About Remah
Remah Naji is a linguist, university worker, unionist, and mother of two, living in Tarragindi on Brisbane’s southside, on Jagera and Turrbal Country. She is one of Magandjin’s most consequential community organisers: someone who does not wait for belonging to find her, but builds it from the ground up.
She is Palestinian, and the daughter of refugees. She is the first Palestinian woman ever to stand as a candidate for the Australian Federal Parliament. And she is the woman who received death threats for daring to speak, and refused to stop. A Brisbane man was charged with threatening to kill her (ABC News, September 2025).
Remah’s story does not begin with her. It begins in 1948 with the Nakba, the catastrophic displacement of the Palestinian people, and in 1967 with the Naksa, when a second wave of mass expulsion swept through the region. Her mother was born in Jordan because her family had already been forced from their homeland; her father survived the 1967 displacement as a child.
Remah herself was born in Amman and raised there, growing up Palestinian among Palestinian refugees: Jordanian by birthplace, Palestinian by heritage and by her own account of herself. The family she comes from were exiled from Yaffah, on the coast of Palestine.
This is not distant history. This is the dinner table. This is the bedtime story. It is the inheritance she carries into every room she enters, including this one.
“All of our conversations at the dinner table were about the injustices happening in the world,” she remembers of her childhood. “This is messed up and I want to fight for you.”
Twelve years ago, Remah moved to Australia, arriving in a city where she knew no one. She did not wait.
She volunteered, showed up, and organised, embedding herself in communities living with migration, housing insecurity, disability, and systemic exclusion, long before anyone asked her to run for parliament, and long before she had a profile or a following. She showed up because injustice required it.
Today she is the spokesperson for Justice for Palestine Magandjin, a movement she helped build into one of the most active Palestine solidarity campaigns in Australia. She has organised mass rallies, chaired public forums, and amplified voices in the streets of Brisbane.
In 2025, Queensland counter-terrorism police arrested a man who had twice threatened to kill her for her advocacy. She then showed up at the next rally.
“Until your land is back, we will stand with you.” Speaking to the Hayes family, Traditional Owners fighting to reclaim the land occupied by the Pine Gap military base, Remah said she would be guided by First Nations people, “because I would also like my land back… and I would also like freedom for the Palestinian people.”
For Remah, Palestinian liberation and First Nations sovereignty are not parallel causes. They are the same struggle: for return, for land, for self-determination.
In 2025, Remah stood as the Greens candidate for the federal seat of Moreton, Queensland’s most linguistically and culturally diverse electorate, renouncing her Jordanian citizenship to do so. She ran not as a politician seeking power, but as a movement spokesperson refusing to disappear.
Those who know Remah describe something beyond her politics. At a campaign fundraiser, a supporter remembered watching her bend down to eye level with a child, and thinking: this woman is fully present with everyone she meets.
She describes herself simply and honestly: linguist, mum, social justice campaigner, proud Palestinian, curly hair enthusiast. Asked what gives her hope, she does not gesture toward policy or process. She says: “The streets give me hope. The people who show up, rain, hail or shine, to stand in solidarity with the oppressed.”
Uncle Bill’s Yarning Circles exist for connection. They bring accomplished First Nations people, and friends who walk beside them, into the circle to share the arc of their own story, personal, professional, and public, so that non-Indigenous members of the community can know them not as causes or headlines, but person to person. Remah brings exactly such a story, carried from protest lines, kitchen tables, community meetings, and the streets of Magandjin.
She comes to this Yarning Circle carrying the memory of dispossession in her bloodline, and she has chosen to use that inheritance not to withdraw into grief, but to speak, with full voice, for the sovereignty and dignity of every people the system was designed to silence.
Remah joins Uncle Bill Lemson at St John’s Cathedral on Sunday 23 August 2026 to share a story of displacement, belonging, and building community from the ground up. Everyone is welcome.
Sources: Biographical material compiled from Remah’s public writing and advocacy. Photos by Philippe, used with Remah’s permission. Follow Remah at @thisisremahnaji on Instagram.
23 August Yarning Circle with Remah Naji
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Uncle Bill Lemson