The director of Adelaide Writers’ Week says she’s disappointed and surprised after a major law firm announced it would boycott the festival due to the inclusion of two Palestinian authors.
On Tuesday morning, MinterEllison, which has been a sponsor of the Adelaide Festival for five years and says it is a “strong supporter of the arts community”, announced the decision to step back as a major partner, removing its “presence and involvement with this year’s writers’ festival program” and also “removing [its] support from the broader [Adelaide Festival] program (where feasible).”
Chief executive Virginia Briggs said this was due to public statements made by writers Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd, who are on the festival program, and the law firm’s concerns that “no racist or anti-Semitic commentary should be tolerated”.
Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American writer known for her bestselling novel Mornings in Jenin, has recently been in the media over tweets criticising Volodymyr Zelensky. In March last year, she accused the Ukrainian president of dragging the world into World War III. She has also supported calls to “de-Nazify Ukraine” – an idea which is often regarded as Russian propaganda.
El-Kurd, a writer and poet who creates work about conflict and displacement in East Jerusalem, has previously published tweets saying Zionists have an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood & land” and had “completely internalised the ways of the Nazis”.
Read the article by Meg Watson in The Sydney Morning Herald.