A fortnight ago, Australia’s biggest literary festival rescinded its invitation to Palestinian Australian author and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah. In the time since, the furore of anti-authoritarian outrage and a successful boycotting campaign has made this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week untenable.
The Adelaide Festival board, which oversees the Writers’ Week, justified their decision with a statement on 8 January citing ‘cultural sensitivity’ at a time ‘so soon after Bondi’. Their vague reference to ‘her previous statements’ egregiously associates the writer’s criticism of Israel’s genocide with the horrific Bondi massacre.
Abdel-Fattah slammed the board for this ‘despicable’ conflation, condemning her removal from the program as a ‘blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship.’
Since the ISIS-inspired attack on a Hanukkah celebration late last year, right-wing politicians, alongside the capitalist class and their media empires, have gone on the offensive. Well before the motivations of the gunmen were revealed, they seized on the tragedy to assail immigration and slander the Palestine solidarity movement.
The ruling Australian Labor Party capitulated to the onslaught. Their state government in New South Wales—which encompasses Sydney’s Bondi Beach—immediately introduced an omnibus bill of repression. It allows the authorisation of all public assemblies to be banned for up to three months following a declared terrorist incident. The legislation is an effective ban on all protests, allowing police to arrest participants for obstructing traffic and to ‘move on’ those obstructing pedestrians.
Moreover, Labor has proposed extensive federal hate speech laws that dangerously lower the threshold for offence to potentially criminalise criticism of Israel. Organisations can be designated as hateful and banned without procedural fairness, and visa applications can be denied for supporting the aims of such a group.
The Right in Australia have for years looked with envy at countries like Germany and the UK, where the brutalisation of Palestine solidarity protests is the norm, where activists opposing genocide are unjustly jailed under terrorism legislation, and where false charges of antisemitism are used to ruin the academic prospects and careers of anyone who dares speak up for humanity. The Bondi massacre has finally given them the confidence to go on the offensive.
It is within this context that Abdel-Fattah was axed from the Adelaide Writers’ Week program. Nick Feik, writing at independent news site Crikey, indeed points out that the campaign against Abdel-Fattah’s appearance by Zionist lobbyists and politicians preceded the Bondi massacre by months. Bondi became the ‘convenient, even opportunistic justification,’ Feik writes.
If anything, this makes the resistance to Abdel-Fattah’s disinvitation all the more heartening. After five days and more than 180 resignations, the Writers’ Week director, Louise Adler, born to Jewish Holocaust survivors, herself resigned via a brilliant op-ed in the Guardian Australia. She writes:
‘In the aftermath of the Bondi atrocity, state and federal governments have rushed to mollify the “we told you so” posse. With alarming insouciance protests are being outlawed, free speech is being constrained and politicians are rushing through processes to ban phrases and slogans.
‘Now religious leaders are to be policed, universities monitored, the public broadcaster scrutinised and the arts starved. Are you or have you ever been a critic of Israel? Joe McCarthy would be cheering on the inheritors of his tactics.’
Since the collapse of Adelaide Writers’ Week, the Adelaide Festival board has been renewed to save face. On 15 January, it issued an apology to Abdel-Fattah. ‘Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right,’ it stated. ‘Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short.’
It is a shame that this free of charge, open-air writers’ festival cannot proceed in 2026 due to the Adelaide Festival board’s extreme authoritarian overreach. However, the mass backlash shows that silencing the movement that generated the largest anti-war protest in Australia’s history will be no easy task. It is a win for the Palestine solidarity movement here, one of the largest in the world, in an increasingly repressive climate.
With war criminal Isaac Herzog, president of Israel, set to arrive in Australia at an unknown date in the near future, the fightback to this new McCarthyite era has only just begun.
