Interview #224 — Nasser Mashni
by Hasib Hourani
Nasser Mashni is the President of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN). Nasser is the son of a Palestinian refugee. He is a co-founder of Australians For Palestine and a founding board member of Olive Kids, an Australian Foundation for Palestinian children.
Nasser advocates to bring justice to Palestine and the Palestinian people; he has been a contributor to both domestic and international media and spoken to communities and rallies all over the continent.
Nasser spoke to Hasib about liberation, legacy, and a year of reflection.
Thank you for making the time to have this conversation. This interview will be coming out around the anniversary of October 7, and so I was hoping that we can use this time to reflect on the past year and share visions for the future, both near and distant.
What are some moments that have felt generative for the movement recently, either globally or locally, be it across Naarm or the continent?
I want to go back to October 8 and October 9. I remember walking around my house knowing absolutely what was going to happen. As a Palestinian, we know how Israel responds. We know the Israel lies that will be used to justify any action, [and that] Hasbarists and trolls will exaggerate, aided by a compliant mainstream media which manufactures consent for atrocities. And as we have seen, every accusation has ended up being a confession. I knew what was going to happen, [then] I knew it was going to be bad, but I would never have believed that we’d still be here a year later saying, ‘for the love of God just stop killing kids’.
[That said,] I [also] felt an overwhelming sense of failure, [that] I too had abrogated my responsibilities as a parent. My father had been an absentee father, so desperate for justice for Palestine that he was barely home. Everything my father had done, every sacrifice we had made, [felt as if it] was going to be for naught. Israel would do what it would do, Australia would continue its support for Israel and my children would be encumbered with the responsibility of liberating Palestine ... [I feared that] everything my father and I had worked for—with the hope that the next generation would be relieved of this fight—was wasted.
But wherever I have been—Naarm or elsewhere around the continent—I have been met with solidarity and love, each encounter a micro-recharge. From phone calls with people I hadn’t spoken to in a decade or more, to text messages from old acquaintances and friends offering solidarity, support and gratitude for my advocacy and our work.
The thing I’m most impressed by is that wherever I go, to any rally anywhere on the continent, I see ten-, twelve-, fourteen-year-old Palestinian kids loud and proud leading marches and chants. These kids have a dose of Palestine that their parents never got. Many Palestinians in diaspora and particularly those who make it to the west rush to assimilate and lose their Palestinianness. Before October 7, Palestinians in diaspora were unworthy of the Palestinians in Palestine—a people who are steadfast, unbroken, and who continue to resist every day for Palestine. The environment that these children are growing up in, post-October 7, is how my brothers and I grew up in the 70s, 80s, etc. Everything was Palestine, 24/7/365—everything! So every one of these kids, wherever they are—these kids are all going to be Nassers on steroids. When you multiply that and think about how few of us globally have managed to keep the flame alight—fighting the fight we can with what resources and privilege we might have—and when you extrapolate that to tens of thousands—millions—of Nasser Mashnis, Noura Erakats, Diana Buttus, Ali Abunimahs, Saree Makdisis, all over the world, you realise we’ve never been closer to liberation.
I remember a couple years ago we had a conversation about how you had been feeling like there weren’t enough people to pass the torch on to. Where you could step away from the movement and it would sustain itself on this continent. Hearing you talk about how that’s changed is so invigorating.
At Australia Palestine Advocacy Network’s (APAN) last board meeting, we saw a presentation given by our seventh graduate from our internship program. She’s a fabulously strong, fierce twenty-two-year-old journalism student in her final year of university study; she already has a placement with a [news]paper. I couldn’t help looking back to when I was twenty-two and there was just no space for us to advocate, and this young woman is way smarter and more strategic than I ever was at twenty-two. We’re about to bring on two more interns, [and] I’m just amazed at these dynamic young Palestinians. Every one of them has better politics and is more articulate than I was in my thirties.
And they’re all ‘Australian’, so think about the advantage that comes with that. The foundational confidence that you’re not going to be deported, a distinct belief that, as terrible as the system is, there’s still enough protection to afford most of us a really decent opportunity at freedom of expression. It’s not absolute or what it should be, but when we compare it to the rest of the world, these young people are really going to change Australia.
The quintessential Aussie-Palestinian that arrived from the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of that first generation—whether they were Iraqi exiles or Kuwaiti exiles—came from police states, dictatorships or absolute monarchies, each of them with first-person stories of family and friends who were ‘disappeared’ or re-educated. Suddenly, they find themselves ‘free’, cautioning their children, ‘Now don’t say “Palestine”’.
Just two years ago APAN was running Palestine 101 courses. Basic stuff such as ‘Arthur Balfour signed the Balfour Declaration in November 1917’—we had to teach young Palestinians that. And here we are, a year after the latest up-tick in genocide, and these kids have a full understanding of intersectional politics and settler-colonial constructs.
Dad had to ‘breed’ me and I used to think, ‘I have to “breed” somebody too’. He was Mr. Palestine and now I’m Mr. Palestine, and I thought one of my three kids would then have to be Mr. or Ms. Palestine … I really feared for how long I’d have to fulfil this role—would I still being doing this for decades to come? But I know my job now is just to hold space for the next three, four, five years.
We’ve talked about how you have these different roles in the movement. There’s Nasser Mashni from APAN and Nasser Mashni from the protests and up until recently, those two roles were separate in space and context. I want to hear a bit about the multi-pronged approach towards Palestinian liberation. What is the symbiotic relationship between the two?
On October 6, people who knew Suit Nasser didn’t know that Keffiyeh Nasser existed. And the people who knew Keffiyeh Nasser could never have thought that Suit Nasser existed.
In a lobbying trip to Canberra in November, I’d spent the better part of two hours with Penny Wong and her entire team. I was making the case for a better political position from Australia, and also an impassioned plea for Australia to do the right thing and have an emergency intake of Palestinians as we’d done for Afghans and Ukrainians, and as Scott Morrison had done for Syrians. At the meeting’s conclusion, Wong and I took a picture together, which I thought nothing of. The next thing you know, about 11 o’clock at night, my phone lights up. It was Wong’s most engaged tweet and the commentary ranged from, ‘How could you stand with that terrorist?’ to ‘How could you stand with that woman, a representative of the Empire?’ She was getting smashed by the right-wing, and I was getting smashed by our people, some of whom didn’t know that Suit Nasser had existed for over two decades. I had to take that section of the community on a journey with me, speaking to those people, some who knew me well and others not so well.
I said to them: as an advocate, I didn’t have a constituency, [so] when I asked for something for Palestine I had to reply on the goodwill of the government, but now we have a constituency, we have power—what is the purpose of all these protests if not to ask for political change? Someone needs to be on the inside making that ask. Martin Luther King needed Malcolm X. I certainly don’t claim to be either of them, but there has to be an inside person that leverages the efforts of outside activism.
October 6 [was when] I had to do both jobs. There were very few Keffiyeh Palestinians, and I had to be Suit Palestinian as well. I have been liberated from the need to wear those two identities, and the circumstances [now] demand for more forthright conversations. I’m disappointed that as a movement there is no political consensus or central point of leadership to all of the activist spaces. Some of the movement’s actions have actually hurt us and unfortunately because of those actions, it’s allowed our government to marginalise us in a really racist and pointed way.
What we’re trying to do here is build a populous movement where the community says, Hey government, what you’re saying is not enough, what you are doing is unacceptable. And if we go back to the anti-apartheid work, it wasn’t Ronald Raegan or Margaret Thatcher who said, ‘we’ve decided that we’re boycotting South Africa’—it was the people that campaigned for more action from the government.
How do we get those persuadables on-side? What is our responsibility when interacting with people whose minds can be changed?
That’s the most pressing challenge for the movement—we need ‘pull’ actions. Protests and rallies are necessary but they are ‘push’ actions in that they push mainstream Australia away. I was in Byron Bay, and one of the initiatives that they do there is [called] ‘a free falafel for Palestine’. They don’t try to sell you [the] Palestine cause. It’s just a stall: you go there and get a falafel and they give you a flyer with a QR code and then you go away. The bait is the free falafel, but you take away the flyer and while you’re eating, you read the flyer. It’s a very gentle form of persuasion.
As leaders of the movement, our job is to get 51 people out of 100 to be on our side. If you imagine a straight line where number one is Mark Leibler from the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council and I’m number 100, our job is to get number 49, who is [just] slightly on the other side, to join us, [and] when they do, the scale tips in our favour. There’s no doubt in my mind, just as we saw from the debate around marriage equality here over the period of a decade or so change from ‘Outrageous! Marriage is between a man and a woman’ to ‘Seriously? Queer people couldn’t get married? What’s wrong with you?’, the same will happen for Palestine. Imagine when this becomes a common sentiment: ‘Seriously, you let a settler colony impose itself on an indigenous people and murder and genocide them, and everybody’s going about their normal lives shopping and going to the footy?’
The baseline is constantly shifting, hopefully in our favour. But have you noticed a shift in the strategy too, when it comes to the movement?
If we were in the United States we would have a completely different strategy—it would be all about ceasefire, because the US can actually stop the genocide. Israel drops bombs today that were delivered by the US yesterday. The 500th weapons shipment happened on day 310. Every 16 hours or so, a plane full of weapons lands in Tel Aviv. So, if I were in the US, the only thing I’d be talking about is ending military supply. Here, the fight is about creating the sort of political pressure to change government policies and to convince politicians that Palestine is a vote winner, but that it is also a vote hurter, and who knows what that might look like from a domestic political space after our next federal election in 2025.
What’s something you are surprised and glad to see today in the movement?
There are two things. The first is just how awesome Palestinian women are. It doesn’t matter where I go across the continent—the majority of leadership in organising spaces are amazing Palestinian women. For instance, one of the leaders of the movement in Meanjin is Remah Naji. Remah has been preselected to run for the Greens in the federal seat of Moreton and she has a chance at winning, [which was] unfathomable a year and ten days ago. A Palestinian preselected by a major party, [with] volunteers of the third-largest political party in the country door-knocking for a Palestinian candidate—that just blows my mind. Also, when you think about all these women occupying historically chauvinistic and misogynistic spaces, that’s just so uplifting and beautiful. I’ve always hoped to see it, and thought it was inevitable, but this new generation of Palestinian women is taking no shit from anyone, let alone the patriarchy.
Three or four years ago, Netanyahu was here when Malcolm Turnbull was Prime Minister and they were shaking hands like, ‘Australia and Israel are two vibrant young democracies and these are the things that bind us, we have so much in common’. And we were looking at them going, ‘Yeah there’s a lot in common—you’re both racist, genocidal, settler-colonial, apartheid states that oppress and kill Indigenous people’. They’re saying that too, but in Western White Man speak. But Israel is being stripped of that legitimacy. Tiny holes in the dam wall are appearing everywhere. It’s the Spanish Prime Minister saying [things like] ‘we’re recognising Palestine’ and ‘international law matters whether it’s Ukraine or Israel.’ It’s South Africa taking on the ICJ case. It’s the British Foreign Secretary withdrawing 10 per cent of military export licences. It’s FIFA debating whether Israel should be in the World Cup. They’re only little things, sure, but these were unheard of before October 7. They’re just little cracks, but how many of them can Israel hold, and for how long?
The racist west has dismissed our media (Palestinian journalists on social media, as well as Al Jazeera, et al), but at some point, the western media is going to go into Gaza. And when the mainstream peroxide blonde correspondent says, ‘You can’t believe what happened here—they weren’t lying’, the politicians, decision-makers, etc. won’t be able to dismiss it. When they see what we already know, that Israel has nuked Gaza, but with conventional weapons in the name of ‘self-defence’? [To some] Self-defence is, ‘a kid in the sand pit and somebody stole his toy and then he went and kicked him in the shin and took the toy back’. That’s a layman’s understanding of self-defence.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7, [we see] a rampant lying zionist hasbara machine manufacturing consent for this genocide in the liberal west, [saying] kids [were] getting killed at a dance concert and the whole Khamas narrative … well they excuse October, November, December, January, you’re still going, March, April, June ... October [again]—you’re still going? This is no longer self defence. The only people out there now, thoroughly on Israel’s side, are imperialists, western megalomaniacs and racists. And so that process is going to accelerate, [and] Israel will continue to lose legitimacy. And the dam will break, like a snap of the fingers.
The best example of this is a story I heard when I was in Aotearoa about a year ago. Now, Aotearoa was way ahead of Australia in the anti-apartheid struggle; some of Nelson Mandela’s crew visited Aotearoa in 1997. And one of the leading anti-apartheid guys there, John Minto, spoke to some of Mandela’s crew and they were so thankful for all the work they had done. And John said to this crew from the African National Congress (ANC), ‘We never thought you were this close’, and the ANC guy said, ‘Are you kidding? In the late 80s we all met and wrote the fifty-year plan to end apartheid, in 1994 apartheid ended and they went, ‘Well, what do we do with the other 45 years?’ Sometimes it takes decades for a day to happen, and sometimes decades happen in a day. I believe the same is going to happen with Israel.
And what does a decolonised Palestine look like? We say it, and I mean it—Palestine has to win. Just look at the sycophantic Arab regimes that can stop this. They don’t have the same military power, but King Faisal [in Saudi Arabia, the great-grandfather of Mohamed bin Salman Al-Saud (MBS)] turned off the oil to the US in 1973. It got him assassinated a few years later, but he’d turned off the oil during the Nixon era, which shortened the length of that war. Whether it’s the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Jordanians or MBS himself, if the Arab regimes wanted to, they could make this stop. These leaders are just as genocidal and guilty—it was only a few years ago that Jamal Khashoggi was chopped up in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, and now MBS is touted as a reformist and an inspiring and legitimate leader. They all want the Palestinians to be crushed, as do all of the empiricists and hegemonists all over the earth, because this will become the exemplar for their own people. If Palestinians lose now, humanity can’t win on climate, patriarchy or any form of injustice. If the empire crushes Palestine, no one wins—we’re all doomed. Which is why when we say ‘A free Palestine frees the world’, it is because a free Palestine frees the world. That’s why this fight is so important.
So what does that Palestine look like, [a Palestine] that’s decolonised and liberated? Well, I mean, it’s the Palestine that my dad used to tell us about over sweet tea and biscuits with tears in his eyes, where all of Abraham’s children live together, free and equal in all of the land from the River to the Sea.
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Interview by Hasib Hourani
Photographs by Hashem McAdam