My monthly column for the UK outlet, Middle East Eye:
In early January, the board of the Adelaide Festival in Australia sent a letter to Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah to convey a shocking decision.
A longtime critic of Israel, Abdel-Fattah was told her inclusion in the forthcoming Adelaide Writers’ Week would apparently be “culturally insensitive”. She was told that, in light of the public atmosphere after the recent terror attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, her appearance had been cancelled.
It was a shameful letter, a word salad of vague insinuations and clear intent. Being a public Palestinian – explicitly stating opposition to Israel and Zionism – was deemed beyond the pale.
Abdel-Fattah has been writing about these issues for many years, and her positions on the Middle East are well known. As a Palestinian whose people are being slaughtered and starved in Gaza and beyond, she has every right to reject the nation that’s perpetuating this carnage and even to call for its dismantling.
But as Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd explains in his 2025 book, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, mainstream media turns Palestinians “into criminals of thought, guilty of our rage and grudges, of our natural responses to brutalisation”.
Read the whole article: Australia: Furor over Palestinian festival speaker highlights a deeper crisis | Middle East Eye