Ahmad Khochaiche is a Lebanese-Australian activist based in Wollongong. The following is a lightly edited transcript of his speech to the Hands Off Lebanon rally in Sydney, April 26, 2026.

I want to begin by acknowledging the First Nations people on whose lands we are gathering on today: the Gadigal people. I want to acknowledge their close to 250 years of resistance in this colony, and I want to acknowledge the resistance of all indigenous peoples around the world, be they in Palestine, Lebanon, West Papua, Sudan, or wherever they might be, against the imperialist forces that are trying to eradicate them from their lands and steal their resources.

In 1996, when I was 18 months old, I was taken to a detention centre to visit my uncle. I was handed to the guards, and the guards took me behind the iron gates. My uncle had stitched a little hat for me. On the rim of the hat was an embroidered inscription: “To Ahmad from your Uncle Ali, al-Khiam Detention Centre 1996.”

My uncle was one of the hundreds of people who were detained in the Khiam Detention Centre. Khiam is the village in the south of Lebanon where my family comes from. In that detention centre, hundreds of people were imprisoned throughout the duration of the Zionist occupation of the South of Lebanon from 1982 to year 2000. Hundreds of people were imprisoned, detained, disappeared, tortured and killed by the Zionist occupation and their Lebanese collaborators. My uncle was imprisoned and tortured there for 11 years. My other uncle for 13 years.

Four years after that visit, four years after I was given this hat, the south of Lebanon, along with Khiam, along with the Detention Centre, was liberated by the Resistance in the South of Lebanon, was liberated by the people of South Lebanon, all the people of South Lebanon.

There are beautiful videos of the Liberation Day. Videos of the Khiam villagers running up the hills to where the detention centre sat. They stormed the detention centre, busted the iron gates and broke free their family and friends from their cells with their bare hands and whatever tools they could get their hands on.

In the dead of night, before the morning when the villagers charged up that hill, the Zionist soldiers and their Lebanese collaborators (because there are always collaborators), they all retreated into northern occupied Palestine. They retreated and ran away and the only reason they did that is because of the steadfastness of the Resistance, the resistance of the people, for decades.

And it’s because of that resistance that I and many of us Lebanese people here have been able to go back and visit the south since the year 2000. I have been lucky to go back many times and as I have gotten older, I have looked forward to it more and more because I have understood the connection I have to the land. I went back last year in August, during the “ceasefire” in which Israel was still bombing Lebanon daily and incessantly killing people every day.

It was a beautiful thing to go back, despite the destruction the occupation had inflicted, again, to our village and the villages surrounding our area, to go back and see the beauty of our land. Our village sits in a beautiful spot. In front of us is northern occupied Palestine. To our East are the occupied Syrian Golan heights.

While I was there, I was able to see the destruction. I went down to the cemetery to visit [the graves of my] grandparents. I was able to go to the new section of the cemetery. That new section was very neatly arranged, and there were dozens of new graves there. Those were the graves of dozens of Resistance fighters, from our village alone, who had died fighting against the Israeli occupation in 2006.

As I stood over their graves, I thought to myself what a shame that I get to live here [in Australia] while they had to be there [in Lebanon] fighting a battle that was forced upon them by an occupation that knows nothing but theft, nothing but killing, nothing but murder.

Then I thought to myself; what more can we do? It’s nice to sit here and say that we support the Resistance in Lebanon or in Palestine or wherever it might be. It’s nice to come out to rallies like this to see people who you share your values with, to make connections with them. It’s nice to fundraise and send money, but we’ve been doing all that for more than two and a half years now. What has changed in those two and a half years?

We’ve had fascist goons like Minns pass more laws to try and criminalise our protests. We’ve had fascists in Queensland under Crisafulli, in South Australia and in Victoria as well, trying to criminalise protest and our free speech.

We’ve been protesting for the past two and a half years, and we still have the ambassador of the occupation in this colony, we still have hundreds of Australian citizens that have been allowed to go and partake in the crimes of the terrorist army of the occupation and come back and freely walk our streets. We still have so called charities raising tens of millions of dollars every single year to fund the terrorist army and to fund more settlements. That has not changed either. We still have businesses here, if you look around in all these towers, that are profiting off the murder in Palestine and in Lebanon. They are profiting by exporting the weapons that are used to kill our people and destroy our villages.

So, I want people to walk away from today and think to themselves, what more can we do? We need more direct action. To tell the people enabling the slaughter that we will not sit by idly. That we will hurt them where it matters to them; their hip pocket, because that is all that matters to them. We come out and appeal to the humanity of people who only look at us as a political problem. So, we need to change what we are doing, we need to stop treating them as people that we can convince to be our friends. Two and a half years of genocidal slaughter hasn’t changed their opinion. Nothing will change their opinion. They need to lose. They need to be kicked out, and they need to be shamed for the rest of their miserable lives!  Right now, even though there’s another so-called ceasefire, there are people in the South of Lebanon that are still fighting, that are still resisting the demolition of their villages.