Sitting on the couch in my living room in Perth, my mother-in-law, Ibtisam, holds on to the Aida cloth, cross-stitching a traditional tatreez piece. As she completes a pattern, her hand reaches to her phone to check the headlines on Gaza. The endless stream of news, photos, and videos about the shelling and bombing of neighbourhoods is a constant reminder of our home town being turned into a wasteland. Every now and then, a story, a name or a video captures her attention, and she reads it to me aloud. It is triggering and inescapable, so I turn on the TV, where a Turkish drama and a sense of an extravagant normalcy can distract us both.
Ibtisam landed in Perth last November with two grandchildren and one of her daughters-in-law. Of 22 family members, only these four had been approved for travel through Rafah by Dfat. They left behind Ibtisam’s husband, eight daughters and sons and many of her grandchildren, all of whom had also been granted the same visitor visas issued by the Department of Home Affairs to individuals in Gaza who were immediate family members of Australian residents and citizens.
We had spent hours pleading with Ibtisam to leave Gaza and we genuinely believed that the remaining family members would follow soon. One morning, we were given only a few hours to decide whether Reem, my 13-year-old sister-in-law with Down’s syndrome, who was vetted to leave on that day, was fit to make this trip as an unaccompanied minor. Shortly afterwards, Dfat changed the definition of immediate family, which meant all our remaining family in Gaza were no longer able to leave Gaza through the diplomatic channels that had earlier been sanctioned.
So we spent the next six months unsuccessfully advocating for our families’ exit before we had to face the agonising reality that we could not afford paying the reported bribes to brokers at the Egyptian border for all our family, nor could we make decisions about who to rescue with the money we had managed to collect through months of fundraising – and who to leave behind.
My husband was traumatised by the killing of his sister and her three children by an IDF missile in October 2023, and when the visitor visa scheme was first offered for Palestinian Australians with family in Gaza, he and I had felt a moral obligation to make every effort to “save everyone”. While at the time this scheme was offered to Palestinians in Australia as an opportunity to provide safety for their family members, what we did not realise then was that the Australian government was also inflicting on us as individuals and as diaspora community the total financial burden of a genocide. For many months our energy and resources were directed at managing the “logistics of another Nakba”, of a forced displacement, of family members having to flee the imminent threat of annihilation.
When we started getting the approvals for the sponsored visitor visas, we spoke to our MPs and to Dfat about the difficulty of individually sponsoring this number of refugees and about the Australian government’s legal and moral obligations to provide safety to those in crisis. When the government failed to provide support, it was our community who welcomed our family members with care, kindness, and generosity.
But even with such a welcome, the urge to return to Gaza and the sense of a forced displacement never left Ibtisam. In May, she returned to Egypt with the hope that a ceasefire would take place and that she’d be allowed to return to her family, to Reem and to Talal, to whom she’s been married for over 39 years and from whom she’d never previously been separated.
Last month, however, Ibtisam realised none of the family was able to exit after Israel took control of the Rafah border. We picked her up from the airport in Perth with heavy hearts, knowing that for her, coming to Australia for the second time meant any hope for an imminent return to Gaza becomes ever dimmer. Back at home with us, Ibtisam unpacked her suitcase, which was filled with gifts for almost all our friends and community members who she’d met here in Perth: gifts of gratitude for the kindness of a community that embraced her during such a difficult time, gifts that echo an individual’s resilience strengthened by a community’s support.
The truth is that Peter Dutton’s comments have not come as a surprise. In many ways, they affirm a longstanding political position and attitude towards Palestinian refugees from Gaza, one that denies us even the recognition of the horror and the pain that has been inflicted on us and our families. It affirms the government and Coalition’s refusal to listen to our concerns over the safety of our families in Gaza, our pleas for a humanitarian pathway that can offer hope of resettlement, and our demands that Australia fulfils its duty in accordance with the ICJ’s advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of Gaza is unlawful. Dutton’s sweeping edict, “no one from Gaza”, echoes the Coalition’s consistently dehumanising rhetoric that falsely constructs us, Palestinian refugees escaping carnage, as nothing but a “security threat”. Such rhetoric serves to justify the ongoing killing and dismembering of our bodies.
As I watch Ibtisam closely checking that my sleeping children are tucked up safely before she heads to bed each night, I wonder how long it takes her to soothe herself to sleep, away from the rest of her family, convincing herself that they too are tucked up, even if they’re not safe or sound.
Samiha Olwan is a researcher in literary, cultural and gender studies, with a PhD in English and comparative literature from Murdoch University, Western Australia, and a master’s degree in cultural studies from Durham University in the UK. Before arriving in Australia in 2014 she worked with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza and taught at the Islamic University of Gaza
