, kites, parachutes, windsurfers, gliders, and nonmotorized airborne ‘vehicles’. Thus, images of these items symbolise freedom “and escape from imprisonment’ with ‘Palestinian culture, film, artistic works, poetry us[ing] ‘flight, birds, parachutes, spoons, ladders, and kites’ as ‘symbols of freedom and prison escape.” For example, this mural of parachutes from 2021:
Thus, on October 7, 2023, fifteen years after the last Gaza ‘open air prison breakout’, Palestinians breaching Israel’s Erez crossing— a security infrastructure that is responsible for torturing Palestinians by caging them in Gaza—was momentous. Palestinians in the diaspora were posting the image as an iconic symbol of an imprisoned, besieged population breaking free; the symbolism of a paraglider to Israel’s high tech militaristic ‘impenetrability’ for decades.
The violations of international law Hamas committed against Israeli civilians on October 7 should be properly investigated, and any punishment or sanction must fall on the perpetrators alone (Israel, in fact, refuses any investigation into October 7, whereas Palestinians have welcomed it, and Israel has extra-judicially assassinated the leaders who allegedly planned the attack). However, given that the U.S. and Western states have made a complete mockery of international law and the United Nations in their active shielding of Israel from accountability, it is hard to see how anybody can have any faith in the international legal system (put aside the selective concern for Israeli lives over Palestinian lives).
As a Muslim, my faith teaches me that civilian life is sacred, and I reject the malicious claim that this was a glorification of violence against civilians. There are reports even today attempting some kind of a ‘gotcha’ against me because apparently the image remained on my Facebook for five months. Firstly, I am only active on Instagram and X. Whilst my Instagram posts automatically post to Facebook, I do not use the platform. The only reason my account exists is so that my children can use Messenger to connect with their friends on Roblox! It’s as simple as that. I didn’t even realise the image was up there for months. In the context of the wholesale slaughter of my people, who Israel has trapped under bombs in Gaza, an image that represented a moment of freedom is not something I will apologise for. I will not have my humanity interrogated by people who have no humanity.
There is a blatant political agenda in repeating this lie. It is repeated by people who have either justified the slaughter of Palestinians, blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, or remained silent. In a situation where 2.3 million people are incarcerated and subjected to violence at the whim of an occupying power (as a result of Israel’s genocide, that figure has reduced as 10% of the population has been killed or injured), those who seek accountability for war crimes committed against civilians by Hamas, but refuse accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel, expose their moral bankruptcy. Israelis have spent two years on TikTok posting videos mocking dying and starving Palestinians, filming themselves blowing up homes, shooting children. The evidence is all online and undeniable. And yet it is our humanity as Palestinians that is on trial. I am not surprised, therefore, that people who defend genocide would disseminate mendacious characterisations of my Facebook cover to deflect from their inhumanity.
Cultural Safety posts
In March 2024, the State Library of Victoria cancelled a series of creative writing workshops for teens which were to be conducted by three writers, including Arab Muslim poet Omar Sakr, all of whom had publicly expressed strong opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza.
The State Library cited its “duty of care to ensure the highest levels of child and cultural safety are in place…at a time of heightened sensitivity.” Around the same time, the popular WOMAdelaide music festival revoked its invitation to Palestinian electronic dance group 47Soul, citing safety concerns. Social media was in a frenzy over the cancellations, and the incidents were attracting media coverage. I posted a sub-tweet about the State Library of Victoria and WOMAdelaide with a follow-up tweet the next day, clearly distinguishing between Judaism and Jewish identity, and Zionism, which I consider to be, and Australian courts have also repeatedly said, a political ideology.
My posts plugged into the series of broader interventions I had been making over several months in which I drew on a vast body of scholarship on the concept of safety and emotions and how the language of distress, safety, cultural safety used by institutions, employers and organisers was being deployed to shut down Palestinians and their supporters and cast the colonised and those who defend the colonised as a threat.
My post has been widely and grossly misquoted and mischaracterised over the meaning of “Zionists” and “cultural safety.” It has been used to try to get me sacked from my university employment, to cancel me as a literary prize judge, and to deplatform me from public events. It has been used to defame me (under parliamentary privilege) by federal and state politicians in parliamentary enquiries on antisemitism.
My post and my body of work over decades — academic scholarship, social media interventions, novels, media interviews — establishes an undeniable track record of me denouncing antisemitism and distinguishing between Judaism and Jewish identity, on the one hand, and the political ideology of Zionism on the other. I have an undeniable track record of openly and loudly proclaiming that my fight against Zionism as a political ideology and form of racism aligns with my unequivocal rejection and condemnation of antisemitism. I have always defended the right of Jewish people to openly practise Judaism and celebrate their Jewishness.
But Zionism is not a religious, racial, ethnic, or cultural identity. Has anyone ever heard of Zionist food or Zionist traditional clothing, or Zionist customs? No one is born a Zionist or has Zionist DNA. It is a political doctrine that any member of any culture, religion, race, or ethnic category can subscribe to. To claim Zionism as a religious or ethnic identity is like saying Marxism or Socialism or Communism, or Liberalism are cultural identities. A Zionist can be an adherent of any religion and come from any ethnic or racial background. So too, Jewish people from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds can be anti-Zionist. My post was not directed at Jewish people as Jews. Jewish people have the right to safe environments to practice their faith and culture.
A political ideology that emerged in Europe (like other ideologies, including communism, socialism, fascism, and liberalism), Zionism argued for the majority Palestinian indigenous population to be replaced by a European settler minority population. Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of texts and speeches by the founders of Zionism and early Zionists would know that there is nothing controversial about this definition. The Basel Program was issued at the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897, with colonisation explicitly stated as a goal of the World Zionist Organisation. In the early 1900s wealthy European Jews set up the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. The intellectual dishonesty is staggering. Zionism’s founders openly conceived of their project as settler colonialism, yet in 2026, Zionists deny the historical record and the statements of their own leaders.
If bad faith actors insist that by Zionists I mean Jews then that is their deliberate and malicious twisting of my words. It is also grossly antisemitic in its attack on anti-Zionist Jews.
I can hear it now: only Zionists have the right to define Zionism.
To accept that we are all bound by how Zionists define Zionism would be to detach Zionism from its material reality, how its founders spoke about it, its history, and its actual real-time effects. Zionism is the political foundation of Israel as a Jewish supremacist state, of the apartheid structure of Israeli society, and its occupation of Palestinian land.
You want to know what Zionism means? You don’t need a dictionary, or this word salad of an intellectual debate, or to even reach back to more than a century of facts on the grounds. It’s in the scenes of Gaza we’ve watched on our phones for over 800 days.
Zionists can try to rebrand settler colonialism as self-determination, but surely Palestinians, as the population whose self-determination has been denied for 78 years, are not obliged to accept this? If Zionism is a protected cultural identity, what does this mean for me as a Palestinian? Is it not my right to criticise, rally against, and oppose the political ideology that is the reason why my father, born in 1945 in Palestine, cannot return to his birthplace except as a tourist on his Australian passport and only for a time period determined at the whim of an Israeli soldier at the border? What does this mean for Palestinians whose lives are marked by dispossession, exile, refugee camps, land theft, and now, in real-time, genocide, violence enacted in the name of Zionism?
If Zionism is a protected cultural identity, what does this mean for anti-Zionist Jews? On this basis, then, a White Christian Zionist (in fact, the largest group of Zionists in the USA) would be a protected cultural identity category.
As for cultural safety, some readers of my post, if they are not familiar with the concept of cultural safety, may have understood that I was saying that I do not accept that some members of our society have a right or claim to safety at large. Such an interpretation was not my intention, and I do not believe that it is a fair reading of my post in context.
Cultural safety is a term and practice that emerged from anti-colonial and anti-racist work of Māori nursing educators in Aotearoa (New Zealand). The term speaks to the histories of colonial violence enacted on Indigenous people. It has a specific origin, context and usage in an anti-racism context. A distinctive feature of cultural safety is that it is the people who have been colonised and harmed by the violence and oppressive practices of settler colonialist systems and discourses who have a right to and are entitled to cultural safety, not those who adhere to, enable, or support racist settler colonial ideologies and practices. The term was not intended to be a cover for those who adhere to a political ideology, nor is cultural safety an entitlement that is equally shared between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed.
Racialised people— not political ideologies— are entitled to cultural safety. A Jewish person is entitled to cultural safety as a Jew. A Sikh, or Buddhist, or Indian person, and so on, are entitled to cultural safety. A Zionist, who can be an adherent of any religion and come from any ethnic or racial background, is not entitled to claim the right to a ‘culturally safe space’ to espouse their settler colonial ideology. If people (some of them of Chinese heritage) held protests against the Communist regime of the People’s Republic of China on an Australian campus, and Chinese supporters of Communism claimed these protests should be banned because they felt “culturally unsafe”, would we take such an attempt to suppress speech seriously?
I am an academic trained and experienced in critiquing political ideologies and raising awareness about their material impact. Indeed, my entire PhD was based on me, a Muslim Arab-Australian woman, unpacking Islamophobia and white supremacy from the point of view of the perpetrators. I conducted in-depth interviews with individuals from far-right, white supremacist, Islamophobic organisations. I sat with them as they told me they wanted to set up abortion clinics in Lakemba and Greenacre as ‘demographic control’ of the Muslim population. I am literally trained to subject oppressive and harmful political ideologies to normative interrogation. Except I am denied the right to do that to the ideology and system that is conducting a live-streamed genocide against my people. Our anti-Zionism is directed at a state-building project and a political regime that we are entitled to resist and subject to normative interrogation, as is the case with all political ideologies.
Weaponizing the language of cultural safety to disable Palestinians from criticising Zionism inverts the relationship of coloniser and colonised and burdens Palestinians with a responsibility to ensure that Zionists can openly propagate their ideology without contestation. It is a grotesque burden imposed by those who profess a commitment to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ whilst exposing their anti-Palestinian racism. It is a burden as outrageous and contemptible as demanding that women and/or people who identify as LGBTQI offer the misogynists and homophobes in their workplace a ‘safe space’ to extoll their misogyny and homophobia.
The end goal is clear: ensure that anti-Zionist Jews and Palestinians have no right to be anti-Zionist, that is, anti-colonial and anti-racist. Ensure that Palestinians have no right to critique the ideology that justifies their dispossession, the illegal occupation of their lands, the apartheid regime they live under and the genocide they continue to suffer. As a Palestinian, I refuse to accept this.
“End of Israel” tweet
On December 26, 2024, three newborn Palestinian babies froze to death as a direct result of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and five Palestinian journalists, one of them waiting at the hospital as his wife went into labour with their first child, were deliberately targeted and burnt to death in an Israeli airstrike. Posting a link to this story, I tweeted: “May 2025 be the end of Israel. May it be the end of the US-Israeli imperial scourge on humanity. May we see the abolishment of the death cult of Zionism and the end of US empire and finally a world where the slaughter, annihilation and torture of Palestinians is no longer daily routine.”
As a Palestinian fighting for my people’s freedom, I am part of a decolonial anti-racism, anti-imperialism liberation struggle. We are not here calling for a reformed version of apartheid or genocide-lite. The fact that we must still explain what decolonisation means is a testament to how deeply colonial narratives persist. Decolonisation is, and always has been, about ending colonial rule and dismantling settler-colonial regimes (yet again, we must invoke the tired analogy of the global struggle to end apartheid in South Africa because our struggle needs an alibi for legitimacy). The state of Israel, an apartheid settler colony, has existed for 78 years (younger than my father, in fact). Palestine has existed for over three millennia. A decolonised Palestine is about dismantling the colonial state apparatus and restoring the land from the river to the sea, where everybody lives in Palestine, free and equal. At what point in all this noise will people pay attention to the context of the horrors perpetrated on the Palestinians in Gaza which we have witnessed on our phones for over 800 days? Conveniently, nobody refers to the context and the quote-tweet story attached to my post on December 26, 2024. And so yes, I wish for the state that is carrying out this genocide to be held to account and dismantled. I wish for Palestinians to be liberated from Israeli apartheid and occupation and for a world where Palestinians can finally enjoy justice, liberation, and freedom on their land.
Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah
Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah is a Future Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas cover Palestine, Islamophobia, race, the war on terror, and social movement activism. Dr Abdel-Fattah is also one of Australia’s most prominent Palestine advocates, a former litigation lawyer, and the multi-award-winning author of 12 books published in over 20 countries and translated into over 15 languages. Her latest novel is Discipline (UQP, 2025). Randa is writing this article in her personal capacity.
