Who are the Palestinian people, and where do they live?

Keynote Address at St Andrew’s St Andrew's Anglican Church of Indooroopilly - 11 April 2026

In 1993, as a young and recently arrived settler-migrant family to Australia, when we had little but the belief in God’s ability to provide. “Indeed, He always provides,” said my mother, Randa, the day that my father, John Sr, came home with a trailer full of lemons, which he’d bought from a market garden, near Fremantle, Western Australia. 

‘We are going to make Jerusalem lemonade!’ Mama announced to me, and my younger siblings, Faik and Haya. 

Like a procession of priests and parishioners carrying palm fronds on the first day of Holy Week through Jerusalem’s streets, we carried the lemons in brimming buckets, emptying them onto the table. 

We spent the morning sterilising glass bottles and printing sticker labels that said, “Holy Land Lemonade”. Faik, my brother, was tasked with cutting the lemons. I squeezed them. And, Haya, our sister, poured and mixed the lemon juice into the sugar. It was Mum’s job to add the right amount of Palestinian rosewater, which was how we ensured the lemonade really was from Jerusalem. 

Rosewater, or masaher in Arabic, is a Palestinian favourite. Mum adds masaher to her kaak ma’moul, to her Easter biscuits. Rosewater is Palestine to me. 

“It’s called Holy Land Lemonade,” Mum announced at the church fair that Sunday. “Oh, my, that sounds delicious,” a woman elder said in an English accent. “Did you make it yourself?” 

“Randa is from the Holy Land, you know,” Dad said, proudly interjecting. The woman’s eyes lit up. Mum explained her story — how her father was the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, and how she had grown up under Israel’s occupation, before moving to Australia. 

“Why, I knew a man there when I did a pilgrimage, some years ago,” another parishioner said.

There was always someone who knew someone in Jerusalem, someone who was connected to my grandfather, The Right Reverend Faik Ibrahim Haddad, the first Palestinian Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem.

Who are the Palestinian people and where do they live? 

My name is John Na’em Snobar and I am the Director of Advocacy for Palestinian Christians in Australia and a former Australian diplomat.

I acknowledge the Turrbal and Jagera peoples on whose lands we gather today, and I pay my respects to their elders past and present. I would also like to thank the Anglican Church Southern Queensland, especially St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Indooroopilly, Common Grace, Jewish Voices of Hope, Queensland Muslims Inc, the United Nations Association of Australia Queensland Division, QPASTT and the many other co-hosts of this community Q&A event.

The Palestinian people are a religiously diverse group, largely Christian and Muslim, whose lineages date back to when Jesus of Nazareth — saviour to Christians, and prophet to Muslims — walked the land of Palestine. 

Palestinian Christians are the first Christians, direct descendants of the community that walked with Jesus — a Palestinian Rabbi, born in occupied Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, and died and resurrected in Jerusalem, who, as Palestinians continue to do today, preached peace and justice.

So how is it that descendants of the first Palestinian Christians ended up squeezing Jerusalem lemonade in Western Australia in the 1990s? How is it that Palestinian Christians are now making kaak ma’moul — the Palestinian Easter biscuit — in places as far away as Australia, Chile, Germany and the United States?  

Nakba

The ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians in 1948 — which we Palestinians call the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” — is part of my family’s story. We suffered the Nakba when the Jewish state of Israel was created in historic Palestine, the population of which was 89 per cent non-Jewish.[1] This is despite the claim that the State of Israel was created as “A land without a people for a people without a land”, which was first said by Chaim Weizman, who later became Israel’s first president. The phrase echoes the term terra nullius — meaning “land belonging to no one” — which was the legal principle upon which British colonisation rested until 1992, when the High Court of Australia ruled that native title had always existed.  

A modern Jewish state required a Jewish majority — a significant demographic shift — and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which began in the 1948 Nakba. 

The creation of the modern nation-state of Israel was predicated on the creation of a second state for the non-Jewish inhabitants, for the Palestinians. However, this state did not come into being when the State of Israel was created 78 years ago. 

Prior to the Nakba, the family of my paternal grandmother, Violette Srouji, owned and operated the Palestine Bus Company — a factory in Jaffa that built buses using imported German engines.

In 1948, these buses were loaded with Palestinian Christian and Muslim families fleeing the terror of the Zionist Haganah who were attacking villages and massacring civilians — a militia that later formed the Israel Defense Forces. 

More than 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homelands in the Nakba. My family’s buses carried many of these refugees. The vehicles that were my family’s source of pride became the transportation of a brutal exile.

Palestinians fled to the West Bank of the Jordan River — the same river where Jesus of Nazareth was baptised — and to Gaza. Or to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and other parts of the world. Each carried with them the hope and belief that they would return to their ancestral homes. And, it’s important to note here that the United Nations still recognises our right of return.  

Naksa

Some 20 years after the Nakba, in 1967, Palestinians suffered what they call the Naksa — meaning “setback” — when the State of Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in the so-called Six Day War. 

Following the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, in 2024 the United Nations General Assembly voted that these territories have been under unlawful military occupation since, and “calls for Israel to comply with international law and withdraw its military forces”.

My mother grew up in Jerusalem under this occupation — and she experienced firsthand what it means to live under the State of Israel’s apartheid regime, without equal rights in her own city, on her own land.

In September a United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry found that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, with this tragic figure excluding the countless bodies still buried under the rubble. More than 30 per cent of Palestinians killed in Gaza are children.

Chosen people

I am often asked about the claim that the lands of historic Palestine belong exclusively to the Jewish people out of divine right. 

Any framework — religious or otherwise — that claims to justify the expulsion, dispossession, and destruction of one people in favour of another deserves serious scrutiny. What kind of moral order does that produce? And, is it consistent with the values that tradition actually teaches?

The figure of Jesus himself is instructive here — not as a theological claim, but as a historical one. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew, living under Roman military occupation, who spoke about justice, mercy and the rights of the persecuted. This context is rarely acknowledged, including by Christian Zionists, in the political misuse of religion to justify Israel’s ongoing regime of occupation, apartheid, ethic cleansing and genocide.

The Zionist demographic reversal of Palestine is a settler-colonial project — not borne from ancient scripture, but from 19th-century European nationalism and decisions made by British and American powers that did not consult the Indigenous inhabitants. As explained by the Neturei Karta International, the world-wide voice of Orthodox Jews who oppose Zionism on religious grounds, and I quote:

“To accomplish their goal of statehood, the Zionists chose Palestine, a land with its own people, and initiated a brutal process of taking over the land while forcibly displacing its inhabitants, the Palestinians. Ever since the establishment of the Zionist entity in Palestine, the indigenous people of Palestine have suffered all forms of brutal oppression, including occupation, killings, and theft — all of which are clear violations of the laws of the Torah.”  

I want to acknowledge here the vile, ancient hatred of Jews by Europeans — this hatred of Jewish people for being Jewish is antisemitism, and was a sin committed by European Christians that contributed to the Palestinian people being ethnically cleansed from their homelands.

I also condemn Islamophobia, which is especially connected to anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism in this discourse, and emphasise that all forms of racism are equally egregious. 

Where to from here?

I started this address by sharing a story about Palestinian lemonade. This was a tale about my family — which echoes the experience of millions of Palestinian refugees, who do their best to survive outside their ancestral homeland.

What lemonade are we to make of the human rights violations that Palestinians suffer today? How can we possibly add sugar to this bitter reality or rosewater to cover up the stench that characterises the misinformation, bias, racism, silencing and attempted erasure of the Palestinian people?

Or are we to do as my grandfather and many others of his generation did — to speak the truth about both the evil of antisemitism and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people? 

For those of you who are new to understanding Palestine, welcome. 

Your presence here today speaks to the enduring hope that Palestinians carry. 

The hope to be listened to.

The hope to be asked questions and have the opportunity to answer them.

And finally the very realistic, and genuine hope of the Palestinian people to live equally in historic Palestine.

In his famous “Sermon on the Mount” Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”.

The Palestinian people — including Palestinian Christians through whom Jesus’ message comes — hunger and thirst for righteousness and a just peace. 

How we respond to Jesus’ call is a question both God and history will ask of us. 

I pray we have the faithfulness and courage to answer well.

Thank you.

[1] British Government, Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine, 1920.