‘Sally Rooney is a young author with a young audience and she’s asking people to think about this issue, and that’s a good thing.’ That was the response of Australian publisher Louise Adler in 2021, when asked about Rooney’s refusal to have what was then her latest novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, translated into Hebrew. Five years on and Adler appears to have taken a different position on literary boycotts. This week, Adler quit as director of the internationally renowned Adelaide Writers’ Festival on free-speech grounds, following its decision to rescind the invitation of Australian-Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah. The board has since been dissolved and the festival sensationally cancelled.
Adler’s path was cleared for her when 180 writers who, in objection to Abdel-Fattah’s disinvitation, announced they would also not attend. These included former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and novelists Zadie Smith and Percival Everett. Prominent Australian writer Helen Garner – last year’s winner of the Bailie Gifford prize for non-fiction – joined them. In the end, it appears Adler’s resignation was of little consequence. There would have been no one speaking at the festival, anyway.
Abdel-Fattah has described the decision to rescind her invitation as a ‘shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship’. It is certainly true she has been censored, although that isn’t the whole picture: Abdel-Fattah is not simply ‘pro-Palestine’ or concerned about the Gaza war. She has openly expressed support for Hamas’s terrorism and repeatedly called for the erasure of Israel.
A statement by the festival board said Abdel-Fattah was removed ‘out of respect for a community experiencing the pain from a devastating event’ – that event, of course, being the anti-Semetic massacre of 15 Jews in Bondi by Islamist terrorists in December. South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas has confirmed that he encouraged the board to remove Abdel-Fattah from the event after concerns were raised by the Australian Jewish community.
Adler’s resignation was a refreshing defence of free speech from an industry that, in recent years, has been a crusading force for censorship and cancellation. It was also a strange one. After all, of all the views Australians might want to hear in the wake of the worst terror attack in the nation’s history, Abdel-Fattah’s must surely be among the last.
Like many obscure academics, Abdel-Fattah – a sociologist at Macquarie University who specialises in Islamophobia – became a public name after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. She did this by expressing her full-throated support for it, notably uploading a picture of a Hamas fighter paragliding into Israel, which she made her Facebook profile picture.
She attracted more headlines in 2024. Firstly, by taking a group of children to a pro-Palestine rally at Sydney University, where she encouraged them to chant ‘globalise the intifada’. Then, for her prominent role in doxxing hundreds of Jewish artists and academics. She defended the leaking of what she referred to as a ‘Zionist groupchat’ which she said provided ‘critical insight into how Zionists organise and operate’. Yet despite her extreme views and risible conduct, Abdel-Fattah was still invited to Adelaide to speak about her recent novel, Discipline.
Discipline, which is said to examine ideas of ‘truth and censorship’, doesn’t seem to have passed muster with publishers in the UK. This is a small mercy, if the many, many social-media posts she has authored since 7 October 2023 are any insight into her literary abilities. ‘To hell with you all. Every last Zionist’, she wrote in 2024. ‘May you never know a second’s peace in your sadistic miserable lives.’ In the same year, she wrote that ‘the goal is decolonisation and the end of this murderous Zionist colony’, namely the Jewish State. In 2023, she claimed that ‘Zionists’ have ‘no claim to cultural safety’ (or physical, it appears) and that anyone who cared for the ‘fragile feelings of Zionists’ is ‘repugnant’.
These views should not have excluded Abdel-Fattah from speaking at the festival. Even bigots are entitled to an opinion, and free speech ceases to exist as soon as ‘hateful’ opinions are proscribed. Alder was right when she said, after her resignation, that as the director of a literary festival, she ‘cannot be party to silencing writers’ – even if ‘writer’ is a generous description of Abdel-Fattah.
It would have been better had Adler left it there. Instead, she went on to represent Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation as symptomatic of a widespread cultural animus to pro-Palestinian views. This was evidence, supposedly, that cultural and political life is being suffocated by the Israel lobby.
‘Are you or have you ever been a critic of Israel?’, Adler wrote in the Guardian this week. ‘Friends and colleagues in the arts, beware of the future. They are coming for you.’ She compared Abdel-Fattah’s disinvitation to McCarthyism and ‘Putin’s Russia’. It was a campaign that had been ‘abetted’ by the ‘Murdoch press’, Adler claimed. Ultimately, the Adelaide festival, she said, was the ‘canary in the coalmine’ for a looming purge of pro-Palestinian voices from the arts.
To which only one response seems appropriate: give me strength. The response to Abdel-Fattah’s disinvitation is itself proof that any threat to Adler’s ‘friends and colleagues in the arts’ on the grounds of their ‘criticism of Israel’ is mythical. Indeed, as soon as reports of Abdel-Fattah’s removal from the festival became known, a campaign to undermine it began. For instance, Britpop band Pulp, who were due to perform on the opening night of the festival, soon found their social-media accounts littered with comments demanding they ‘boycott’ the event and show ‘solidarity with Randa’. And then there’s the small fact that every recognisable name at the festival has since quit. Proof, if it were ever needed, that the alleged influence of the Israel lobby in the arts is imaginary.
The literati’s sudden reverence for free speech is also curious. Under Adler’s watch, the Adelaide festival has cancelled multiple writers. In 2024, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman was disinvited after a number of academics – including, ironically, Abdel-Fattah – demanded his cancellation. Friedman is Jewish, and had used his editorials at the New York Times to make the case for Israel’s defence. A former board member of the writers’ festival, Tony Berg, said Adler’s voice was critical in removing Friedman from that year’s programme.
At which point, an obvious question arises: where do Australia’s cultural elites stand on the free-speech rights of Jewish artists? The example of Australian singer Deborah Conway immediately comes to mind. For the sin of supporting Israel’s existence, and doubtlessly also because she is Jewish, Conway has been effectively blacklisted from performing in Australia. In 2024, more than 500 writers – again, Abdel-Fattah among them – demanded Writing Western Australia remove Conway from its Literature and Ideas festival. Yet there was no outcry over Conway’s treatment, no one mounting a principled defence of her right to free speech. The same argument could be made for the countless gender-critical authors who have been blacklisted by the arts cognoscenti in recent years.
The collapse of the Adelaide Writers’ Festival is not just a literary bunfight on a larger scale than usual. It is a symptom of a diseased industry. For years, these ‘festivals of ideas’ have been a welter of intolerance. Many of the most significant social and political issues – from Black Lives Matter to trans and the Israel-Palestine conflict – have been sealed off from debate by the very writers and curators now positioning themselves as brave defenders of free speech. The hypocrisy is visible to everyone.
Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.
