How the Oxford Union debate was won
JVL introduction
On her website, Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa is described as “novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, mother, and activist”.
She is also an indomitable advocate for Palestinian freedom and a scourge of the apartheid Israeli state.
Her contribution to the Oxford Union debate on November 28, which resulted in 278 votes for and 59 against a motion that “This House Believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide,” was astonishing from the first furious syllable to the very last.
Read below the full text as posted by Abulhawa on X, and below that her account of the background to the debate, which is in itself a fascinating story.
See here for a full account of the rumbustious event in the Oxford Student.
NWI
PS: added 06 Dec 2024. Links to videos of the contributions to the debate, now added to the Oxford Union website, have been added at the end of this post.
PPS: 15 Dec 2024: The video of Susan Abulhawa’s presentation has been censored by the Oxford Union! See details and original video at the end of this post after the previous PS.
My remarks at the Oxford Union debate
by Susan Abulhawa
I will not take questions until I’m finished speaking; so please refrain from interrupting me.
Addressing the challenge of what to do about the indigenous inhabitants of the land Chaim Weizman, a Russian Jew, said to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that Palestinians were akin to “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”
David Gruen, a Polish Jew, who changed his name to David Ben Gurion to sound relevant to the region, said. “We must expel Arabs and take their places.”
There are thousands of such conversations among the 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, which became the subject of their obsessions in the decades that followed, especially after conquering what remained of Palestine in 1967.
Zionists lamented our presence and they debated publicly in all circles—political, academic, social, cultural circles—regarding what do with us; what to do about the Palestinian birthrate, about our babies, which they dub a demographic threat.
Benny Morris, who was originally meant to be here, once expressed regret that Ben Gurion “did not finish the job” of getting rid of us all, which would have obviated what they refer to as the “Arab problem.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, a Polish Jew whose real name is Benjamin Mileikowsky, once bemoaned a missed opportunity during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to expel large swaths of the Palestinian population “while world attention was focused on China.”
Some of their articulated solutions to the nuisance of our existence include a “break their bones” policy in the 80s and 90s, ordered by Yitzhak Rubitzov, Ukrainian Jew who changed his name to Yitzhak Rabin (for the same reasons).
That horrific policy that crippled generations of Palestinians did not succeed in making us leave. And 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 advisor, 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 9 years whose hands and part of his face, had been blown off from a booby trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poisoned food for people in Shujaiyya, and in the 1980s and 90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.
The harm they do is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming antisemitism, 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 and wipe out whole bloodlines 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, that this man was motivated by some innate savagery and irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews, rather than the indominable 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; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.
If the roles were reversed…
Because if the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decade stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;
if Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine;
if Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 year old were die of heart attacks;
if we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;
if Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food;
if a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;
if Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan alBursh and others;
if Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…
if the world were watching the livestreamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
And yet two Palestinians—myself and Mohammad el-Kurd— showed up here to do just that, 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. The house resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this holocaust of our time.
For the sake of history
I came in the spirit of Malcolm X and Jimmy Baldwin, both of whom stood here and in Cambridge before I was born, facing finely dressed well-spoken monsters who harbored the same supremacist ideologies as Zionism—these notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favored, blessed, or chosen.
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.
And 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 you away. We fed, clothed, gave you shelter, and we shared the bounty of our land with you, and when the time was ripe, you kicked us out of our own homes and homeland, then you 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.
You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses, but the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, our past.
The sacredness of the olives trees
But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairytales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olives trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbak or Bittir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery in the mount of olives, as labors of faith and care for what we know is part of our ancestry and story.
Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world from whence you came. The mythos and folklore of the land will always be alien to you.
You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the thobes we wear, that sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries—every motif, design, and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.
What your real estate agents call in their high-priced listings “old Arab home” will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them. The ancient photos and paintings of the land will never contain you.
You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism and indeed onto humanity.
You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery and theft, that’s why even the drawings of our children pasted hung on walls at the UN or in a hospital ward send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns.
You will not erase us
You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage.
The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.
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, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.
..and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.
The missing link: what happened before the Oxford Union debate 28 November 2024
Before I post my remarks at the historic Oxford Union debate on November 28, 2024, let me give a bit of essential background. As you know, the resolution was “this house believes that Israeli is an apartheid state responsible for genocide.”
Of course, zionists had a meltdown in advance, and at least one invited guests, who refused to participate, wrote a long diatribe against the union for considering such a debate.
Gerald Steinberg, a white European colonizer in my homeland whom I hadn’t heard of before, spewed the usual drivel about antisemitism, Nazi holocaust, whataboutism, and poor-little-enlightened-Israel in a sea of barbarians (you know, the ancient colonial script that never changes no matter when or where these monsters go, from Columbus to Churchill to Herzl).
Benny Morris was initially meant to be on the opposition team. He backed out apparently because the union refused to bring on his buddy Ehud Barak. Note this is hearsay, second hand info. Finkelstein decided to back out ostensibly because Morris wasn’t coming, but in reality, I think he didn’t want to be overshadowed by actual Palestinians who can speak more cogently and eloquently than him on the matters pertaining to our own lives, on which he claims expertise, almost exclusively.
Norman is a star and shall be treated as a star. Therefore, he demanded to have his own Oxford Union session, undiluted with the voices of pesky Palestinians. That left a gaping hole in the opposition’s side, which could not be filled on such short notice. That’s why the president of the union, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy stepped in.
It could have gone on as a 3v3 debate, but the opposition blackmailed the union that unless they allowed them to bring Mosab Hassan Yousef, a “former Palestinian” (collaborator on zionist payrolls), they would all withdraw and force the cancellation of the debate.
All genocidal monsters
Our initial reaction was refusal. They’re all genocidal monsters in my view, but at least some of them have some credentials. We were already shocked to learn that they had added Yosef Haddad (another collaborator on zionist payrolls) without telling us, but to add Mosab was going too far–not because we’re afraid of dancing monkeys (no offense to monkeys), but because it’s beneath our dignity to be in a room with individuals who have the blood of their own people on their hands, not to mention the fact that they have little to offer in the way of intelligence or cogent speech. It’s just new iterations of Stephen spreading his arms and incredulity to protect Calvin Candie [the slave-owning villain in the 2012 Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained – ed]
However, in the time-honored tradition of Palestinians holding things together against zionist sabotage and destruction, Mohamad and I agreed to go through with hit with one caveat: Mohamad would speak then leave, as he understandably could not remain in the presence of disgrace. As Mohamad said, “it dishonors me” to be in the same room. As for me, I addressed the reasons for my presence in my remarks.
That’s how the composition of the speakers came to be. Norman Finkelstein had his own event the following day and everyone fawned over our white American savior. Yes, I’m angry. Norman came to be invited because I suggested he be there to have an academic counterweight to Morris. Rather than supporting Palestinians, he withdrew, apparently because he’s too special and important.
The day of the debate saw a packed chamber. There was a long line of people waiting to get in, hoping someone left early so they could take their place. The gallery too was packed with no standing room left. We, the proposition team, walked in to a thunderous standing ovation. It was too bad the opposition team wasn’t there yet to see that. In stark contrast, they walked in to a few claps, but mostly jeers.
Three standing ovations
There were three standing ovations: one for Mohammad when he left the chamber; one for a student who spoke about the murder of her family in Gaza; and one for me when I concluded my remarks.
In a shameful lack of grace or decorum, the opposition speakers were actually heckling us as well as members of the audience. In fairness, the audience were not kind to them either. As everyone already saw, Yosef Haddad had to be removed by security because his behavior was unhinged. At one point, it looked like he was going to cry. Incredulously, renowned Eqyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who was sitting behind me, was heard saying “is he going to cry?”
The only person on the opposition team who had a mildly coherent speech was their opening, Jonathan something, another white European colonizer. But he was also rattled and at one point angrily demanded of the secretary “I WILL finish my speech” because he was going way over time (something they all did).
To my surprise, their closing speaker, Natasha Hausdorf (also white European colonizer), was barely coherent. I was told that in advance that she was smart and calculating, but she sounded like a blabbering toddler, jumping from one half baked point to another. She started by trying to say that the zionist quotes I used in my speech were lies. You can be the judge when you read or hear my speech.
She kept insisting that she take as much time as I did. In fact, I was at the podium longer than the allowed time because they kept interrupting and trying to get me off stage; so I had to pause for the President to bring the chamber back to order. Additionally, Mohammad el Kurd did not take his full allotted time and yielded the remainder to me. But in typical fashion of zionists taking and taking, she got her way and blabbered on for a while. She was a bore, frankly. I took out my journal and passed the rest of the time putting my thoughts to paper. I think everyone stopped listening after the first minute of her speech and were waiting to vote and leave.
Fun fact, the gentleman sitting next to me, a longtime member of the Oxford Union, turned out to be a psychotherapist. He watched the opposition the entire debate and he told me that they were unsettled during my speech. They were fidgeting, looking at their phones, passing notes, and displayed other chaotic “body language.” I feel proud of that.
Another memorable moment was when a member of the audience yelled “sharmoot” [Arabic for “whore” -ed] during a perfect moment of silence when Mosab went to the podium.
As everyone knows by now, the motion passed overwhelmingly: 278 to 59. I actually think it was more brutal than that, because the voting occurs by walking through one side of a partitioned door or another. I saw at least one person walk through the wrong side because she wasn’t familiar with the voting process.
There you have it. My remarks will follow.
VIDEO: Oxford Union debate on Israel Apartheid/Genocide.
(h/t AEO.com)
Only 6 of the 8 are currently available. Check here for updates.
Mohammed El-Kurd | This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide | 1/8
Jonathan Sacerdoti | This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide | 2/8
Ebrahim Osman Mowafy| This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide| 3/8
Yoseph Haddad | This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide | 4/8
Susan Abulhawa | This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide | 7/8
Natasha Hausdorff | This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide | 8/8
An update, 14 Dec 2024
today, the @OxfordUnion set the original version of my speech to private (see screenshot) and uploaded an edited version, one minute shorter, seemingly following zionist pressure. see their statement on the matter. such modification of my speech and censorship is unethical and contrary to the ideals they purport to uphold. this censorship and perversion of my remarks comes after the original YouTube video had garnered hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments in less than one week, which was apparently was bothersome to zionists. whereas the previous leadership of Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy withstood zionist bullying, his tenure ended in early December, when a new president took office. the usual zionist threats are working on him, it seems. as Palestinians struggle to make our voices heard in the midst of a genocide, it is particularly egregious for the @OxfordUnion to bow to the very same forces committing that genocide. it was bad enough to have been in the same room with genocide apologists and individuals who’ve actually murdered or caused the murder of people, but to find out that my speech has been edited to cater to them is intolerable. the @OxfordUnion has not seen fit to issue statements, retractions, or other forms of censorship in the case of some truly abhorrent individuals that they’ve hosted in the past, such as Tony Robinson or Tzipi Hotovely. Robinson was sent to prison for repeatedly inciting violence against refugees and Muslims, Hotovely made public calls to genocide against Palestinians. her remarks were so vile that it provoked calls for her expulsion from the UK. and yet it was my speech that they saw fit to edit. why?
I demand the original speech be reinstated in its entirety as it was previously posted. for the record, thanks to web.archive.org, the originally posted version cannot be erased from the web: web.archive.org/web/2024121300
This surely qualifies as one of the most powerful speeches made on the greed, lies and blatant settler colonial aims of the Zionist project. It is a total anihilation of the Hasbara myths doing the rounds even now in the midst of a live streamed genocide and a paean to Palestinian ‘sumud’ in the face of the worst atrocity they have ever faced.
In spite of my huge admiration, I have to say I wish she had not gone public with her anger against Finkelstein. In her own words her criticism is preceded by “I think….”, not any proof or example of NF’s so-called superior attitude towards Palestinians. We have real powerful enemies to confront, we don’t need division in our ranks. (I speak as another outsider, but a supporter of Palestine for the last 52 years)
Strong, powerful and heart-rending. Thank you for your courage and clarity. Sending all good thoughts to you.
The pro-israel speakers and their supporters were, as you might imagine, on fine form. You can read a full account of the rumbustious event in Oxford Student here: https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2024/11/29/ex-idf-soldier-and-former-spy-for-israel-among-surprise-speakers-at-union-palestine-debate/
Very sorry to hear the awful criticism of Finklestein. You speak of the hordes of people pouring onto the street to oppose the Zionist terror, including myself, yet attack one of the fiercest critics of Zionism. Why, because he is Jewish? Thousand of Jewish people have protested against what Zionism is doing in Palestine.
Attack your enemies, not your friends.
It is a measure of their desperation that the Zionists included abject collaborators as part of their team. It is as if, in a debate between pro and anti-Nazis the former had included the Chair of the Judenrat in Lodz, Chaim Rumkowski and George Kareski, President of the German Revisionists and a Gestapo agent.
By any measure Susan Abulhawa’s speech was a magnificent outpouring of feelings, emotions, history and contrasts as she explained the Palestinian experience to those who knew little or nothing of Zionist colonisation.
The device she employed, asking what the world would say if it was Jewish children who were being slaughtered and Jewish synagogues destroyed is simply irrefutable, hence the tantrums of the Zionist speakers.
Susan’s speech deserves to be widely disseminated as it explains almost everything.
I also agree with her attack on Norman Finkelstein and disagree with Roshan. It is time that Norman understood that no one person is more important than the movement of solidarity. He needs to get rid of his sense of entitlement. He is not the centre of the universe. BDS was not a ‘cult’ nor is ‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ ambiguous.
Of course Palestine solidarity activists are entitled to criticise the tactics of the Palestinians but there is a way to do it that isn’t patronising and insulting.
Well done but criticism of Norman Finklestein demeans you
Thank-you for posting this, it has been very difficult to find any video , audio or transcripts from teh debate
The narrative by Susan Abulhawa is what appears to be the true horror story about the origins of the State of Israel. This happened within my lifetime. I am eighty years old. I realise how the establishment media, particularly the same long-term trusted provider of information, the BBC, misled us all.
Thankyou for posting Susan Abulhawa’s speech and background notes. I usually ignore the posturing hypocracy of privileged elitists like the Oxford Union. But on rare occasions they provide a space for such brilliance and humanity to shine out, as in this debate.
She knows the people who voted for and against are part of the problem, destined to continue the inhumanity as they did about antisemitism and the Holocaust against European Jews.
And that’s why we are here again.
This woman is wasted on that crowd of colonisers!
PS: 💯 agree with her criticisms of Finkelstein.
Brilliant!
Thank you Susan Abulhawa. Thank you. You have more integrity in your little finger than is possessed by the entire Israeli government and all their Western lackeys. We will keep repeating the truth; keep shaming Zionists who should be in prison; keep being loud; keep educating the uneducated; keep resisting every evil monster from Washington to Tel Aviv; and one day, there will be justice for the Palestinian people.
I have observed the formally dressed figures behind the speaker in the photograph. Is this a requirement of the Oxford Union? Are they university students? Do they buy their posh attire in charity shops? Is the formal clothing lent out by the Oxford Union? Whichever, it appears as highly elitist.
Back on the subject, we have read that the leaders of the State of Israel are a phoney bunch. How apt that Israel is supported by senile Joe Biden, the unbelievable Donald Trump and by the ultra false Keir Starmer.
Just be aware that in Susan Abulhawa’s speech she claimed Ben Gurion wrote:”We must expel the arabs”.
Researchers (like Benny Morris) have debunked that claim. His letter actually says:”We must not expel the arabs” in his 1937 letter.
Anyone who can read Hebrew can see that Susan’s interpretation doesn’t make sense. She probably brought that from an Ilan Pappe book, which was wrong on this point
The problem with hardcore anti Zionists like Abulhawa, is that they want to use every historical atrocity under the sun to make shakey, possibly even false, accusations about Israel. As well as this, she seems to appeal more to emotion, rather than facts and logic. If you care to watch the other speakers, they have an easy time debunking Abulhawas distortions.
The truth will WIN
Ali, above, states “the truth will WIN” but then fails to tell us what that truth is. Come on Ali, we’re all eagerly waiting…
I loved every word of your speech. I’ve never heard a better one on this topic. You made me cry.
May I gently suggest that we be informed as to the text of which sections of Susan Abulhawa’s speech has been censored out of the official video?
This would be particularly informative and for some reason we are not told above. Moreover the uncensored version of the video says “private” when I try to open it; but in any case I suspect I am not alone in not wanting to watch the entirety of both videos in order to figure out what has been censored from one of them.