Controversial academic Randa Abdel-Fattah offers free classes on Palestine to schools

Randa Abdel-Fattah is offering ‘introductory lessons’ on Palestine aimed at school students and teachers, prompting Coalition calls for the controversial scholar to be kept out of classrooms.

Randa Abdel-Fattah speaks at a pro-Palestine protest at Macquarie University in Sydney. Picture: Richard Dobson

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Anti-Israel academic Randa Abdel-Fattah is offering online “introductory lessons” on Palestine aimed at school students and teachers, prompting calls from the Coalition for the controversial scholar to be kept out of the nation’s classrooms.

The Macquarie University academic, who had her $870,000 tax-funded grant cancelled after she bragged about breaching research rules, advertised on social media that she was offering the hour-long free sessions to help students and educators gain a “foundational understanding of Palestine”.

The session would also instruct participants on Palestinian history before the creation of Israel in 1948 and “our ongoing struggle for liberation and justice”.

Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson urged the Albanese government to prevent Dr Abdel-Fattah from infiltrating classrooms and stop the spread of “ideological indoctrination and to stand firmly against anti-Semitism in all its ugly forms”.

“It is utterly unacceptable that an academic with a record of deeply divisive, extremist rhetoric, including calls for the end of Israel, is seeking to target Australian schools,” she said.

“Randa Abdel-Fattah has no place in our classrooms. Education Minister Jason Clare must take immediate and decisive action to ensure she is not given a platform to spread her inflammatory agenda to schoolchildren.

“Schools should be safe, inclusive environments for all students, not battlegrounds for radical ­political activism.”

Dr Abdel-Fattah said the class would draw on her work as a lawyer, academic and author as well as her “lived experience”.

“I am offering a free one-hour Zoom session to any school in Australia, providing an introductory lesson on Palestine,” she said in a weekend post on Instagram.

“I cover its history (including pre-1948), and our ongoing struggle for liberation and justice.

“My class is designed as a primer to help students and educators gain a foundational understanding of Palestine. My class is relevant to humanities subjects or can be run as a general incursion across year levels.”

In the post directed at “teachers, principals and school leaders”, Dr Abdel-Fattah said she had been speaking at schools in Australia and internationally since 2005 and urged potential participants to send her a direct message.

Dr Abdel-Fattah, who is understood to be on leave from the university, came to national attention after she organised a “kids excursion” in support of Palestine in which children were coached to chant “intifada” and call Israel a “terrorist state” in April 2024.

Her Australian Research Council grant to study the “hidden history” of “Arab/Muslim Australian social movements since the 1970s” was frozen in February after Mr Clare asked the body to investigate Dr Abdel-Fattah’s adherence to grant rules.

The academic had bragged that she was always looking for ways to “bend rules, and refuse and subvert them”.

The ARC confirmed it had engaged an auditing firm to ensure the grant application was “consistent with the purposes for which the funding was provided”. It was also investigating if instead of holding an academic conference, as was the condition of her grant, Dr Abdel-Fattah had instead asked for women to send their favourite quotes from “warriors, their feminist women, their scholars”.

Macquarie University agreed in February Dr Abdel-Fattah had made “anti-Semitic” statements but the term was not well defined in law, meaning it could not easily pursue disciplinary action.

A Macquarie University spokesman said Dr Abdel-Fattah was assumed to be “making this offer in a personal capacity”.

“This is not an offer that has been raised by Dr Abdel-Fattah directly with Macquarie University,” he said.

“The proposed activity is not being undertaken on behalf of the University.”

Mr Clare was contacted for comment.