For more than two years, Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah, a prominent author and academic at Sydney’s Macquarie University, has been the victim of a Zionist-orchestrated attack resulting from her defence of the rights of the Palestinians and criticism of the crimes of the Israeli state.
Finally, 10 months after her Australian Research Council (ARC) fellowship was suspended in February at the behest of the Albanese Labor government after a Zionist and media witch hunt, she has been exonerated on the trumped-up allegations against her.
On December 23, Abdel-Fattah announced on Instagram: “After a 10-month exhaustive, rigorous investigative process, I have been cleared of all allegations raised against me and my employment suspension has been lifted and my ARC Future Fellowship reinstated.”
The suspension of her grant was the product of an orchestrated assault by Murdoch media outlets, lobbyists and politicians that sought to conflate opposition to the genocide in Gaza with antisemitism.
The Albanese government intervened directly against Abdel-Fattah. On January 31 this year, Education Minister Jason Clare wrote to the ARC, instructing it to investigate her four-year research grant as a “matter of priority.” The supposed reason was that she allegedly bent ARC rules by holding an online workshop as part of the grant, instead of a formal academic conference.
Just four weeks later, on February 27, the ARC announced that her grant was suspended and that if it was determined that the grant had been misused, Macquarie University would have to refund the entire amount of some $870,000.
The protracted campaign against Abdel-Fattah had escalated in December 2024, following the deaths of children in Gaza, when she tweeted: “May 2025 be the end of Israel. May it be the end of the US-Israeli imperial scourge on humanity. May we see the abolishment of the death cult of Zionism and the end of US empire and finally a world where the slaughter, annihilation and torture of Palestinians is no longer daily routine.”
As the Macquarie University Rank-and-File Committee (RFC) explained, in calling for her defence: “To call for the abolition of the Zionist state, based on ethnic discrimination and the violent dispossession of Palestinians, and an end to the Israeli regime’s US-armed atrocities is not anti-Jewish. In fact, the apartheid-style Israeli state is inimical to the interests of working-class Jews themselves. It is based on pitting them against their Arab brothers and sisters, functioning as a garrison entity for the plundering interests of US and European imperialism.”
Parliamentary inquiries and statements, including by Labor MPs, were used to heap pressure on university management to act against Abdel-Fattah.
There was widespread opposition, however, as shown by an online petition, signed by more than 7,500 people, demanding that Clare “immediately retract his directive for an investigation into Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s research,” and an open letter, signed by over 700 academics, including more than 50 from Macquarie University, condemning Clare’s intervention.
Abdel-Fattah’s reinstatement is to be welcomed, but the wider political context makes clear that this is only a partial and temporary reprieve. Labor and Liberal-National governments, the corporate media and the university apparatus have used charges of “antisemitism” as a political weapon to suppress dissent and shut down campus protests.
Abdel-Fattah has been far from alone in being targeted. In Australia, other critics of Israel tarred as anti-Jewish bigots and persecuted by governments, the corporate media and Zionist organisations have included journalists Mary Kostakidis, Antoinette Lattouf and Peter Lalor, Jewish Council of Australia executive officer Sarah Schwartz, University of Sydney academics John Keane and Nick Riemer, and the same university’s sociology professor Sujatha Fernandes and sacked academic Tim Anderson.
Despite Abdel-Fattah’s vindication, the ARC has reportedly agreed to cancel research grants to academics who engage in “hate speech” or antisemitism. An ARC spokeswoman told the media it would “look to update its grant agreements’’ based on the recommendations of the Albanese government’s special envoy to combat antisemitism Jillian Segal, a Zionist lobbyist.
Segal recommended that “all public grants provided to university centres, academics or researchers be subject to termination where the recipient engages in anti-Semitic or otherwise discriminatory or hateful speech or actions.” This is not regulation of scholarly standards but rather the political policing of academic life.
Left unchallenged, such provisions will have chilling effects across the tertiary sector. Universities will be pushed to subordinate independent scholarship to state foreign policy and corporate priorities. Already, managements have used repressive campus rules—”neutrality” clauses, campus access policies and the adoption of politicised definitions of antisemitism that conflate anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred—to threaten staff and students.
Under the Labor government also, nearly 4,000 university jobs have been eliminated over the past year and universities are being restructured to serve corporate and military priorities, including the privileging of STEM and applied research for armaments.
Throughout 2025, the Macquarie University RFC called for unified national action to defend Abdel-Fattah, but the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) refused to call any public meetings or rallies.
In March, a Macquarie RFC member was prevented from moving a resolution in defence of Abdel-Fattah at an NTEU online meeting at the university. That was despite a unanimous vote by a lunchtime meeting of some 70 educators, students and workers organised by the RFC on February 21 to call for a campaign throughout the universities and the working class as a whole for the defence of Abdel-Fattah.
There was also determined opposition by NTEU branch officials when rank-and-file committee members and supporters successfully moved similar resolutions at NTEU branch meetings at the University of Sydney and Western Sydney University, and at Footscray High School in Melbourne.
Not a single public defence of Abdel-Fattah was made by the NTEU. Instead, its representatives insisted that they were “working behind the scenes.” As a consequence, Abdel-Fattah remained unjustly suspended for 10 months.
To defeat the ongoing assault on jobs, free speech, academic freedom and basic democratic rights, staff and students need to build rank-and-file committees at all universities, completely independent of the NTEU and the other main campus trade union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU).
Educators, students and workers must oppose the ARC’s proposal to politicise grant agreements, demand that universities resist any contractual provisions that allow political censorship of grant recipients and insist on an end to management policies that curtail campus debate.
This also means rejecting and exposing the federal and state Labor governments’ branding of anti-genocide and anti-Zionist dissent as antisemitic, including their exploitation of the December 14 Bondi Beach terrorist shootings to impose sweeping anti-protest, “hate speech” and police-state measures.
As part of this crackdown, Clare and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that Segal and David Gonski will lead a 12-month taskforce, “to ensure the Australian education system prevents, tackles and properly responds to antisemitism.”
This offensive is aimed at silencing any opposition, including in the universities and schools, to the continuing US-backed Israeli mass killings in Gaza and the occupied West Bank of Palestine, the Labor government’s complicity in the genocide and the underlying plans of the Trump administration to dominate the Middle East as part of its preparations for war against China.
As universities become increasingly enmeshed into serving the research needs of both Australian and US militarism via the Labor government’s Universities Accord, the rights of academics to speak out against imperialist war is more important than ever.
The defence of free speech is inseparably linked to the fight against the capitalist profit system itself, which is the root cause of military aggression, war and barbarism.
To discuss how to take forward this fight and defend all witch-hunted educators and students, please contact us via the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the rank-and-file educators’ network.
Contact the CFPE:
Email: cfpe.aus@gmail.com
Facebook: facebook.com/commforpubliceducation
Twitter: CFPE_Australia