Khalid Abdalla’s powerful speech

JVL Introduction

On Saturday May 3rd activist and actor Khalid Abdalla was one of the speakers at the opening session of a Counterfire conference.  It is a “must listen”, so thoughtful, so moving, so honest and also inspiring us to keep going.  He talks about Gaza, of course, and many other issues such as how easy it is for the Right wing populists to provide simple messages hankering back to a “known” past whereas we, as socialists, need to convey a complicated message as simply as possible about a future that we have never seen. He has posted his speech at the opening plenary Counterfire’s May Day weekend event on Instagram.

There is a full transcipt below but we recommend listening to him delivering the speech.  Please note that in his introduction he refers to other speakers at the session; these were Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine), Lindsey German (a leader in Stop The War who was involved in organising the global day of action in February 2003 against the Iraq war) and Jeremy Corbyn

Transcript of the speech

When I was asked to be part of this event I wasn’t told I’d be part of the opening until 10 days or so before and being totally honest my first reaction was uncertain. As you were just told I am an actor and I work in the cultural sphere and despite the various ways in which I  have political experience, whether with the revolution in Egypt or in my family history of struggle and political prison, I am not someone who has led the some of the most historic protest movements of our time or led the Labour Party and navigated the consequences of trying to do so in this word and I’m not Francesca Albanese.

And yet I am someone who finds themselves under police investigation alongside two of the people with whom I’m sharing a stage and so before declining, I took a breath and asked myself what I might say if I were to try and live up to the honour of being asked to speak on this May Day event just over 100 days after Trump took power for the second time, during a livestreamed genocide that has been ongoing for over 18 months with threats of being ramped up and while the last of the post Second World War norms are shredded with a brute arrogance, equalled only by the levels of climate catastrophe denialism that accompany it.

Then comes the news of Reform’s wins; the party that should really be called Regress and here we are gathering this morning. And I’d like to start with intimacy of my hesitation because in it is something I think so many of us carry. In the face of such overwhelming challenges, in the face of a world that is so bewildering and sharpening its teeth, where do I start? Or if I’m already active, where do I begin again? It’s an honest hesitation, but lurking inside it is an abdication of power that perhaps when it is multiplied into the collective plays a part in bringing us to where we are.  Because like everyone here, and I really do mean everyone, of course I have something to say and something to offer, even if it is simply being open and clear about how I too am bewildered by this world, not least because throughout my education in this country, I was taught, rightly so, about the importance of the words “never again” and to watch out for the signs of rising fascism. And yet here we are. In the dark rhyme of history with  sufficient collective agreement about what we face in the genocide and the rise of fascism, and despite our consciousness, we seem unable to stop it. Or so we tell ourselves.

And from this flow the schizophrenic actions that mean I carry this consciousness while I continue to be hostage to the machinery of capitalism, feeding its mechanisms, trying to be successful on its terms or just about survive, while simultaneously fighting it and becoming lost in my sense of who I am pitted against; who I wish I could be, trying to get by despite the failures by political leadership, in a world of such rampant inequality that corporate power can buy what’s left of the world’s democracies, and accountability starts to look like videos of Teslas being smashed up or refusing to buy products online from Amazon. Such is the degree of state capture.

And so the first thing I want to say is we are not confronting Trump and the New world disorder, we are confronting the Old world disorder. And its latest creation? Trump. It is decades of neoliberal capitalism and its beneficiaries that have created the world of rampant inequality everywhere and wage stagnation, globalisation that create the basic political and social experiences that someone like Trump, Modi, Sisi, Meloni, Farage or even Putin step into, each in their own way and the specificity of their context. But when you systematically defund all of the Social Democratic institutions across the post war world and privatise and deregulate without a redistributive tax policy and the sphere of your growth becomes housing markets and the super-rich becoming richer while the poor become poorer – and you think all the while you can find technological solutions that mean you don’t have to change anything structural. Well, this is the world of migration, social turmoil and surveillance you get and our failure. Is that we still haven’t made that argument clear enough – because it’s hard.

And meanwhile, the progressive agenda is split between social and economic reforms as if they can be split, or rather because they can be split up to the point that allows them to be instrumentalised in so-called culture wars, minority rights set against economic injustice and the battle of fractured identities that follows. And this is where I step in as an actor and writer. Because our job is not just to interpret the world, but to change it. But if we cannot interpret it and find the cultural animus that sets it alive in people’s minds, we will never change it.

It is also where I step in as someone who has experienced revolution and counter revolution. In the silences, in the abdication of collective power, the political consciousness that is against the status quo grows. The question is how to capture and channel its tumult and urges. Right wing populism is always at an advantage over all its enemies because it arrives with arguments that are regressive narratives and stories that come from the past, albeit frequently imagined. Because these are things that people already know – or think that they know. Working within the frameworks of powerful interests that already exist and so seem more achievable, however, ruin us.

If you have a progressive agenda, you are always about building future that is pitched at the horizon. You have to make it inspiring. You have to make it easy to explain without diluting its difficulty. You have to make it feel possible and irresistible. You have to be able to reinvent the culture you are standing in, in a way that can grow without shaming those who aren’t willing to join you – yet. Because you’re always sending them the message that they are welcome and that listening to them matters. Otherwise you just get polarised faceoffs that make for good TV and viral social media posts, but symptoms of a horrible world to live in.

I can already tell from the titles of the sessions that are taking place over these two days that there is a broad agreement on our analysis of the world that we’re facing and the challenges that confront us and so the question is what do we do about it now? How do we create the spaces for this consciousness to grow and the political desires in it to become effective in showing people that our analysis and our solutions put into action would actually create a far better world?

I hope part of that is what comes from this gathering of thought and figures. I have to be honest and say that right now what is happening in Palestine has taken me to the brink of my faith in the basic goodness of humankind. And yet I also see Palestine as the key to unlocking a better future. And perhaps that’s why I’m here.

The intersection of global issues we face is clear when we talk about Palestine. The way in which things are linked. Netanyahu, given the honour of being the first official invite to the White House in the midst of a genocide, to sit by the fireside and gloat over Trump’s fresh idea to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into a so-called Riviera real estate opportunity is the vision of the Old World disorder on steroids and acid.

International law is being broken on the back of the genocide in Palestine; authoritarian norms are being established on the back of the genocide in Palestine and those who tried to stop it. Universities, the media, culture and protest all subject to acts of authoritarian disciplining either through changes to the law or removal of funding; and the idea that to rise in any  profession, not just politics but any profession, at the very least you must be silent about Palestine and pawn your conscience to whatever pragmatic gains are still possible on the terms of what our oligarchic class deem permissible, is a primary marker of corrosion in our politics and culture. And yet. The moral spine of the world is regenerating from the ground up. Palestine is a space of consciousness that is animating deep realignments, most importantly among the world’s youth, but in people of all ages. Jewish people together with Palestinians. Arabs and allies of all backgrounds are finding the language and frameworks that reformulate how to stay true to the promise of the words “never again”, and what it means to build an international world order built on equal rights. The cultural and narrative renewal this represents is formidable.

When we have a class of politicians able to take power while standing up for Palestinian rights, we will have a world that has turned a corner. It’s not that solving the question of Palestine will magically solve the world’s problems, but rather that it will mean we have dynamics in which the world’s politicians are able to take on vested interests while guided by moral grit. The only way that might happen is with functioning democracies and a consciousness able to bring those political actors to power.

Revolutions are a product of unreformable structural failure. And I guess the question is, are we there yet? I don’t think so. But the writing is on the wall. Every day, more clearly. And it requires us all to rise beyond our hesitations to create the world we know is necessary and worth the difficult journey to make real.

Khalid Abdulla
Counterfire Conference Opening session, 3^rd May 2025