Palestine

The 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week has been cancelled entirely. That’s because so many writers have pulled out over the festival’s decision to bar a Palestinian-Australian writer from participating.

The festival withdrew its invitation last week to author and lawyer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah because it claimed that allowing her to take part would be “culturally insensitive” after the Bondi Beach attack. The Bondi Beach murderers were nothing to do with Palestinians. They were reportedly motivated by ‘ISIS ideology’ that despises Palestinian resistance and collaborates with Israel. Yet the Israel lobby has been desperately trying to use the attack to demonise Palestinians and their supporters even though the hero of the attack, who disarmed one of the gunmen, is a Muslim hailing from close to Palestine.

Adelaide Writers Week: fuck around and find out

Dr Abdel-Fattah rightly condemned the decision to block her as:

a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship and a despicable attempt to associate me with the Bondi massacre [that] has stripped me of my humanity and agency, reducing me to an object onto which others can project their racist fears and smears.

A number of other writers immediately withdrew from the festival in protest at Abdel-Fattah’s ban. Festival director and child of Holocaust survivors Louise Adler resigned saying she could not be party to the censorship. But now the whole event has been cancelled – and the rest of the board of the festival has resigned in disgrace – after over 180 writers – all but one of those scheduled to attend – pulled out.

Weasel words

The resigning board issued an apology – of sorts. But the apology was about the way the decision was viewed by others and still tried to justify the withdrawal of the invitation and pin the Bondi atrocity on Palestinians:

This is a deeply regrettable outcome. We recognise and deeply regret the distress this decision has caused to our audience, artists and writers, donors, corporate partners, the government and our own staff and people.

We also apologise to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah for how the decision was represented and reiterate this is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history.

The weasel distinction was not lost on Abdel-Fattah, who publicly rejected the ‘apology’ via an Instagram post:

It is clear that the board’s regret extends to how the message of my cancellation was conveyed, not the decision itself.