October 7, 2026

The following article first appeared in The Electronic Intifada on October 6:

By Ali Abunimah

Palestinian American novelist Susan Abulhawa has secured the restoration of her full Oxford Union speech in a settlement announced on October 5. It’s a major victory for free speech about Palestine and the fight to preserve the public record of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

The agreement ends a legal dispute over the Oxford Union’s removal of five passages from her November 2024 address.

You can watch the powerful speech, delivered just over a year into Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, in this video.

“I’m pleased that we reached a just agreement that led to my unedited speech being posted back on the Oxford Union’s channels,” Abulhawa told The Electronic Intifada.

A contributor to The Electronic Intifada, Abulhawa is the author of “Mornings in Jenin,” which has sold more than a million copies, and other novels including “Against the Loveless World.”

She also founded Playgrounds for Palestine.

Abulhawa spoke at the prestigious Oxford debating society on Nov. 28, 2024, supporting a motion that Israel is an apartheid state engaged in genocide. The motion passed by 278 votes to 59.

Abulhawa says she agreed to participate on the express condition that her speech would be published unedited and received repeated assurances from Oxford Union representatives that it would be.

The full recording appeared on the Oxford Union’s YouTube channel on Dec. 5 [2024] and attracted about 250,000 views within one week, according to her lawyers. The full version was blocked from public view on Dec. 12 and an edited version appeared on Dec. 13, without her approval. An accompanying statement invoked standards and legal concerns.

The cuts removed roughly a minute and a half from an address that searingly described Israel’s crimes over decades and challenged the double standards applied to Palestinian suffering.

Abulhawa posted the unedited speech on her own YouTube channel, but it attracted a far smaller number of views.

Critical cuts

A published transcript of the unedited address makes clear what was being withheld from readers and viewers. One deleted passage described the Israeli military leaving explosive toys in southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s that detonated when children picked them up.

Another asked listeners to imagine Palestinians inflicting on Jewish captives the sexual torture inflicted on Palestinians in Israeli prisons, describing assaults with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks and fire extinguishers, and referring to the torture and death in Israeli detention of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a renowned Gaza orthopedic surgeon, killed in April 2024.

A third edit removed her condemnation of Zionist entitlement and privilege, including the idea of being “divinely favored, blessed or chosen.”

Two further cuts removed accusations that Zionists could not live without dominating others and had crossed all limits, “nurtured the most vile of human impulses” and had revealed their true nature during the Gaza genocide.

“You carved out our hearts,” one of those passages began.

Lawsuit filed

Lawyers for the Oxford Union characterized the passages as antisemitic tropes or unproven allegations that attributed supremacy and depravity to Jews or Israelis generally. They argued the censored comments risked inciting racial hatred and that publishing them could expose those responsible to criminal prosecution.

Abulhawa’s lawyers said that the Oxford Union had broken its promise, violated her rights as a writer and damaged her reputation by suggesting she had committed a crime. Her lawyers argued that the passages addressed well-documented Israeli abuses and Zionist ideology, rather than attacking Jews or Israelis as groups.

They cited reputable reporting going back decades, a United Nations submission from Lebanon’s government and even a British Foreign Office memorandum which cited ongoing deaths and injuries “with victims falling foul of mines, shells, unexploded Israeli cluster bombs or even booby trapped toys, allegedly dropped by the Israeli airforce near Lebanese villages.”

A 2008 Human Rights Watch report also documented how unexploded Israeli cluster bomblets in Lebanon had “maimed and killed children who thought they were toys.”

In September 2025, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) announced it had filed a discrimination claim on Abulhawa’s behalf, with support from the British law firm Bindmans, alleging she had been treated less favorably, because she is Palestinian and holds anti-Zionist beliefs.

The lawsuit sought restoration of the full speech, removal of the edited version, a declaration that the Oxford Union had acted unlawfully and compensation.

Abulhawa’s lawyers compared her treatment to that of Mosab Hassan Yousef, a pro-Israel speaker participating in the same debate whose speech disparaged Palestinians collectively, yet remained unedited.

Yousef said, “There come the Palestinians, the most pathetic people on planet Earth.” He also said that the Palestinian identity was “nothing but a false identity.”

The Oxford Union argued that Yousef’s remarks were offensive but did not incite racial hatred. It also pointed to its editing of Israeli speaker Miko Peled’s contribution as evidence that it had not singled Abulhawa out merely for being Palestinian.

Key demand met

ELSC sought an assessment from Pete Weatherby, a senior lawyer specializing in protest rights, international law and human rights law. Weatherby concluded that nothing in Abulhawa’s speech provided reasonable grounds to suspect she had committed any of the incitement offenses the Oxford Union had invoked.

The publicly announced settlement meets Abulhawa’s key demand: the edited video has been removed, and the original returned to the Union’s platforms.

Other terms have not been disclosed.

In its announcement, also posted on Instagram, the Oxford Union reaffirmed its commitment to free speech and open debate. “It is a matter of regret that this dispute arose,” it said, expressing satisfaction at the resolution.

Arwa Elrayess, a former president, said the agreement respected Abulhawa’s rights as a speaker and writer while meeting the Oxford Union’s legal duties.

The announcement contains no admission of liability.

‘I can recommend we fight back.’

“For 78 years, Palestinians have had their history disputed, rewritten and erased,” ELSC told The Electronic Intifada, invoking Edward Said’s phrase “permission to narrate.”

“Palestinians are routinely told they may speak only as perfect victims, measured and grateful and careful not to cause discomfort,” the group added. “Susan Abulhawa refused to accept those terms.”

ELSC said Palestinians and their supporters across Britain face police investigations, disciplinary action and censorship, often justified by “vague allegations of criminality that nobody ever tests.”

“The allegation collapsed under scrutiny, and the speech has been restored,” the group said.

“Palestinians should not fear those who seek to bully us into submission,” Abulhawa told The Electronic Intifada.

She added: “I can recommend we fight back, even if the battle seems small relative to an ongoing genocide, because our greatest powers live in our voices; our Indigenous stories; our intellectual and creative labor; our love for our ancestors, for each other, and for our children; and the truth of our struggle for liberation.”