Antisemitism in Adelaide

One of the tasks I've been working through in this summer holiday is consuming a large volume of Michael Lewis podcasts (including his fantastic conversation with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal for the 10-year anniversary of their cult podcast Acquired) plus reading Lewis's latest book, Who Is Government? 

That's because on February 28, I had been scheduled to interview Lewis at the Adelaide Writers' Week. That was until the festival triggered a writer and sponsor boycott, the resignation of its director and its entire board (bar one) and its own cancellation by disinviting the now-famous Randa Abdel-Fattah over her vile past remarks about Jews (sorry, 'Zionists') and her apparent celebration of the October 7, 2023 massacre of 800 civilians in Israel.[[The day after Hamas fighters invaded Israel (including by paraglider) and slaughtered 800 civilians, including 40 children, Abdel-Fattah changed her Facebook profile picture to an image of a Palestinian paraglider. Conversely, how many Australian Jews did you see openly celebrating the deaths of Palestinian civilians in the subsequent Gaza war?]]

Virtually the entire writing fraternity rose up in defence of Abdel-Fattah's trammelled freedom of speech, whereas I'm only wondering how she was invited in the first place. 

The answer, of course, is that these festivals have become a hotbed of such feral views, where perfectly legitimate abhorrence of Benjamin Netanyahu's government of Israel has metastasised into completely improper antagonism towards the Jewish diaspora.

Festival director Louise Adler is someone I've always liked personally while vehemently disagreeing with almost everything she says. Her blaze-of-glory exit letter was baffling. She cited "the increasingly extreme and repressive efforts of pro-Israel lobbyists to stifle even the mildest criticism". Here, much like Abdel-Fattah, Adler is attempting to delegitimise Jewish community leaders by describing them as "pro-Israel lobbyists". But if they did make a case for Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation, would a reasonable person consider that "extreme and repressive" not even four weeks since a modern-day pogrom unfolded on Bondi Beach?

And how could anyone consider it mild of Abdel-Fattah to say that her "duty" is "to ensure that every space Zionists enter is culturally unsafe for them". Most Jews are Zionists, so Abdel-Fattah considers it her calling to guarantee that only Jews like Adler may live their lives unmolested. This is properly crazy stuff and yet everyone from Richard Flanagan to Zadie Smith to Jacinda Ardern is saying, I'm with you sister! 

Incidentally, Abdel-Fattah provides an hilarious glimpse of her logical capacities when she asserts that depriving all Zionists of their cultural safety is "the duty of those who oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia and all forms of oppressive harm". Last time I checked, women in Israel enjoy equal rights under the law while Tel Aviv Pride is a marquee event on the calendar. Randa should go to Gaza City and try fighting misogyny and homophobia. The gentlemen of Hamas would promptly throw her from the nearest signal tower. To be clear, her right to say stupid things is sacrosanct. What she should not be permitted to do is threaten the safety of others.

This brouhaha coincided with a dumbfounding Cathy Wilcox cartoon published by The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on January 7 in which the broad coalition of Australians demanding a royal commission into antisemitism was depicted as being carried by conservative politicians to the drumbeat of Netanyahu.[[My favourite part of the cartoon was the scorn reserved for "Labor has-beens for [an] RC", which for me evoked English cricket captain Ben Stokes dismissing "has-beens" like Ashes legends Ian Botham and Michael Vaughan for suggesting Stokes's team could've done with some practice matches before the series it just lost 4-1.]] The grand irony of the drawing is that nothing has done more to demonstrate the urgent necessity for a royal commission, or to illustrate what Jews mean when they say the ancient hatred is always there just under the surface. 

It also demonstrates just how tribalised we have become. If Wilcox really believes that support for a royal commission into antisemitism has been manufactured by external forces and that there is little real grassroots support for one, her relational network must be telling her these things. So, too, Mike Carlton, Patrick McGorry, Greg Barns – they're all saying this stuff. 

Personally, I've had the opposite experience. I haven't spoken to many people who aren't seriously worried about Australian antisemitism. It's like we're all living in one of two parallel universes. While Australian authors and 'public intellectuals' are raging against the cancellation of an antisemite from a writers' festival, Jewish parents in Melbourne and Sydney are absolutely shitting themselves about sending their children back to school next month, literally days since the last funeral from the Hannukah massacre. 

Part of tribalism is reflexively deciding what we think about an issue based on who thinks the opposite, and a big part of the problem, I suspect, is that many Australians have decided antisemitism is manufactured because News Corp is campaigning so hard against it. I get that. Anyone who has read my commentary over a long period of time knows I'm usually the last person to indulge the nuance-free zone that is the Murdoch press and Sky News, and the first to hop into them when they're peddling dross. However, I need not abide their editorial position on Netanyahu or the Gaza War to concede that they have been right on antisemitism all along, and have demonstrated a moral clarity on the issue that has been missing elsewhere.

I made an embarrassing slip-up a few years ago by referring to a businessman in my Australian Financial Review column as "the Melbourne Jewish establishment's favourite fixer". It was a descriptor uncomfortably close to historical tropes of shadowy Jewish control and I was mortified to evoke them. I listened to the feedback of Jewish leaders, immediately apologised, and meant it. 

Abdel-Fattah, Adler and Wilcox remain a triptych of defiance. Abdel-Fattah has portrayed herself as a victim to extraordinary effect. Adler is the other martyr – not the saboteur – of Adelaide Writers' Week. Wilcox is lashing out on Bluesky (I had to Google what that was).

There was no small irony in the revelation that Abdel-Fattah lobbied for the disinvitation of New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman from Adelaide Writers' Week in 2024 over a column in which he wrote that "Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered parasitoid wasp is to nature" and that "Hamas is like the trap-door spider". He compared Netanyahu to a rare Madagascan primate that "use(s) bipedal sideways hopping as a primary means of walking".

Friedman is a two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient, a strident critic of Netanyahu, a lion of the 'fake news'/liberal establishment and the furthest thing from a racist. He ultimately made the choice to withdraw from the festival, citing "last-minute scheduling issues" (that old chestnut). 

Let's be real here: Friedman compared Middle East states to species of the animal kingdom in an arguably clumsy metaphor; he did not declare it his life's work to deprive one religious group of their "cultural safety" (whatever that really means).

Yet after his column landed with some controversy, he immediately penned a follow-up, saying "One can't be a columnist calling on combatants to hear the other side if you don't model it yourself. So, this is not a hard call for me. If invoking a metaphor or image alienates and angers part of my audience, I know I used the wrong metaphor".

I certainly know who I'd rather go to Adelaide to hear from, but of course, now none of us are going.