Bearing witness to the parts of the whole

Editor’s Note: The following is the text of the speech Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah gave upon being awarded the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network’s 2026 Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize on April 10, 2026.

In an interview in 1971, the famous Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, was reflecting upon his role as a novelist in the Palestinian resistance movement. “Day after day comrades are killed, he said, “and then they are forgotten because others are killed. This makes it difficult to continue writing. It is as if the novelist is suspended and his generation, his comrades, are passing him by, advancing faster than he is, therefore there are times when a novelist can’t write. On the other hand there are times that the novelist can’t stop writing. The novelist lives therefore with this kind of contradiction, a kind of suffering.”

I have felt this contradiction, this kind of suffering, acutely since 7/10.  What is expected of us is not normal. The fragmentation of ourselves, shards of grief and rage and helplessness. To go to work, engage in small talk in the coffee queue, take your kids to soccer, count the little bodies on the field; count the bodies of 165 dead school girls in Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Iran. Try to exist as if, a million times a day, we’re not confronted with the fact that we live in a world that has normalised the live-streamed annihilation of Arab and Muslim lives. 

Every day we are suspended above a daily stocktake of apocalyptic horror, of a people’s live-streamed annihilation that has now spread to four fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran. 

Each time I sat down to write this lecture news of another unfathomably sadistic Israeli war crime would pop up in my news feed. A 10-month-old baby tortured with cigarette burns. Champagne bottles as the racist death penalty law is passed. Another UN report to add to the pile documenting the systematic policy of torture of Palestinian hostages. US-Israeli bombs on ambulances, journalists, medical centres. Trump essentially threatening to nuke Iran. Lebanon hit with 100 bombs in 10 minutes. 

What legal or geopolitical analysis can I offer that has not been said and written before? 

And so, like Kanafani said, there are periods when one cannot write or indeed speak. It was, ironically, the words of the Genocide Convention that led me back to writing and speaking. The Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part. I find that a way to honour the suffering we feel, suspended above ongoing genocide, is to invest our emotional, intellectual and artistic energy reflecting on the individual parts that make up the incomplete sum. 

We must allow ourselves moments to pause, to consolidate what is unfolding, the piled up parts of ongoing crimes, and to bear witness. In Islam, to witness is shahada. Those we call martyrs are shuhada because witnessing is among the most profound sacrifices a person can make. It demands the surrender of one’s desires, comforts, conveniences, and even one’s own claims upon life, for the sake of others.

So tonight is not a typical lecture. It is me as lawyer, academic, artist, activist, mother trying to offer us some intimacy with the parts of the whole as a way for us to pause and bear witness together. As a way for us to collect the parts in order to secure accountability.

Tonight let us refuse the macro, the big picture analysis. I want to tell you some stories, stitch and weave a patchwork of witness testimony.   

Jet parts and body parts

Genocide. Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part. When is a part not a weapons contract? When is a part not a component? When is a part of a F-35 jet that drops a bomb on a child that rips off his arm not an arms deal? What makes a part in a lethal jet “non-lethal?” I wonder if these questions haunt Australia’s Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, at night. 

At least 68 shipments of F-35 parts were sent from Australia to Israel via commercial air since October 2023 according to documents leaked in late 2025. The number 68 is 1 more than 67 which is how many words it took for Balfour to promise away our land in 1917. The number 68 is 2 less than the number 66 and 14 more than the number 54. In February 2026 Israeli authorities delivered 54 charred bodies and 66 boxes containing human remains of Palestinians who went missing during the genocide. Non-lethal jet parts take a Palestinian body and tear it into unidentifiable parts.  

“I surrender everything except my death,” 20-year-old dentistry student Zinha Adahdouh wrote in TRT World. “I want a complete shroud, I want my arms, my heart, my head, my 20 fingers and toes, and my eyes ….”

The displaced pray Fajr prayer in a mosque on 10 August 2024. The Israeli army bombs the worshippers. More than a hundred are killed, dismembered or destroyed beyond recognition. Mondoweiss reports that the doctors at Baptist Hospital were unable to identify the individual bodies and so they collected body parts in plastic bags and gave 70 kilos of remains to each grieving family. What makes a part in a lethal jet “non-lethal?” Hassan Ahmad couldn’t find his 6-year-old son Ali. Not a single body part. The doctors gave him a plastic bag containing 18 kilograms of human remains. “This is your son; go and bury him.” 

In Frankenstein in Baghdad, a 2013 novel by Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi set in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a junk dealer collects body parts from bombing victims, stitching them together to form a corpse. How many Frankensteins will emerge from Gaza? Lebanon? Iran?

Turn the temperature down

Speaking in parliament and responding to protests against the visit of Isaac Herzog, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: ‘We need to turn the temperature down in this country. We need to turn it right down.” The climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal. In November 2024, a bulk carrier of coal arrived from Newcastle to the Hadera port, on the coast near Tel Aviv, to supply Israel’s largest power station. An Al Jazeera investigation in February this year revealed that Israel used internationally prohibited thermal and thermobaric weapons in Gaza, weapons which burn at 3,500C. At that temperature, nearly 3,000 Palestinians evaporated. “We need to turn the temperature down in this country”, says Anthony Albanese.

Algorithms

It’s day 915 of Israel’s genocide. Plus 78 years. Every time I start a talk I google how many days since 7 October. The algorithm knows me now. I start typing how man and it immediately comes up with the search question. The algorithm knows. It predicts. It has been trained to predict that I want to know how many days of genocide. The same algorithm that has been trained by the genocide. Who’s your Daddy? Palantir. Google. Lavender. Israeli intelligence officers testified that in using Lavender they would “invest 20 seconds for each target and do dozens of them every day. It saved a lot of time.” The algorithm predicts my question, autofills, and saves me typing time because it has been trained by programs that save time killing Arabs and Muslims. Algorithim is the Latinised name of Al-Khwarizmi, a 9th century Persian scholar in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom and the father of Algebra and Algorithm. They’ve killed thousands of scholars with an algorithm that traces its origins to a Persian Muslim. And now that algorithm guides bombs that drop on scientists and scholars in Iran. The algorithm returning home, auto filling the land with our blood.

Keffiyehs  

In November 2023, Jewish Zionists were “outraged,” and felt their ‘safe space’ threatened by three actors in a Sydney Theatre Company stage production who wore Palestinian keffiyehs during curtain-call. Board resignations, 1.5 million from Jewish donors was withdrawn, a frenzy of damage control, grovelling apologies.  

The Seagull might have been the start of the post 7/10 Zionist war on the keffiyeh.  But the groundwork was laid before 7/10.   

In late 2017 the NSW Police Force conducted a police counter-terrorism training exercise involving 200 police and emergency services personnel at Sydney’s Central Station. Two officers, wearing keffiyehs, boarded a train, acting as ‘active armed offenders’. They displayed the Islamic State flag, simulated stabbing and shooting people and held train passengers as hostages at gunpoint. The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal found that the exercise racially vilified Palestinians and Arabs and portrayed them as potential terrorists. The NSW police defence was that the scarves had been bought from an army disposal store and were part of a ‘non-specific mix of criminal/terrorist style items’ of clothing. They’ve always used the Palestinian body as a terrorist mannequin. 

Each time a keffiyeh is worn in public a Zionist cries. So let the path to liberation be built with a million keffiyehs. 

Hunting

Zionists mean for us to have no voice, no agency.  They have no convincing response to an indigenous people’s struggle for liberation and so they seek to hunt us down and eliminate us. I use the word hunting deliberately and not as mere rhetorical flourish. It captures the power relations and technologies of colonial violence deployed against Palestinians (and now Lebanese and Iranians), especially after 7 October. Destroy, in whole or in part. To do that you need to hunt down the parts. Palestinians—cast as “human animals”—are literally hunted in Gaza: drones mimicking the cries of children to lure people into sniper fire; children shot in the skull or chest like game; civilians confined to shrinking zones before being killed.

They hunt down journalists— sending menacing threats to their phones— and then strike, burying Palestinian, Arab, Muslim witnesses in the blood-soaked lands of Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. 

In the corridors of workplaces and institutions in this settler-colony founded through the hunting down and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, in mainstream media newsrooms, the board meetings of writers festivals, the classrooms of universities and schools, the offices of departments of education, law firms, medical centres, Zionist hunting operates as a technology of power that seeks to survey, neutralize and ultimately eliminate Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices from public life.  

The hunt starts with the tracking, the monitoring, the casting of nets.   

A Palestine map pendant. A 16-year old volunteer. Like a hunter using a scope to survey the terrain for its prey, the tiny pendant is detected. The prey is eliminated, scrubbed from the digital newsletter. Panicked warnings issued by Public Libraries Victoria about Library mascot Pip the Watermelon. A cricket commentator who tweeted about Gaza sacked because Zionists complained his voice is unsafe. Two large pieces of white cloth cover the Palestinian flag in a tapestry featuring protest material and flags from around the world in an exhibition at the National Gallery Australia. ‘No pride in genocide’ on the guitar of an Aboriginal musician. Fired from his job. A John Farnham mural painted over in QLD. A Palestinian flag edited out of a bunting of world flags in a Harmony Day school photograph . A First Nations writer’s Twitter feed monitored. A tweet. The net is cast. Their $15,000 black&write fellowship award is revoked.  Prey caught. A musician, a student, a DJ, a pianist, a radio host, a dancer, a comedian, a  lecturer, an artist, an Australian of the Year, an academic, a doctor, a nurse, an editor, a writer, a lawyer. Change the singular to the plural. Many plurals.

The hunting parties are ruthless, relentless, organised. The preparatory work is critical. It involves creating the conditions that render the prey vulnerable: isolating them; shrinking their zones of safety; and cultivating an atmosphere of plausible deniability in which spectators come to believe that the hunt is in fact a form of pre-emptive defence and that the prey itself constitutes the threat. Anti-semitism crisis. Hate Speech. Threatens social cohesion. Divisive. This is how you set up the hunting ground. The institutions that ought to protect and defend us are gradually primed to distance themselves, inverting the power relations so that the prey— the one wearing the pendant, chanting from the river to the sea, attending a protest, tweeting words not dropping bombs— is compelled to justify why they are the ones attacking, threatening, causing harm. Media and political actors work hand in glove to assemble the arsenal deployed against us—labels such as antisemitic, unsafe, triggering, hateful, and dangerous—make it difficult for those in positions of authority to refuse the ammunition that is ultimately used. By the time the shot is fired, the victims are sufficiently demonised to render the eventual capture both possible and defensible. The hunt is complete.  

And yet… the weapons deployed against us ultimately misfire. Even in death, the hunter loses, because the Palestinian lives on as a martyr. With every hunt, the tactics of Zionists, white supremacist politicians, media and institutions, are laid bare. They may hunt us down, but the more of us there are, the harder it will be. They can’t catch us all.  

Torture 

UN special rapporteur, Franscesca Albanese releases a report documenting Israel’s systematic torture of Palestinians. The same Albanese whose appearance on a panel triggers Adelaide University to cancel the venue booking. In her book Draw your weapons Sarah Sentilles narrates that governments that torture develop “clean techniques”, a kind of stealth torture deploying everyday items that can double as torture devices in order to evade detection by the human groups monitoring them. Interrogation teams are therefore trained in methods that leave no marks. American slavers created ways to torture the enslaved that would leave no mark not to evade accountability, for there was none, but because scars would devalue the slave’s marketability, signalling to prospective buyers that the enslaved was trouble. In  Gaza, Israel does not care about exposure because it has been granted impunity for all its crimes and it does not care about spoiled bodies because the only Palestinian of value to an Israeli is a dead one and that is why Palestinians are being tortured in plain, open sight. 

Media

In an episode on ABC’s national television program, Q&A, in March 2022, a pro-Russian audience member, named Shasha, asked a question about how Russia was being portrayed in the media as the bad guy and Ukraine as the good guy. In a first for Q&A, then host Stan Grant, ‘uncomfortable’ by Sasha’s question, directed Sasha to leave the studio: “Sasha, people here have been talking about family who are suffering and people who are dying. You supported what’s happening, hearing that people are dying.” Defending the decision to eject Sasha from the audience, Grant said, “We can’t have anyone who is sanctioning, supporting, violence and killing of people.”  

Four years on and I can’t forget this moment. It will always stand out for me. 

On the same day as the Knesset passed its death penalty law for Palestinians, the Israeli ambassador to Israel was invited to speak at the National Press Club, his address of lies and defence of apartheid and genocide streamed on the ABC. It was entirely consistent with the ABC’s coverage of Israel’s genocide since 7/10. ‘We can’t have anyone who is sanctioning, supporting, violence and killing of people,’ Stan Grant once said thinking we would forget. But it’s a fragment of a whole that I caught. A reminder that we can’t have anyone who is sanctioning, supporting, violence and killing of people—unless those people are Palestinians. The media are playing their part in Israel’s theatre of genocide. One day we will gather all these parts and present them to a tribunal and we will say: the stenographers for Israel have blood on their hands. 

Healing

In March this year, Brothers for Life, an Israeli organisation providing support services to the IOF, funded a “healing delegation” of Israeli female soldiers to Australia. During their stay in Melbourne, the soldiers took part in activities such as puppy yoga, a MasterChef-style cooking challenge, school visits, and day trips to hot springs, wineries, surfing beaches.  On 30 March 2026, the New Arab published an article titled: ‘Amid Gaza’s rubble, families are trying to protect their children from suicide’. It is antisemitic, I suppose, to insist that soldiers who have driven children to suicide do not deserve puppy yoga and hot springs. 

Museums, Arts, and Culture

The Victorian government has committed $7 million towards the creation of a Jewish Arts Quarter in Melbourne. The JAQ is spearheaded by the Gandel Centre of Judaica and the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre. “After months of Jewish creatives being excluded and doxxed since October 7,” Josh Burns said with not a hint of irony, “now isn’t the time to hide away – it’s time to invest in Jewish arts, culture and community.” The Albanese Government has also committed $18 million, not to be confused with the $8.5 million in funding to the Sydney Jewish Museum. Not to be confused with the $57,500,000.00 awarded to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Not to be confused with the $4.4 million to establish a National Holocaust Education Centre in Canberra. What do the hundreds of Palestinians and their allies, including anti-Zionist Jews, get after being publicly defamed, doxxed, sacked, cancelled by coordinated Zionist lobby groups? The Jewish community gets millions in government funding. We run chuffed and go fund me campaigns on Instagram. 

But arts and cultural sites, museums and archives, are important. I shouldn’t be so petty. So let me tell you a story about culture and heritage. On 12 September 2025, the Israeli military warned it was about to attack al-Kawthar building, a tower storing thousands of ancient treasures in Gaza. The ancient treasures—fragile ceramics, exquisite mosaics, centuries-old skeletons—were, apparently, “Hamas terrorist infrastructure.” International experts appealed to Israel to give an extra day to allow evacuation. Volunteers and aid workers raced to evacuate 6 lorryloads of the precious artefacts. I imagine these volunteers frantically rushing into the building, balancing ancient, fragile mosaics that kings and sultans walked over, trying to gently place them into the back of the truck, to find a safe place in a city where there is no safe place.

With archaeological traces dating to at least 1300 BCE, Israel’s bombs have destroyed over 150 world heritage sites. “The city that represents absolute evil must be destroyed,” said Lieutenant Colonel and Rabbi of the Northern command.  Which evil sites should I list: the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrios Church, which dates to 425 CE, the third-oldest church in the world. The seventh-century Great Omari Mosque, thought to be the first mosque in Gaza, along with its 13th-century library containing rare Islamic manuscripts. One of Gaza’s jewels, 700-year-old Qasr al-Basha, built in the mid-13th century. Bombed and bulldozed, the thousands of artefacts contained within are, like thousands of human bodies, buried and missing under rubble. 

UNESCO was heavily involved in trials and legal actions regarding the destruction of cultural heritage in Mali and Bosnia. It sought urgent action from the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly to protect cultural sites against attacks by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.  It has been accused of being ‘notably muted’ in relation to the decimation of ancient sites and heritage in Gaza.  It has failed to publicly invoke the 1954 Hague Convention which it has cited in virtually every major conflict since its ratification. Those who do not invoke the Hague belong in the Hague. 

Settlers

I’m looking through documents donated to me by an Arab activist from the 1990s. Inside is a yellowing file containing Australia’s 1991 Report of National Inquiry into Racist Violence. I read the appendices which document a catalogue of reports of racist violence against Aboriginal people. Running over a man with a car, harassing and assaulting families in their homes with baseball bats, shooting a young boy in the knee and a pregnant woman in the stomach, killing the baby. Lacing a flagon of alcohol with poison and killing 5 people, holding down a man and painting him white from his chest down. Can you see the pattern of settlers here and settlers there, settlers drunk on impunity and racial supremacy? White paint here, the Star of David carved into a Palestinian man’s face there. Remember the flour poisoned by the IOF in Gaza? The shooting of pregnant women in the West Bank? The harassment of families in their homes and on their lands? Israelis running over Palestinians with their cars? 

Australia and Israel. Democratic, free, civilised, equal rights. ‘I don’t believe what you say,’ said James Baldwin, ‘because I can see what you do.’  

Royal Commissions

In August 1929 there was a revolt at the Buraq/Wailing Wall which spread to other cities and towns throughout Palestine. The British mandate power changed the laws and judiciary to trial those arrested under murder charges in order to “guarantee a process void of politics” suppressing any political motivations to the revolt. Local Palestinian judges were removed and only British judges were allowed on the grounds of avoiding any “harm to public security”.  

The terms of reference of the Commission of Inquiry into the riots were deliberately confined to look only at immediate causes not the wider political motivations and if this is starting to sound eerily familiar to you in light of Australia’s political rhetoric of ‘social cohesion’, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion which has not heard from a single Palestinian and it seems won’t, parliamentary inquiries into antisemitism, then it should. Throughout the entire process, the British judges denied the defence permission to submit any material or conduct any questioning that put the riots in a political perspective. Any time any kind of political context was introduced, the court objected under the rule that the introduction of political matters was inadmissible.

There is a continuity between this racist suppression of our right to name our political reality, to testify and diagnose, and the racist suppression of our rights and voices today. American filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer, Ava Duvernay, writes: “I keep thinking about the moment when language breaks eye contact with truth. When we look away and words lose their meaning because they stop answering to what they see.” Our resistance is grounded in holding the line between language and truth. Every day we see ordinary people refusing to look away from the crimes of the Israeli-US death machine. We see Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians amid bombs and carnage fight for the right for every single soul to be honoured as a world in itself. 

When I think about the lengths the British went to in order to suppress testimony, cleave language from reality, then I understand that every part of our existence as Palestinians is profound because our mundane survival, the material realities of our everyday quotidian lives whether under occupation, apartheid, in refugee camps, or the diaspora, has always been mystified, denied, deliberately obscured. Even the land is speaking back with Haaretz reporting just this week that the European trees the Zionists planted on top of the destroyed ruins of our villages are dying en masse. Ghada Sasa calls this a land intifada. And so, every time you speak up, fight back, you are part of the struggle to uproot these invaders who even the land rejects. You are offering testimony, victim impact statement, insisting on the freedom to narrate, accuse, expose. You are insisting that liberation comes when every part of our whole insists on the right to live untamed, unmuted, uncontrolled, undisciplined. 

We are not the first

If I can offer us anything from this patchwork it is to remember that we are not the first. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,’ said the great African American novelist James Baldwin, ‘but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

The gaslighting has been happening for over 100 years. Leila Khaled, a refugee of the Nakba, was scathing of those who claimed that “the people of Haifa left their city voluntarily.” “Zionist deeds” she wrote from her camp in Lebanon, after cataloguing the crimes of the Nakba, “were more eloquent than Zionist words.”  

I want to print that on fliers and rain it down on every parliament house, every workplace, every newsroom. For 100 years they have been gaslighting us about Zionism— as identity, self-determination, socialism, freedom— and we have been saying, for 100 years, that if you have a steel-studded boot on my neck and you insist that it’s a silk slipper, your definition should not be taken seriously. 

Every generation is handed the baton of liberation for only a brief moment. Writing about Palestine’s first martyr, Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Leila Khaled reflected in her 1973 autobiography: “his generation started the revolution; my generation intends to finish it.” That is all the mantra we need. Find your heroes, inherit their courage, continue their revolutionary struggle in your lifetime. Because each generation summons its will and effort to advance our struggle within the time it has been given. This is not a romanticisation. We have never been closer to liberation precisely because we have never been closer to annihilation—that is the devastating truth.

If genocide is defined by acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, then resistance to genocide is defined by acts committed with the intent to oppose and resist, in whole or in part. That is why every small act of resistance matters. We are gathering the fragments and parts of our resistance, drawing them closer together until we are whole.

It is in these fragments—in the parts, the shards, the small insistences of life and dignity—that hope must be placed, and where our righteous rage, action, and energy must be sustained. 

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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.

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