Adelaide Writers’ Week controversy is about Jews, not just Israel

In response to the storm of criticism over the scheduled appearance at Adelaide Writers’ Week of two Palestinian writers accused of peddling antisemitism, festival director Louise Adler told The Age that writers’ festivals must engage with “complex” issues. She says she’s not interested in creating “safe spaces”, only “brave spaces”.

The writers are Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd. Abulhawa has recently been in the media over tweets criticising Volodymyr Zelensky. In March last year, she accused the Ukrainian president of dragging the world into World War III. She has also supported calls to “de-Nazify Ukraine” – an idea which is often regarded as Russian propaganda. El-Kurd has previously published tweets saying Zionists have an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood & land” and had “completely internalised the ways of the Nazis”.

Well, when it comes to dissing “safe spaces,” I’m a broken record. Bravery, however, implies telling uncomfortable truths. Yet if it is true, as alleged, that writers Mohammed El-Kurd and Susan Abulhawa propagate racism then by definition they are telling not truths but lies.

Controversial writers Mohammed El-Kurd and Susan Abulhawa, and festival director Louise Adler.

I won’t keep you in suspense: I think the allegation of antisemitism against these writers is right. Does that mean people should boycott Writers’ Week? I don’t have a firm view either way, although I can understand why South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas and corporates don’t want their brands tainted by association — supporting partner PwC Australia is the latest to distance itself from the festival. Abulhawa, for example, regularly likens Zionists to Nazis, or worse than Nazis.

Some people argue these writers aren’t attacking Jews but rather the Jewish state for its oppression of the Palestinians. This is politics, they argue, not racism. And look, they say, Adler is herself Jewish, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, and even she reckons these writers are kosher.

No doubt these same people will see in the current backlash the nefarious influence of the “Zionist Lobby” yet again strangling debate about Israel-Palestine. Adler herself says the two writers are being lashed because Australian media outlets have “pre-emptively buckled” to The Lobby. Yes, such is its daunting power that it needn’t utter a word for journos to fall obediently into line.

Would these writers have scored an invite in the first place had their bile been directed at a group other than Jews? Would they have been platformed without any countervailing or moderating voices?

Adler says Israel’s new hard-right coalition government makes it incumbent on literary festivals to explore the Palestinian perspective on occupation and dispossession. But she also claims she wants to end the “impasse” on Israel-Palestine. Why then have seven authors hailing from Palestine and not one Israeli, not even from among the many writers fiercely opposed to the occupation?

El-Kurd, who lives in Jerusalem, tweets of Zionists’ “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood,” and “kristallnachting us in real time.”

But who hasn’t lost their shit on Twitter, right? And like the US-based Abulhawa, slagged Israel as “demonic,” or “Zionists are demons on earth”?

“One cannot overstate what an abomination Israel truly is,” she tweeted on another occasion. “They’re worse than Nazis.”

Why link Israel with the regime that murdered six million Jews? I’m not speculating on Abulhawa’s personal motivation for these remarks; and she’s hardly alone in spewing Israelis-are-Nazis rhetoric. It is designed to hurt, certainly. Hard to imagine an insult more wounding for Holocaust survivors and their descendants in Israel and beyond.

It certainly undermines the Jewish story; the history of persecution that galvanised Jews to seize control of their fate and establish a state of their own. But it’s above all clever strategy. Because if Israelis are Nazis then nothing directed at Israel can constitute antisemitism.

Yet the clearest example of antisemitism here isn’t even about Israel, at least not directly. I’m referring to Abulhawa’s tweets about Ukraine, which are widely described as the ranting of a “Putin apologist”.

Of the two writers under scrutiny, “Abulhawa’s case is more straightforward,” wrote Melbourne University journalism academic, Denis Muller, in The Conversation. He cites her tweet saying Volodymyr Zelensky “would rather drag the world into a third world war than give up his ambitions for Ukraine to join NATO, and describing him as far more dangerous than his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.”

Except, Muller’s left out a key fact: Abulhawa described the warmongering Zelensky as “a depraved Zionist”.

Never mind that Zelensky is fighting not for Israel but for the self-determination of Ukraine. When Abulhawa calls him a Zionist, in my view I believe she means Jew. Trying to drag us into another world war, just as the Nazis dragged the world into the last one. All she sees is Jewish Zelensky, naturally “far more dangerous” than Putin, just as Israelis— Jews— are “even worse than the Nazis”.

And in the face of views expressing such hatred, it astonishes me these writers were ever invited to speak.

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