Jacinda Ardern’s Adelaide Writers Festival Hypocrisy

Australia may have pulled out of hosting this year’s Commonwealth Games, but in the last fortnight it has been treated to a spectacular display of gymnastics, with astonishing backflips, double somersaults, contortions, and walkovers. 

The furore surrounding the storied Adelaide Writers Festival, the longest-running and largest literary festival in Australia and one that receives significant taxpayer funding, has made international headlines. Our drama ostensibly begins when the Festival’s board disinvites Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, an Australian writer with Palestinian heritage. 

Its climax sees a cultural stampede of 180 writers escaping the inferno of ignominy engulfing the Festival, before its smouldering wreckage collapses. Well-known names elbowing their way through the flames include Zadie Smith, Trent Dalton, Roisín O’Donnell and perhaps most high-profile of all, New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern, who was to be promoting her memoir A Different Kind of Power.   

The story’s denouement has Abdel-Fattah rising phoenix-like from the ashes to be issued a fulsome apology and invitation to return to the next Festival by its newly constituted board.   

Like all good dramas, our protagonist has an intriguing backstory. Abdel-Fattah is a sociologist academic with an $870,000 Australian Research Council grant who was scheduled to appear at the Festival to promote her new book Discipline (plot: the story takes place after a student at a local Islamic school is charged with terrorism offences for protesting against an Israeli arms manufacturer). 

While Abdel-Fattah has been an activist for some time (in 2021 she spoke on a panel with Hamas’s “head of international relations”), she has earned notoriety since 7 October 2023. She has repeatedly glorified that day’s Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel, while simultaneously denying its mass sexual violence. The next day she changed her Facebook banner to a paraglider (of the sort that was utilised by Hamas in the attack on the Nova music festival, at which 378 mostly young partygoers were slaughtered); and has said the attack gave her a glimmer of hope. On the day itself she mocked terrified young people fleeing the Nova festival and wrote about “all the Zionists staying up tonight hammering out… coloniser cries victim op eds.” There is footage of her teaching young children chants of “intifada”—no doubt inspired by UNRWA schools’  pedagogy that it is never too early to indoctrinate children into eliminationist hatred. She explicitly hopes for the eradication of the “murderous Zionist colony” and that “every last Zionist” will “never know a second’s peace.”