An immensely popular literary festival has been canceled, with over 180 authors walking out of the program to protest the cancellation of a Palestinian Australian writer, who was invited to the festival and as a result of the range of cultural sensitivities on the cancellation of such programs after the Bondi Beach terror attack.

The Adelaide Writers Week has been associated with controversy since the late last week when the board informed that Randa Abdel-Fattah, an outspoken critic of the war in Gaza initiated by Israel, was not invited anymore due to her previous remarks.

“Although we do not in any sense allude that the tragedy at Bondi is in any way connected with the writings of Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, or that she has any relationship with what occurred at Bondi, we have based on her past utterances the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to keep on programming her at this unprecedented time shortly after Bondi.”

After the declaration, three members of the board resigned, as well as its chair and director, and high-profile members such as British novelist Zadie Smith, Pulitzer-winning US author Percival Everett, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and popular Australian writers Helen Garner and Trent Dalton.

Since the backlash intensified, the organizers of Adelaide Writers’ Week made a statement on Tuesday that it was sorry that the decision had caused such distress, and apologized to Abdel-Fattah how it had been reported.

This is not a question of identity or even dissent but instead an ongoing accelerated movement within the national discourse concerning the scope of freedom of expression in our country after the worst terror attack in the history of Australia.

Abdel-Fattah, a Future Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie university, specialised in Islamophobia and author of 12 books, declined the apology in one of the posts on X.

And again, the Board who references the national discourse to justify an act that specifically discriminates against me, a Palestinian Australian Muslim woman, is categorically stating that I cannot assume a position within the national discourse and it is both offensive and racist to the extreme.

The foaming at the mouth underlines the situation in Australia where the government is scrambling to unite the nation following the attack of 15 people at a Jewish gathering in Bondi beach Sydney on December 14 that the Jewish community said was a direct consequence of government inability to stave off antisemitism.

Following the attack, the New South Wales (NSW) authorities made a correlation between the mass shooting and the pro-Palestinian protests held weekly since Israel had attacked Hamas in Gaza retaliating against its murderous attack on Israelis on October 7, 2023.

Australian Palestine Advocacy Network declared any confusion of the demonstrations with the attacks as irresponsible and misleading and declared that the government action to tighten the protest legislation in its aftermath as a severe and dangerous dilution of democratic rights.

Abdel-Fattah had been invited to address Adelaide Writers’ Week on her new book, Discipline, on the life of two characters, an academic and a journalist, during the Gaza war in Australia.

It is described as follows: Silence is complicity and the price of speaking out is all… Discipline is a measure of how much we are all paying when privilege is exercised by them.

Abdel-Fattah has in the past criticized some of the members of the Jewish community by claiming that Zionists have no right or claim to cultural safety. In 2024, she was condemned after talking in a pro-Palestinian protest camp in the University of Sydney, where children were seen chanting an intifada.

At the time, Abdel-Fattah posted on X a post that 15,000 children had been killed in Gaza, and that children at the protest had been offered the megaphone to lead the chants of their choice, hoping to have attained some sense of agency in an ailing moment.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), representing approximately 200 Jews organizations, assailed the incident, and the part Abdel-Fattah played in it, and demanded an investigation into antisemitism in higher education.

The ECAJ did not react to a call to comment on the cancellation of Adelaide Writers’ Week at once.

The board of the Adelaide Festival in its statement added that it would ensure that it regained the trust of the artistic community and audience to allow open and respectful debates to be held at the future events of the Adelaide Writers’ Week.