Gaza conflict engulfs Melbourne Writers Festival as leaders quit over program row

The war in Gaza has split the Melbourne Writers Festival, with the organisation’s chief executive and deputy chairman quitting over the promotion of an anti-Israel line at this year’s event.

The 38-year-old festival is the latest major cultural institution to be upended by the social and political fallout from the deadly conflict in the besieged Palestinian territory, which has driven a wedge between writers, artists and performers and the arts organisations and patrons that support and fund their work.

Protesters in Melbourne on Sunday brandish the Palestinian and Aboriginal flags.Credit: Chris Hopkins

The dispute within the Melbourne Writers Festival centres on the unpublished program for this year’s festival and accompanying promotional material that casts Israel as an illegitimate, settler colonialist state, accuses it of atrocities and seeks to align Indigenous Australia with the Palestinian cause.

The program claims in part: “Aboriginal and Palestinian solidarity has a long history, a relationship that is more vital than ever in the movement to resist colonialism and speak out against atrocities.”

This proposition, while embraced by the pro-Palestinian and black sovereignty protest movements, is historically contentious, as it denies the ancient connection of Jewish people to Palestine and challenges Israel’s right to exist.

The decision to frame this year’s program in this way has put Melbourne Writers Festival artistic director Michaela McGuire and her curatorial staff at odds with the board, which last year unanimously agreed that while writers should be free to express their views, the festival should not take a public position on the war.

Melbourne Writers Festival artistic director Michaela McGuire.Credit: Simon Schluter

A source within the festival said that despite concerns at board level that the program was imbalanced and the promotional language unnecessarily inflammatory, the board and chief executive were unable to convince McGuire to tone it down. Under the festival’s longstanding tradition of curatorial independence, the artistic director retains the final say over content.

Dr Leslie Reti, a retired Jewish clinician who served as the festival’s deputy chair for the past two years, said while he respected the festival’s curatorial independence, the inclusion of “historically untrue and deeply offensive” material compelled him to quit the board.

“It is with sadness and great regret that I have resigned from the Melbourne Writers Festival board,” Reti said in a statement provided to this masthead.

“I always have and always will respect the artistic integrity and independence of both the individual writers who participate in the festival and the team who curate the festival’s artistic direction. It is this independence that makes the Melbourne Writers Festival so special.

Solidarity always: A protester at Sunday’s pro-Palestinian rally in Melbourne.Credit: Chris Hopkins

“My reasons for resigning were in respect of the proposed promotional materials for the festival, some of which I feel to be historically untrue and deeply offensive. I wish Melbourne Writers Festival every success and believe that its best days are ahead of it.”

The organisation’s interim chief executive, Fiona Menzies, has also stood down from her role, having agreed to take on the vacant post in December.

Menzies, an experienced arts administrator who has run government agencies, served on boards and worked as chief of staff to former arts ministers, declined to comment when contacted by this masthead. Her departure means the festival is looking for its third chief executive within four months. This year’s program is scheduled to run in the second week of May.

Former chief executive Vivia Hickman, who resigned in November to take up a position as executive producer and co-CEO at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, last week confronted a separate Gaza-related schism, when Besen Family Foundation chair Debbie Dadon quit the theatre board to protest against its staging of a show featuring feminist author Clementine Ford, a vociferous critic of Israel.

The Besen Family Foundation is the philanthropic trust of one of Melbourne’s most prominent Jewish clans.

McGuire has directed the Melbourne Writers Festival for the past four years after crossing from the Sydney Writers’ Festival. She has informed the board of her decision to leave the festival later this year when her current contract expires.

McGuire said the session at the centre of the internal ructions was curated by Mykaela Saunders, a writer with Koori and Lebanese heritage. Under McGuire’s approach since joining the festival, First Nations writers are invited and given broad licence to program sessions that cover Indigenous culture, history and themes.

Saunders was one of 123 Indigenous activists, artists and intellectuals who within three weeks of Hamas’ October 7 rampage in southern Israel – that left 1200 people dead and prompted the start of Israel’s military operations in Gaza – signed an open letter blaming the violence on “75 years of Israeli settler colonial dispossession”. At that point of the war more than 7000 Palestinians had died in the conflict. Saunders was contacted for comment.

McGuire said the Saunders-curated session was titled Let it Bring Hope and involved Aboriginal and Palestinian poets reading works “in affirmation of commitment, care and solidarity”.

“I completely support the right to self-determined programming, and this beautiful event is going to be a highlight of a festival of more than 50 events featuring 100 authors,” McGuire said. The program is embargoed until March 21.

The chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival, Dr Alice Hill, confirmed Reti’s exit but did not answer questions about the split within her organisation.

Dr Leslie Reti has resigned from the Melbourne Writers Festival board.

“We respect and understand his decision and are immensely grateful for Leslie’s dedication and leadership during his tenure,” Hill said. “Matters pertaining to any other staff or board member are treated with the utmost confidentiality.”

Reti worked for 30 years at the Royal Women’s Hospital, where he served as the clinical director for gynaecology, cancer and clinical governance, and was a board member of the Peter MacCallum Centre. He is married to Lee Liberman, a prominent Jewish philanthropist who supports charitable causes in Australia, the US and Israel.

Menzies worked for a decade as chief executive of Creative Partnerships Australia, a federal government agency responsible for managing private donations to the arts. She is also a board member of the TarraWarra Museum of Art, which was established by the Besen family.

The upheaval within the Melbourne Writers Festival follows The Seagull saga at the Sydney Theatre Company, where three directors resigned from the company’s foundation after actors performing the Chekhov play wore keffiyeh scarves on stage; the ongoing legal stoush between the ABC and presenter Antoinette Lattouf; and a failed campaign by pro-Palestinian activists to remove Jewish singer/songwriter and author Deborah Conway from the Perth Festival.

Gaza health officials say almost 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. More than 1400 Israelis have been killed, including about 1200 on October 7, according to Israeli tallies.

The war in Gaza, which has left much of the surviving Palestinian population at risk of starvation, has fuelled a global protest movement against the Israeli government. At weekly rallies in Melbourne and Sydney, some Aboriginal activists have adopted the Palestinian cause while pro-Palestinian protesters have co-opted the Aboriginal flag.

University of Melbourne Professor Marcia Langton, one of Australia’s leading Indigenous scholars, while horrified by the loss of life in Gaza, has rejected the idea of Indigenous solidarity with Palestine as historically flawed.

“This is false; it is the view of a tiny few, if put in those words,” Langton wrote in The Australian. “Most of us are aware of the complexity and that there is very little comparable in our respective situations, other than our humanity.”

Langton described as a “moral outrage” the failure of black sovereign activists who adhered to this view to condemn Hamas. “They do not speak for me,” she wrote. “I fear and loathe the possibility of further loss of life in this terrible crisis. I fear also that our multicultural society is being torn apart by people deluded about terrorism who have used their protests as a cover for antisemitism.”

The New York-based Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organisation dedicated to eradicating hate speech, says applying the term “settler colonialism” to Israel fails to recognise that Jews and Arabic Palestinians are both indigenous to the land and that Israel was lawfully established under the auspices of the United Nations.

Disclosure: The Age is a partner of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

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