Remember Gaza, Remember Palestine
The following speech was delivered by Dr Jordana Silverstein at the Naarm protest against Herzog’s visit on 12 February 2026.
I start by acknowledging that we’re here on the lands of the Kulin Nation and I pay my respects to Elders past and present. Sovereignty has never, and can never, be ceded. I am grateful to First Nations people here and across the continent for their leadership, history, resistance.
Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal land!!
In anger and grief, rage and shame, I want to talk today about relationality. I want to talk about what I have learned from being an anti-zionist Jew living on Wurundjeri Country and deeply committed to ethical liberatory relations with Palestine and Palestinians.
When we are welcomed onto this land, at a Welcome to Country, Wurundjeri Elders, as I have heard it, tell us that we should come with purpose. We should know what we are doing here and we should act with integrity and commitment.
I have learned from friends like Associate Professor Crystal McKinnon the importance of care for one another; of critique to ensure that we are always doing our best; of making, building and maintaining connection; of looking out for each other. I have learned from listening to Crystal and from Professor Gary Foley the importance of knowing our history, knowing in whose paths we tread, knowing from whose struggles we build our own today. We can’t fight without each other and we can’t fight without knowing where we come from and who we are in relation to the past, present and future. We have to learn from history and stories. We have to let them carry us into the future.
And from Palestine, from my Palestinian friends and kin, I learn about sumud, steadfastness, about the necessity of endurance, of holding in both hands the devastation of the ongoing Nakba and the determination to keep fighting against this overwhelming violence until liberation is reached.
We have fundamentally failed, but that doesn’t mean that that failure is permanent. The systems are working exactly as they are designed, but we are failing as humans.
It is a colossal failure of humanity that Herzog, Almog and Hagoel are here, are able to travel the world freely and to be feted and eat their nice food and sleep in their comfortable beds. This is a failure that should—and does—make us sick with anger. It is a failure that Netanyahu is able to fly across Europe and arrive in the United States. It’s a failure that every person involved in perpetrating this genocide—for a genocide is not undertaken by one person but whole society and ecosystem—a failure that they are walking free and unbothered. May their crimes haunt them forever.
These are crimes beyond crimes. These are crimes which destroy language, which are both believable and real and beyond belief. That seek to bring about death for all and everyone where there should be beautiful, glorious life. What has been lost in Gaza, in the West Bank, in ‘48, across Palestine, and across Lebanon, Syria, and so many places, is devastating in its multiplicity. May we never stop being devastated by what has been taken from us.
And so we must remain angry, we must remain devastated, we must remain committed and we must remain determined.
We read and learn of Palestinians whose bodies are desecrated, their organs stolen. Of Palestinians whose bodies are disintegrated when israel uses weaponry that operates at extremely high temperatures and is designed to obliterate bodies from existence. Of Palestinians who, as they lie buried in cemeteries, are disinterred, trampled, devastated. Of places and prisons like Sde Teiman and the horrors being waged there.
We have to act for all of them. For the dead and for the living, of every gender and every age. For every precious life. We have to see ourselves as being in relation with each and every Palestinian, as responsible for each other. We have to see ourselves as being in relation with every Indigenous person and every person enduring genocide, with every person who is gathered here and all those who wish they could be here but could not be in attendance. Each of these humans is a precious life and we have to defiantly hold onto each other - despite the actions and demands of colonial governments and politics that seek to obliterate us and our relationships with each other. We have to keep each other fighting, keep drawing lines in the sand between what is acceptable and what is not. And never forget what we owe to each person subjected to this brutal expanding state violence.
Because what is being said now, with this state visit designed to improve relations between these two settler-colonies, Australia and israel, is that we should forget what’s being done in Gaza.
That we should forget the rubble, mass graves, the screams (that live in our heads), crushed bodies, crushed souls, graves unearthed, bodies dangling. They are asking us to move past what has been done. The red carpet has been laid out for Herzog, and—as my dear friend Hiba Farra, who has lost too many family members to this genocide—as she said to me, that red carpet is a carpet of blood demanding we forget.
But we are not obligated to respect this demand of us. Indeed, we are obligated to remember, to keep telling these stories, to not move past this, to not look away. We must refuse complicity, a complicity that is demanded of us. And we do this by voicing and embodying our anger.
And I say this as a Jewish person, who refuses to be called Australian because that is a colonial category and refuses zionism in both name and practice because that is a colonial ideology. Because both are violence. And both must be refused.
And so I stand here as a Jew sharing in the pain of my Palestinian siblings, because we are family in struggle and determination and commitment.
And the government tells us to think of the context and, as so many have pointed out over these last few days, what is the context? It is hundreds of thousands of people murdered, pain beyond the imagination of what is possible, ongoing colonialism being perpetrated around the world in concert between the various colonial powers, it’s Nakba, continuing Nakba, spreading Nakba.
But as Sara M. Saleh has written, “Gaza and the people of Gaza remain the story. There is no future without our resistance, our care, our community, our joy, our love… That is to say, there is no future without Gaza in it.”
There is no future without Gaza in it. Remember that. Commit it to your heart and soul.
For may our hearts be permanently broken, our souls unable to function, if we forget Gaza, if we forget thee O Palestine.
And we won’t. We will keep fighting, we will keep struggling, we will remain committed to Palestine and to each other! And we will win!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever!
Dr Jordana Silverstein is a writer & historian and member of the Loud Jew Collective and BDS Unimelb, and sits on the board of APAN.