The Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) debacle might have served as a “life lesson” to politicians and lobbyists about the risks involved in interfering with the independence of arts organisations. But as we have seen at Newcastle and the Sydney Writers Festival some are apparently slow learners.

In the aftermath of AWW a litany of self-serving furphys circulated about literary festivals and the role of their directors. I can’t speak for other directors’ priorities, but it is time to set the record straight about Adelaide Writers’ Week.

Festival directors are hired for their expertise, knowledge of the book business, networks and capacity to engage audiences. It is standard operating procedure that curatorial judgement and independence is respected. However, when arts boards take unto themselves the programming role, there will inevitably be lawyers at 50 paces.

In Australia there are thousands of new fiction and nonfiction titles published every year. Much as writers may feel entitled to an invitation, that is not how the business works. There are thematic factors to consider, the quality of the writing, the imperative to focus on available stock of recently published books, frequent use of the office abacus to work out the how many writers can be afforded given perennially inadequate budgets. And then there are individual curatorial preferences and tastes.

As the director it’s my responsibility to curate a festival which entails choosing who will and who won’t be invited. It’s not hypocrisy to choose some writers and not others. Not programming someone who believes they should be invited is not an act of censorship. It’s not surprising that one or two embittered memoirists, aggrieved to have not received an invitation, prefer the aggrandised explanation that they were “silenced”. This characterisation is understandably preferable to the simpler explanation that their work might not have been regarded as of sufficient literary merit.

What constitutes literary merit is, of course, a contentious question; but thankfully navigating these complexities is not a task we assign to premiers or, worse, to the aforementioned, dyspeptic memoirists.

Another aspect of the AWW drama that bears consideration is the way in which false equivalences are deployed. Which is why I want to address the “gotcha” accusations of hypocrisy regarding objections to the appearance of the NYT columnist, Thomas Friedman. Without wading into the echo chamber that is the opinion pages of the Oz, the Friedman/Abdel-Fattah comparison is instructive. It’s inappropriate to discuss board discussions regarding writers deemed by some to be “controversial”. But the equivalence being made between Friedman and Abdel-Fattah is symptomatic of the bad faith modus operandi of the pro-Israel lobby: Friedman is a figure at the heart of the mainstream journalistic establishment. Dr Abdel-Fattah is a Palestinian academic and author who – despite being at the centre of this saga and despite being a highly-respected scholar and award-winning novelist – is unable to get an opinion piece published in a mainstream media outlet.

To suggest that a change in scheduling or indeed to suggest any objection to his appearance amounts to a denial of Friedman’s free speech is risible. I note, unlike his champions in Australia’s Israel lobby, Friedman has not complained about having been silenced. Unlike Dr Abdel-Fattah he has not been vilified, defamed, or treated with disrespect.

The Friedman case needs to be understood in its context: that is, as another instance of the dishonest and frequently deployed strategy of false equivalence. This same false equivalence underlies the craven posture of both siderism, adopted by sections of the media in the face of relentless campaigning by sectional interest groups. The pressure to present ‘both sides’ is intense, implying a moral equivalence between the occupied and the occupier.

But a writers festival is not a debating society: the director’s task is to present the audience with expert writers and readily available books that cogently explain complex ideas.

In my first year as director we had a focus on Palestinian writers, the following year we brought together South Asian writers; both representing a fraction of the 200+ writers attending. To broaden and deepen our understanding of contemporary, often overlooked, non-western literary traditions seemed to be a worthwhile endeavour. In 2023 the pro-Israel lobby and News Corp propagandists hyperventilated over the inclusions of a handful of Palestinian writers. For the next two years, this unholy cabal made no public comment whatsoever as a raft of Jewish writers aired their views, from avowed Zionists to two-state solutionists to one-state solutionists. Media studies 101 students might like to examine the contradictions.

I personally find an ‘inclusive’ approach to programming that entails a mandatory tally of writers’ ethnic, racial or religious backgrounds problematic. But given the accusations by cultural warriors and pro-Israel lobbyists that as Director of AWW I failed to program Israeli and Jewish authors, let’s consider the facts according to their own racialised metrics: In 2023, seven Palestinian writers and seven Jewish writers participated in AWW. In 2024, one Palestinian writer, 10 Jewish writers. In 2025, five Palestinian writers and 15 Jewish writers appeared. And this year we planned to include three Palestinian and 12 Jewish writers. The facts testify to the reality that Palestinians are rarely heard.

Much purple prose has also been devoted to the blatant lie that Jewish writers were excluded. Indeed most of the invited Jewish writers were concerned with questions of identity, what it means to be Jewish in the diaspora, the history of Zionism and the future of Israel.

Given the importance Israel and its loyal diaspora advocates place on demographic calculations, it’s instructive to think about the relationship between the significance accorded to a one-hour conversation about a novel by a Palestinian academic and the worthlessness accorded to Palestinians (or to quote the Israeli Defence minister “ human animals”) in Gaza and the West Bank. Presumably the silencing of Dr Abdel Fattah and other Palestinians is the precondition for their dehumanisation. The numbers are telling: 20 Jewish hostages are exchanged for 2000 Palestinian prisoners. The murder of 1200 Israelis justifies the murder of 70,000 Palestinians.

And yet, at AWW in 2026, the prospect of the presence of three Palestinian invitees eclipsed the presence of 12 Jewish writers and scandalised those proponents of “cultural sensitivity”, who are otherwise indifferent to Palestinian life in Gaza. When it comes to speech, when it comes to speaking about their experience, suddenly Palestinians count – count, that is, as a dangerous threat to that most authoritarian imperative, “social cohesion”.

The exclusion of Dr Abdel-Fattah was certainly racist. But the hysteria generated by her mere inclusion in a writers festival reveals what is really at stake: that is, the unbearable truth of the destruction of Gaza and Gazan lives must be repressed at all costs.