What began as a powerful anti-Palestinian campaign by a few Zionist organisations and individuals turned into a victory for Adelaide Writers' Week (AWW) and the Palestinian writers who attended.
The sessions featuring the Palestinians, particularly those held in conjunction with Australian First Nations writers, were phenomenally popular; hundreds of people attended these sessions.
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.”
“The definition proposed for adoption by the South Australian parliament is one devised by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (or IHRA). It is a flawed definition because it singles out one group of people for special treatment. This motion is specific to Israel and to Israel only. The motion moved by One Nation’s Sarah Game gives Israel a ‘get out of jail free’ card.
The motion itself determines the ways in which we might be allowed to criticise Israel without finding ourselves labelled as antisemitic.”
"The White House revealed last weekend that the “Deal of the Century,” the administration’s plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promote peace in the Middle East, will be crafted by and for businessmen. Jared Kushner, a real-estate mogul and son-in-law and senior advisor to President Trump, will launch the plan by convening an “economic workshop” in Bahrain at the end of June."
"Prior to 1976, the Israeli government had been using the Emergency Regulations, a law left over from the British Mandate, to take control of land in the Galilee and hand it over to the Israeli Land Administration (ILA), which would then redistribute it to Jewish settlers under the direction of the Jewish National Fund (JNF)."
"Britain’s colonial past has left its mark in many parts of the world. But most of the peoples it ruled gained their independence after Britain left - except for the Palestinians. Instead, Britain promised their homeland to the Zionist movement through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, even before its occupation of historic Palestine. Britain did so without consulting them, indeed, against their will."
"The Supreme Court in Israel has only been able to question the legality of this policy in a few individual cases, but not in principle. Imagine if in the United Kingdom or the United States, Jewish citizens, or Catholics for that matter, were barred by law from living in certain villages, neighborhoods, or maybe whole towns? How can such a situation be reconciled with the notion of democracy?"
"Today, we can only speculate about where King would stand. Yet I find myself in agreement with the historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who concluded that, if King had the opportunity to study the current situation in the same way he had studied Vietnam, “his unequivocal opposition to violence, colonialism, racism and militarism would have made him an incisive critic of Israel’s current policies.”
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