Palestinian Activist Delivers Poignant Speech at Oxford Union, Calls for Justice and Liberation
In a profoundly moving and meticulously crafted address, Palestinian author and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa captivated the Oxford Union during Thursday’s debate on the motion: “This House Believes Israel Is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” The motion passed with overwhelming support, 278 votes to 59, but it was Abulhawa’s speech that resonated deeply, leaving the audience in stunned silence.
Abulhawa, the daughter of Palestinians displaced during the 1967 war and the founder of the NGO Playgrounds for Palestine, laid bare the historical and ongoing struggles of her people under Israeli occupation. Her speech, delivered with calm yet unyielding resolve, painted a stark picture of Palestinian suffering and resilience.
Below is Susan Abulhawa’s Speech at the Oxford Union:
“Addressing the challenge of what to do about the indigenous inhabitants of the land, Heim Weizmann, a Russian Jew, said to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that the Palestinians were akin to the rocks of Judea—obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path. David Ben-Gurion, a Polish Jew who changed his name to sound relevant to the region, said, ‘We must expel Arabs and take their places.’
There are thousands of such conversations amongst early Zionists who plotted and implemented the violent colonization of Palestine and the annihilation of her native people. But they were only partially successful, murdering or ethnically cleansing 80% of Palestinians, which meant that 20% of us remained an enduring obstacle to their colonial fantasies.
Zionists lamented our presence and debated publicly in all circles—political, academic, social, and cultural—regarding what to do with us, what to do about the Palestinian birthright, about our babies, which they dubbed a demographic threat. Benny Morris once expressed regret that Ben-Gurion did not finish the job of getting rid of us all, which would have obviated what they referred to as the ‘Arab problem.’ Benjamin Netanyahu once bemoaned a missed opportunity during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to expel large swaths of the Palestinian population while the world’s attention was focused on China.
Some of their articulated solutions to the nuisance of our existence included the ‘break their bones’ policy in the 1980s and 1990s, ordered by Yitzhak Rabin. That horrific policy, which crippled generations of Palestinians, did not succeed in making us leave. Frustrated by Palestinian resilience, a new discourse arose, especially after a massive natural gas field was discovered off the coast of northern Gaza worth trillions of dollars. This new discourse is echoed in the words of Colonel Efraim Eitan, who said in 2004, ‘We have to kill them all.’
Aaron Sofer, an Israeli so-called intellectual and political adviser, insisted in 2018 that ‘we have to kill and kill and kill, all day, every day.’ When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy, no more than nine years old, whose hands and part of his face had been blown off from a booby-trapped can of food the soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poison food for people in Shuja’iyya and booby-trapped toys in southern Lebanon.
The harm they do is diabolical, and yet they expect you to believe they are the victims, invoking Europe’s Holocaust and screaming ‘anti-Semitism.’ They expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so-called ‘kill shots’ and the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive is self-defense.
They want you to believe that a man who had not eaten a thing in over 72 hours, who kept fighting even when all he had was one functioning arm, was motivated by some innate savagery or irrational hatred, rather than the indomitable yearning to see his people free in their own homeland.
It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives—about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams. It is about the worth of our homes, which contain the memories of generations, and the worth of our humanity and agency.
If the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decades stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping, and killing them—there would be no debate about whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
Yet here we are, enduring the indignity of debating those who think our only life choices should be to leave our homeland, submit to their supremacy, or die politely and quietly.
But you would be wrong to think that I came to convince you of anything. This house resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this Holocaust of our time. I came in the spirit of Malcolm X and James Baldwin, both of whom stood here and in Cambridge before I was born, facing finely dressed, well-spoken monsters who harbor the same supremacist ideologies of Zionism.
I’m here for the sake of history—to speak to generations not yet born and for the chronicles of this extraordinary time, where the carpet bombing of defenseless indigenous societies is legitimized. I’m here for my grandmothers, both of whom died as penniless refugees while foreign Jews lived in their stolen homes.
I also came to speak directly to Zionists, here and everywhere. We let you into our homes when your own countries tried to murder you and everyone else turned away. We fed, clothed, and sheltered you. And when the time was ripe, you kicked us out of our own homes and homeland, then killed and robbed and burned and looted our lives. You carved out our hearts because it is clear you do not know how to live in the world without dominating others.
No matter what happens from here, no matter what fairy tales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olive trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and break our hearts a little more. You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill all day, every day. We are not the rocks that Heim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories.
Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free. She will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic, pluralistic glory. We will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, and beyond. You will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.”
Abulhawa’s address not only emphasized the enduring spirit of the Palestinian people but also called attention to the systemic violence and dispossession that have defined their plight. She concluded by expressing hope for a future where justice prevails and Palestine is restored as a beacon of pluralism and peace.
Her speech at the Oxford Union is already being hailed as a pivotal moment, a searing testament to the Palestinian struggle and a call to the global conscience to act against injustice.
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