Jeanie Lucas
"Hello," I said to my gym buddy one day in March when she turned up after a week’s absence, "Haven't seen you in the gym for a while, where have you been?" "Oh," she said "I was at Writers' Week every day last week. It was fantastic! I went especially to listen to those Palestinian writers to find out what all the fuss was about. They were brilliant!"
What had begun as a pretty grim looking and powerful anti-Palestinian campaign by a few Zionist organisations and individuals, the Advertiser and the Australian newspapers, had turned into a victory for Adelaide Writers' Week (AWW) and the Palestinian writers who attended. From the moment in early March when Louise Adler, the Director of AWW announced the program, the campaign began to silence the Palestinian writers, particularly Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El Kurd and to undermine the festival itself.
The theme of AWW was "Truth Be Told - truths we acknowledge, truths we feel are debatable and those beyond debate.” This year's AWW was to continue in the festival’s tradition of free speech and literary creativity. But free speech for Palestinian writers was not welcomed by Zionists in Australia, who railed against the inclusion of the Palestinians in the program, calling them antisemites and extremists, even calling for visas for the overseas writers to be denied and for other invited writers to be boycotted if they did not withdraw from AWW. Two significant sponsors of the festival withdrew their support and the Murdoch press called for Louise Adler’s resignation and for the South Australian Government to withdraw festival funding.
The controversy continued for weeks, but the Premier, Festival Board and Louise Adler stood their ground, the funding stayed in place and the Palestinians came. And so did the people. The sessions featuring the Palestinians, particularly those held in conjunction with Australian First Nations writers, were phenomenally popular; hundreds of people attended these sessions, attracted, just like my gym buddy, by the controversy started by the people who tried to ban the Palestinians in the first place.
As Louise Adler said, “People are free to deeply object. They don’t have to come. Or come, and you don’t need to agree with what people think. But people listened. These steadfast Adelaide audiences came out in their thousands and listened with courtesy and respect for the conversation. It should be something that lifts the spirits of all of us.”
It was a victory for Adelaide Writers’ Week, a victory for free speech and a victory for Palestine!