“Refusing disappearance, returning to the future,” by Bayan Haddad, a Communis original feature, comprises the remarks remotely delivered by the author to the British Parliament on 10 March 2026, and her own foreword to her speech.

 

“No matter where we live, we are all being taught a global lesson in scarcity. We are asked to grieve in the future tense. Whatever space we now have will soon disappear. We are told that resources and spaces for education and care are shrinking. And yet, there is always money and resources for war and destruction.”

— Bayan Haddad

A speech to the British Parliament

Foreword

On March 10, 2026, I joined, remotely, a panel hosted at the Palace of Westminster titled “Education as Resistance in Palestine.” Organised by Member of Parliament Steve Witherden and the Socialist Educational Association, the event brought together educators, organisers, and advocates to discuss the conditions facing Palestinian students and institutions under Israeli occupation.

As I prepared my remarks, I kept thinking about my former student, Oudeh Hathaleen, a teacher and community organiser from Masafer Yatta. His name means return, and he practised that return daily—in the rebuilding of demolished structures, in his commitment to his community, and in his refusal to surrender the possibility of a future. On July 28, 2025, Oudeh was murdered by a settler on the playground of the community centre he had helped build. His death was an attempt to foreclose the future.

The invitation to speak arrived at a historical juncture when the Israeli colonial project, with its unrelenting machinery of violence, had been intensifying across Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. This system produces a form of temporal domination that suspends us in an unending present, one that consumes itself through perpetual crisis. We are forced into a state of preemptive mourning, where grief does not only follow loss but anticipates it. It pushes us into grieving in the future tense: the lives we mourn and will mourn, the civilisations we fear we may one day speak of only in the past tense, the houses, spaces, and buildings that were lost and will be lost. It is a form of preemptive and ongoing structural grief, a temporal imprisonment where past violence and anticipated loss collapse into the present.

Because of Oudeh, I came to think of education as a process of return, the persistent work of the re- prefix: repairing, rebuilding, refusing disappearance. Yet for us, the return to land, to community, to the collective remains physically foreclosed by ongoing occupation. That being said, there were, have been and will be constant attempts at return that accumulate as a pedagogy of true optimism, insisting that the future remains unforeclosed. Thus, pedagogical practice unfolds through sustaining the capacity to build at all within the long duration of dispossession. Education here is the ongoing, unfinished work of world-making in the face of world-shattering, where the act of teaching itself becomes resistance.

When schools are attacked, the target is the future itself. The Israeli-American bombing of the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran, as well as the systematic destruction of every university in Gaza and 97% of its schools, is an attempt to shatter worlds before they can fully come into being. This is what the pedagogy of empire accomplishes: It seeks to annihilate the very capacity to imagine and build futures.

By carrying Oudeh’s teaching alongside Virginia Woolf’s reflections, I hoped to unsettle the comfortable distance that separates political institutions from the realities they have a say in shaping. Distance is not only geographical; it is produced through language and political imagination. Some lives are marked as disposable before they are even lost—their deaths preemptively rationalised their futures already written off as inevitable rather than preventable. Entire places are rendered abstract enough that their destruction can be discussed as a matter of strategy, their reconstruction as a nuisance, and the loss of their lived worlds as collateral damage rather than man-made, machine-operated acts of deliberate destruction. A friend shared with me how, from the privilege of distance, these politicians “persuade themselves that somehow this is the way things should be, the way they have always been, with their untouchable serenity at the centre of it all… The sublime spectacle of flame and smoke is safely far away, where it belongs.”

Woolf once imagined Richard Dalloway, a well-meaning Member of Parliament who remains untroubledly detached from the inequalities structuring the world around him. Speaking to Westminster, that figure felt to me less like fiction and more like a haunting question.

What follows is the intervention I delivered that afternoon: an attempt to bear ethical witness to the right to imagine futures in which life is neither disposable nor conditional, and to the courage required to keep building those futures, even when non-futureness seems, at the moment, like the more conceivable outcome.

***

Speech delivered to the British Parliament, 10 March 2026

This is Bayan Haddad, a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Birzeit. In true fashion, I would like to share with you two Virginia Woolf moments.

Last November, I travelled across the UK with the University and College Union for the Campus Voices for Palestine tour. From Oxford to King’s College London, and several campuses in between, I spoke about scholasticide—the dismantling of the spaces where Palestinian futures are imagined and built.

During that tour, a colleague from the UK spoke with a heavy heart about funding cuts and the loss of dedicated workspace in the British higher education system. Frustrated, she sighed that in order to produce knowledge, one needs the space to think and reflect.

She said, quite simply, that one needs “a room of one’s own.”

That sentence stayed with me. Because no matter where we live, we are all being taught a global lesson in scarcity. We are asked to grieve in the future tense. Whatever space we now have will soon disappear. We are told that resources and spaces for education and care are shrinking.

And yet, there is always money and resources for war and destruction.

In Palestine, this contradiction takes a sharper form. Many Palestinians now don’t have a room of their own. Hundreds of thousands are displaced in tents and are under the constant threatening hum of drones. Our very existence is treated as disposable.

This is what I call the pedagogy of the machine: a system designed around the shattering of Palestinian life and futures. And your very country has been supporting and abetting this machine.

My second Woolf moment happened in my classroom at Birzeit University on January 6th. We had just finished discussing the novel Mrs. Dalloway when the campus was raided. The sound of live ammunition shattered the campus—what we call in Arabic haram, a sanctuary. It is supposed to be a sacred space. A space beyond our own temporality.

At that moment, Clarissa Dalloway’s line echoed in my mind: “It is very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

For many Palestinians, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is dangerous to live even one day. Settlers, armed and stationed on hilltops, attack villagers daily with near-total impunity. Soldiers are emboldened to shoot unarmed Palestinians and to humiliate, beat, and arrest people. The West Bank has become a place of slow-motion death and attritional erosion. Now, over 1,000 military gates choke the land, fracturing what little space remains and turning the place into a maze, if not a death trap. Students send photos of blocked checkpoints instead of homework. Even our radio weather segments now include road updates.

We live in what has been described as carceral geography—a shrinking landscape engineered to keep us apart from each other and to dismember any sense of continuity, of belonging.

This system creates a form of debilitation that exhausts people slowly. It is a corrosive system designed to make ordinary life nearly impossible.

But violence does not only target bodies. It targets the future.

As my colleague, Dr. Rania Jawad, has observed, the Israeli project seeks to colonise not just our land, but our tomorrows. She recalled how Israeli settlers had placed billboards across the main roads of the West Bank declaring in large Arabic print: “There is no future in Palestine.”

This attempt to negate our futures explains why education is such a prime target.

Education is a process through which societies imagine and build their futures, and university campuses are spaces where young people gather, study together and exchange ideas, where they imagine collective futures, where they become the very awareness of the futures they carry under threat.

In a geography intentionally fragmented into isolated enclaves and constantly disrupted, the university itself becomes a form of resistance and an attempt at continuity.

A Birzeit university student captured this reality powerfully:

“For Palestinian students, learning does not begin in the classroom. It begins on the road, at the checkpoint, and in the constant calculation of risk. The reality of arriving at the university is the constant negotiation of a settler colonial infrastructure designed to fragment Palestinian life. For students, this reality is especially stark as access to education is not formally denied, but it is rendered unstable and exhausting. Despite these conditions, I continue pursuing education as a means of asserting continuity, against the fragmentation of life… Continuing to study under these conditions is both a personal aspiration and a collective insistence that education should not be contingent on endurance alone. This endurance should not be applauded, but should be made no longer relevant.”

I echo his words today: this endurance should not be applauded, and resilience should not be romanticised.

In a world dependent on euphemism and doublespeak, the obvious must be restated:

Students deserve to walk to class without calculating the risk of arrest, if not murder.

They deserve the right to imagine and create a future.

They deserve the right to triviality—worrying about missing classes and managing deadlines, not about their possible death or that of their loved ones or the destruction of their homes and educational spaces.

Israel’s process of scholasticide destroys that right. It destroys not only classrooms, libraries, and infrastructure. It destroys a society’s capacity to imagine its futures. It is a foreclosure of imagination, engineered and sustained by the machine. And when imagination collapses, politics collapses with it. And without politics, the only language of difference is war.

This is why students are among the most targeted. One of our students, who was held in administrative detention in an Israeli prison for organising community activities, shared the following:

“The occupation tries to prevent us from being a group. Political participation is the participation of groups—ones with ambitions, dreams, and visions. If you try to build relationships and friendships, you will be held accountable and punished. The high price of participation produces reluctance; it also prevents us from sympathising with anyone punished for their participation…”

When the simple act of extending empathy to a classmate becomes a punishable offence, the social fabric is deliberately torn apart. The colonial machine prevents us from being a group to prevent us from thinking and imagining together. But politics, as you well know, cannot exist in isolation.

Politics begins with the collective belief that another future is possible.

And this room—this Parliament—is supposed to be one of the places where futures are imagined and made possible.

Which brings me back to Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf again.

In her novel, Clarissa’s husband, Mr. Richard Dalloway, is a Member of Parliament. He is a decent, well-meaning man, but Woolf portrays him as strangely untouched by the injustice unfolding beyond his world.

Standing here today, I cannot help but wonder how many Richard Dalloways sit in rooms like this.

Not necessarily cruel people. Not hateful. Just people who remain untouched.

I stand here today asking you to be touched, to be unsettled by this reality, and to refuse any hierarchical order to life. Because the grim reality today is that there are grievable lives and non-grievable lives. And the Israeli colonial project has created a hierarchy of lives and rights: at the bottom, Palestinians in Gaza; then the West Bank; then Jerusalem; then Palestinians inside the Green Line; and, at the top, Jewish Israelis—who have their own internal hierarchies but whose lives are deemed naturally inviolable.

Education, in its broader sense, is not only about knowledge. It is also about confronting and challenging hierarchies.

It is about the right to imagine a future and the right to build it together.

If we can share a story of scarcity, then we can also share a story of possibility.

And this room, right now, is a space where you can help shape that possibility.

Thank you.

Featured image: Excavators and workmen dug nearly 100 graves at a cemetery in Minab before the funeral for children and teachers killed in an airstrike on a girls’ school on 28 February 2026. Photo. Iran’s Foreign Media Department via Associated Press. Courtesy of The Intercept.

Bayan Haddad