The Israel-Gaza conflict loomed over the Sydney writers’ festival long before it opened its doors at Carriageworks last week.
In February, the chair of the festival board, Kathy Shand, resigned over her concerns about some of the programming related to Gaza and Israel.
Robert Watkins, who replaced Shand as chair, promised the festival would present “a plurality of voices [and] a diversity of thought” including “both Jewish and Palestinian writers and thought leaders”.
Guardian Australia attended a number of events related to the conflict to see how the writers’ festival covered the ongoing death and destruction, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the feelings of different communities being rejected and sidelined.
The war’s proximity
Raja Shehadeh – described by the Guardian as Palestine’s greatest prose writer – was one of a few writers joining the festival by video link from the region, Zooming in from his home in Ramallah in the West Bank.
Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer turned writer, has written a number of acclaimed books, including the Orwell prize-winning Palestinian Walks. He was at the festival speaking about his book What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? – a question he answers succinctly in his panel. “The very existence of Palestine is what Israel fears.”
Describing his daily life, Shehadeh told the audience how Israeli settlers had attacked a nearby Palestinian village, firebombing houses and cars “with the help of the Israeli army”.
Israel Defense Forces checkpoints made the hill walking he loves difficult but, he said, “this is nothing compared to what’s happening in Gaza”.
“We hear the planes, the jet fighters … they streak through the sky on the way to Gaza to kill more people,” he told Australian writer Abbas El-Zein, who moderated the session. “And so we cannot complain.”
Ittay Flescher, an Australian Jewish writer and peace activist, joined the festival via video link from Jerusalem, where he moved with his family from Melbourne in 2018. The audience was warned before the session began that earlier in the evening Flescher had had to evacuate his home because of incoming rockets from Yemen.
Flescher, who is the education director at Kids4Peace Jerusalem, an interfaith movement for Israelis and Palestinians, said a key element in working towards peace was combating the dehumanisation of the other side that has occurred in the region.
“I don’t think Hamas could have carried out October 7 without extensive dehumanisation of Jews and Israelis … And what Israel has done in Gaza, not just killing Hamas, but killing so so many innocent men, women and children that were not connected to Hamas … and now the limiting of food into Gaza and the starvation, that can’t happen without extensive dehumanisation.”
Peter Beinart, an Jewish American political commentator, echoed the need for humanisation of the other, and listening to voices across the divides of the conflict in his sold-out event on Sunday.
“Palestinians lack permission to narrate,” he said, echoing the literary great Edward Said.
“There is this process in which, as a Jew, from the moment you can remember you’ve been talking about Palestinians, but you’re never listening to Palestinians or actually meeting with Palestinians. And I think this is a recipe for both ignorance and dehumanisation,” Beinart told Debbie Whitmont.
Beinart said he wrote his recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, to try to offer “a voice that my mind comes from … from love and from Jewish solidarity, to say to the people in my life that I love that I think something has gone horribly, horribly wrong”.
“When I look at what’s happening in Gaza, a place where most of the buildings and the schools and the universities and the mosques and the churches and the bakeries and the agriculture have been destroyed, and people have been displaced from their homes … every person I know from Gaza has lost count of the number of people who’ve been killed,” he said.
“It seems to me this is the most profound chillul hashem – desecration of God’s name – that I have witnessed in my entire life, and it will constitute not just a moral crisis for the Jewish people but for those of us who take Judaism seriously.”
‘The league tables of horror’
At a packed – and occasionally tense – session on Friday morning, the British Jewish barrister and author Philippe Sands and Michael Gawenda, the former editor of the Age, spoke about antisemitism and xenophobia.
Gawenda argued that many Jewish Australians working in the arts had been refused work because of their political stance on Israel.
“They feel like they are being rejected on the basis that they are Jews, Jews of a particular kind. And I think that there’s evidence that this is widespread in Australia ... It’s widespread in the arts, I’m absolutely convinced of that.”
Gawenda’s comments prompted a heated question from an audience member about the experience of Arab Australians who had missed out on opportunities due to their pro-Palestinian stance, naming Khaled Sabsabi and Antoinette Lattouf as examples.
Sabsabi had been selected as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale but was dumped by Creative Australia over past works that involved imagery of Hassan Nasrallah, the now-dead Hezbollah leader, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Of Sabsabi, Gawenda said: “With his cancellation, there was a huge uproar ... Letters were signed, petitions were signed calling it out, including by Jews who would have been opposed to his views. There were no letters or petitions supporting these young Jewish artists, none. They got no support at all. Lattouf got heaps of support, as she should have. I think it was a mistake what the ABC did.”
Sands, who is a king’s counsel, spoke about the risks of a sense of competition between marginalised groups, and of antisemitism being weaponised by politicians for their own political ends.
“The concern about creating the league tables of horror is that it leads to an instrumentalisation of what’s going on. And what I really worry about right now is that what’s going on is instrumentalising antisemitism for other purposes,” he said.
Tension among the audience was heightened when the first question from the crowd came from a woman asking about the “Zionist lobby”, which she said had put “its tentacles into everything” – an antisemitic trope that attracted gasps and furious comments from other members of the audience. The question was shut down by the moderator.
Rage and grief
For many in Australia with family and cultural ties to the region, art has become a place to express their rage and grief.
The Lebanese Australian writer Sara Haddad, the Lebanese Palestinian poet Hasib Hourani and the Palestinian Australian playwright Samah Sabawi discussed with moderator Micaela Sahhar their texts of home and identity against the backdrop of the Israeli bombardment and blockade of Gaza. All three works were published after 7 October 2023.
Sabawi started writing Cactus Pear for My Beloved, which tells the story of her family’s expulsion from Gaza and settling in Queensland over 100 years, in 2016. It was intended as a celebration of her father and her home. By the time she got to writing the author’s note, in December 2023, “a lot of Gaza was fast turning into rubble”.
“My family was on the run, my grandfather’s home destroyed. Much of our neighbourhood was gone. And then my father, watching the news, fell and broke his ribs,” Sabawi said. After her father died in 2024, the book “became an obituary for both”.
Haddad began writing The Sunbird, a novel following a Palestinian woman’s memory as a child in the Nakba and then adulthood in Australia, in response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
She started her novel in December 2023, after seeing the words written by Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila on a whiteboard in his hospital in Gaza: “Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.” Haddad finished the book in January and self-published.
“Watching this for many years … I knew that Israel had what it wanted and what it needed, and it wasn’t going to stop. They were not going to stop. And so I knew that I had to do everything I possibly could to speak as loudly as I could.
“I wrote the book very quickly. I had a deadline. I knew it was urgent.”
