AARON PATRICK: Anti-Israel writer Randa Abdel-Fattah and her supporters have seized power over arts festivals

The Sydney Writers’ Festival’s decision to promote anti-Israel academic and writer Randa Abdel-Fattah might be one of the greatest acts of chutzpah since Mel Brooks filmed a musical comedy about Adolf Hitler called The Producers.

When the news broke Wednesday morning that Ms Abdel-Fattah had been allocated a prized speaker’s slot, there was disappointment but not surprise among the city’s Jewish community, according to Jewish leaders.

Famously disinvited and reinvited to the Adelaide Writers’ Festival for her political views, Ms Abdel-Fattah has emerged as a powerful figure in the artistic community: a woman able to bring one of Australia’s top literary events to its knees.

The Sydney invitation, which the festival said was issued before the Adelaide blow up, and an upcoming appearance at the Newcastle Writers Festival, were extended despite widespread coverage of her views, which include wishing Zionists may “never know a second’s peace in your sadistic miserable lives” and a hope “may 2025 be the end of Israel”.

Jewish leaders argue Ms Abdel-Fattah’s enduring popularity is evidence that radical groups have seized control of cultural festivals and use them to promote ideological positions.

“Across the world arts organisations are being captured by this ideology,” said Kathy Shand, who chaired the Sydney Writers’ Festival until last year. “You don’t put views that are hateful on stage and seek to find a view that is not hateful. That is not balance.”

Festival chief executive Brooke Webb and artistic director Ann Mossop said: “A festival like ours, which holds freedom of expression as a core value, is not in the business of cancelling or censoring writers.”

What does the premier think?

Writers’ festivals may seem like niche events, but help poorly paid authors promote their work and give them a chance to enjoy attention for what is often a lonely pursuit. For reasons that are hard to pin down, the audiences seem to be dominated by university-educated inner-city residents, especially women, who tend to read more books than men.

Fed-up with perceived bias among established festivals, some well-connected Sydney figures are trying to build support for a new event. Whether there would be community interest in listening to a range of political opinions from writers is unclear, although former prime minister Tony Abbott’s Australia: A History was one of summer’s surprise hits.

The Sydney Festival received $1.1 million in subsides last year, mostly from NSW. Given the defining acts of Premier Chris Minns’ leadership have been to try to protect Jews from violence and hostility since the Bondi Beach attack, his views on Ms Abdel-Fattah might be of interest to anyone following the story.

They remain a mystery, unlike those held by his South Australian counterpart, Peter Malinauskas, who was blamed for disrupting one of the state’s top public events because he expressed a view, in private, that her “appearance runs contrary to current community expectations of unity, healing and inclusion”.

On Wednesday, Mr Minns’ office directed questions to Arts Minister John Graham, who said he expected arts organisations to make “Jewish arts and culture lovers feel welcome at our events and institutions”.

It would be understandable if Mr Minns does not want to get into a fight with a major cultural event in his home town, although he showed less reluctance after the Newcastle invitation became public. “I don’t know why these organisations do it,” he said at the time.

Architects for Palestine

As for Ms Abdel-Fattah, she has accused Mr Minns of mischaracterising her comment that Zionists have “no right to cultural safety” and The Australian of publishing “the most defamatory, shamelessly slanderous, malicious, hysterical, pompous treatsies”. She threatened to sue Mr Malinauskas but hasn’t followed through yet.

Paul Rubenstein, the NSW chairman of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, said Ms Abdel-Fattah was part of a trend of people who use the word Zionist — someone who supports Israel as a Jewish homeland — as a synonym for Jews.

“She has been obviously at the vanguard of a very disturbing sort of phenomenon of Australian society and putting her at the head of the writers festival, it just signals that the intellectual chattering classes support that view of the world,” the Sydney lawyer said.

Book festivals aren’t the only events Jews see as hostile. The Sydney Biennale — a high-brow arts festival run every two years — has drawn attention from the city’s Jews for its high representation of Arab artists and few or no Jewish ones.

The exhibits include works by Taysir Batniji, a Palestinian man whose life illustrates the horrible consequences of the war in Gaza. Mr Batniji, who combines photography with video and drawing, lost his brother, his sister, her husband, their children and grandchildren, and two cousins during the fighting between Hamas and Israel.

There will also be works from a Palestine-based group of architects who say they provide an “artistic answer to the Israeli invasion of the Palestinian lands”.

A board member referred questions to a publicist, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Second fiddle

Two weeks ago the most senior Jewish person involved in the Sydney Festival, Jacqui Scheinberg, wrote that she could “no longer in good conscience support it” because of a hostility towards Jews. (The festival, held every January, specialises in performance arts.)

On Wednesday, hearing the news from the Writers’ Festival, Ms Scheinberg said she was asked by fellow Jews: “Are they doing it to thumb their nose at us or do they think she has something to say?”

The full program for the Writers’ Festival has not been made public, but a prominent British-Jewish author has been invited to speak. Jonathan Freedland is best known as the author of The Traitors Circle, a non-fiction book about a small group of German civilians executed during World War II for expressing opposition to the nazi regime.

On Monday, Mr Freedland published an essay in The Jewish Independent website lamenting that the Bondi attack ended a fantasy that a beautiful, sunny place existed where Jews could live in safety.

“It ended on Bondi Beach in December, when Jews were gunned down as they celebrated the festival of light,” he wrote. “That it was even possible to celebrate the wintry festival of Chanukah on a golden beach had once been part of the Oz fantasy for the rest of the world’s Jews. That it could end in such murderous bloodshed proved it was just that: a fantasy.”

Mr Freedland won’t, at this stage, appear anywhere near Ms Abdel-Fattah. He has been allocated to a preliminary event in March at the NSW State Library. The main event will be held two months later at venues across Sydney capable of accommodating the large crowds expected for Ms Abdel-Fattah and other famous authors.