Festival ‘must answer’ for dropping Palestinian author

Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah says her cancellation by a major national festival was calculated to link her to the Bondi massacre.

Three Adelaide Festival board members and chair Tracey Whiting quit over the weekend and dozens of authors have withdrawn from Writers’ Week, which starts on February 28.

The mass boycott followed the board’s announcement last Thursday that “national grief” and “community tensions” triggered by the Bondi shooting on December 14 had prompted its decision to remove the Palestinian-Australian writer from its program.

The decision was made public on the same day a royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion was announced.

The board referred to “past statements” by the author in announcing its decision, and conservative Jewish groups have highlighted Dr Abdel-Fattah’s sharing of posts critical of Israel on social media.

Dr Abdel-Fattah told AAP it was “clear that attempts to police speech … will be met with a strong response from the writing and creative community”.

“It is hard to view the timing as accidental rather than a calculated decision to make the announcement on that particular day and to reinforce the link between me and the Bondi atrocity,” she said on Monday.

“No amount of retrospective back-pedalling about vague ‘prior statements’ can obscure the fact that I was formally disinvited on the grounds that my Palestinian identity would act as an emotional provocation.

“(It was) a frightening foreshadowing of what is attempted to be normalised post-Bondi.”

Readers and Writers Against the Genocide said the future of the festival was “dubious” and up to 4pm on Monday, they had documented 114 people withdrawing from the writers week event.

They include former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, author Trent Dalton, journalists John Lyons, Sarah Ferguson, Louise Milligan and Amy Remeikis and international guests Zadie Smith and Yanis Varoufakis.

Marque Lawyers managing partner Michael Bradley, who represents Dr Abdel-Fattah, told AAP the “moral indefensibility of the Adelaide Festival board’s actions has been amply evidenced by the reaction it’s provoked”.

“It also trampled on Randa’s human rights and the board will have to answer for that,” he said.