Adelaide Writer’s Week was derailed after the withdrawal of an invited speaker, triggering mass author withdrawals and a board resignation. The episode raises hard questions about free speech, institutional courage, and the politics of Israel and Gaza in Australia’s cultural life.

Adelaide’s prestigious and much loved Writer’s Week lies in ruins. It may not recover nor will the city’s domestic and international reputation. Gone will be Don Dunstan’s dream of it becoming the Athens of the South. The speed and overpowering nature of the destruction is surely without precedent.

However did it happen? Why did so many invitees speak with one voice as they headed collectively for the exit – writers with widely varying opinions from all parts of Australia and from overseas – novelists, poets, historians ,biographers, and journalists. Members of the Board must surely have known about the disaster which befell the Bendigo Festival last August.

As I was writing the lines above I received, as one of the invited writers, a letter from the Festival Board announcing that because so many authors had decided to withdraw Writer’s Week could no longer go ahead as scheduled for this year and that all remaining Board members would now step down declaring that: “We recognise and deeply regret the distress this decision has caused to our audience, artists and writers as well as donors, corporate partners and the government.”

There was also an apology to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah for how the decision to withdraw her invitation had been made and explained. Some detail of how it was reached in the first place has been recently exposed. In their public Statement of Thursday 8 January, the Board made reference to the significant heightening of both community tensions and debate and stressed what they referred to as the role of the Festival “in promoting community cohesion.”

In these circumstances it was decided that it would “not be culturally sensitive” to allow Dr Abdel-Fattah to address an audience at the Festival. The language in the letter was the sort used to obfuscate rather than elucidate. The real chains of influence were discreetly hidden. But there can be no doubt that what mattered was that she was an effective critic of Israel. Powerful and influential leaders of the main Zionist organisations wanted to silence her. And they succeeded. They must have been pleased with their work.

But what a pyrrhic victory it was – destroying one of the nation’s great cultural institutions and alienating many of the country’s most prominent writers who collectively decided take a determined stand in support of freedom of speech.

That brings us to the heart of the matter – how should we respond to what has happened in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023? The Board members of the Festival obviously thought that the less said the better in the name of social cohesion and what they termed cultural sensitivity. Well-meaning, no doubt, but scarcely attributes needed to plan a writer’s festival.

The horror of what had unfolded in Gaza had been witnessed on a daily basis all around the world. Outrage was widespread and inescapable for many Australians. Could it have been otherwise? The judgement of many of the international human rights organisations was appropriately harsh while the decisions of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice delivered even greater moral and intellectual force. The indictment of Israel was comprehensive – war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal use of occupied territory and the complete subversion of the fourth Geneva Convention dealing with the treatment of civilians during armed conflict.

The Australian government has said very little about these judgements but they are not just contestable assessments like historical interpretations but practically unanimous judgements of the world court subsequently confirmed in the UN General Assembly by countries representing the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. The question of genocide still awaits the definitive judgement of the ICJ but there is an ever enlarging consensus of experts that Israel is guilty in Gaza of this most egregious and infamous crime of all.

Israel rejects all of these judgements, endlessly declaring that they are all the malignant manifestation of antisemitism and thereby nugatory and easily dismissible. Antisemitism is therefore a remarkably effective prophylactic – easy to apply and always at hand. We cannot be surprised that it is used by Jewish communities all over the world including Australia. And everywhere it leads to the conflation of anti-Jewish sentiment and criticism of the state of Israel. Can they ever be effectively prised apart when it is in the interest of one side of the argument to keep them glued together and Jewish communities not resident in Israel having a special relationship to the state which regards them all as de facto citizens?

Australia’s Jewish citizens, and perhaps a clear majority, return this commitment in kind. They are people with two homelands – not an unusual phenomenon in a settler society. In living memory older Australians referred to travel to Britain as ‘going home’ and they talked about supporting King and Empire ‘right or wrong.’ Surveys of opinion in the Jewish community have found that 76 per cent considered themselves Zionists while 86 per cent feel a sense of responsibility that the state of Israel continues to exist.

This helps us understand why there is so much determination to relate the growth of criticism of Israel in recent times to antisemitism rather than to the utter barbarity of the IDF in Gaza and the continuing pillage of the settlers in the West Bank. It is critically important to relate the horror to Australia and Australians rather than to Israel’s growing status as a pariah state. Wherever possible it must be interpreted as exogenous arising from the recrudescence of ancient, ancestral Jewish hatred. While this may be the case in parts of Europe and is still vividly remembered in Ashkenazi experience of pogroms and persecution in central and Eastern Europe it is simply not the case of the utterly different historical experience of colonial Australia.

It would greatly facilitate social cohesion if the leaders of the mainstream Zionist organisations could trace the true source of discomforting, community criticism back to Israel rather than to the broader Australian community.