This week, Antony Loewenstein speaks with Randa Abdel-Fattah; Palestinian Australian writer, academic, former lawyer, and author most recently of “Discipline”. They reflect on knowing each other for over two decades, before turning to Randa’s visits to Palestine in 2000 and 2010 with her father, including returning to his village Burqa, and what dispossession looks like when it fractures people from land, memory, and ancestry. The conversation moves to the present: how Randa thinks about “after Zionism,” why she rejects future-tense ideas of “coexistence,” and what it means to practise solidarity now, including with anti-Zionist Jewish communities. They discuss how Palestinians process ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank, the psychological toll of constant exposure, and why refusing to “switch off” has become a discipline in itself. Antony and Randa also examine Australia’s media and cultural institutions including the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices, the use of “risk management” as censorship, and what the Adelaide Writers’ Week controversy revealed about power, narrative control, and whose speech is treated as dangerous. The episode closes with a wider discussion about the rise of the far right in Australia, the positioning of far-right parties as “pro-Israel,” and why Randa believes building independent institutions and alternative platforms is no longer optional.
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