A Palestinian writer whose inclusion at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week sparked a sponsorship boycott has directly addressed the controversy, accusing “simple-minded” critics of smearing him.
Poet Mohammed El-Kurd appeared at his first Writers’ Week event on Sunday, following weeks of debate over his inclusion and demands that he, along with another Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, be dropped from the line-up over accusations of antisemitism.
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”.
While the event’s organisers continued to back the authors, a number of key sponsors including law firm MinterEllison and consultants PwC withdrew their support.
El-Kurd spoke via video link from New York City, on a panel titled Authors Take Sides, chaired by former ABC Middle East correspondent Sophie McNeill. The panel also featured Palestinian Egyptian author Randa Abdel-Fattah, journalist and author Ramzy Baroud and high-profile ethicist Peter Singer.
The panel’s broad theme revolved around the extent to which authors should take a public position on contemporary political issues, including topics like climate change, but the majority of the conversation focused on El-Kurd, Baroud and Abdel-Fattah’s experiences of Israeli occupation, and its relationship to their work.
Read the article by Osman Faruqi and Walter Marsh in The Sydney Morning Herald.