Mad March in Adelaide is about to begin. 

The Adelaide Fringe has started already. The Garden of Unearthly Delights and Gluttony in the East Parklands are filled with performers and audiences and Fringe events are appearing all over the suburbs. The Adelaide Festival of Arts starts in a couple of days, as does Writers’ Week, the first of Australia’s writers’ festivals, its tents, more or less in the shade of the large trees surrounding the Women’s Pioneer Memorial Garden, to be filled once again to the brim.  

WOMADelaide bursts into life in the parklands behind the Zoo several weekends from now, and for three noisy and petrol filled days, as the Festival comes to a close, motor racing afficionados can watch the spectacle of racing cars roaring around Victoria Park on the same roads made world-famous by the Adelaide Grand Prix (until it was poached by neighbouring capital, Melbourne). 

There is something for everyone in Mad March. Adelaide is positively buzzing.

In my last blog I talked about the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa, her novels set in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And then, a bit slow on the uptake, I discovered she is to speak at Writers’ Week.  But Susan Abulhawa is about to come into a storm of indignant protest.

Now, I have never been enthusiastic about Twitter, or Instagram for that matter. Facebook is as far as I have progressed I have to admit. How much more time must I spend on my iPad or phone when I can be walking on the beach or in the bush, or sitting quietly enjoying my garden with a glass of chilled Riesling and a good book? Or talking directly to people? Or reading on-line or printed news? And I am past the age of being mesmerised by today’s influencers (an extraordinary phenomenon if ever there was one). Apologies for sounding like the behind-the-times old fogie I seem to have become.

It appears Susan Abulhawa has tweeted some angry comments about Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenski, which has resulted in her being described as anti-Semitic, and pro-Putin and his totally unjustified invasion of Ukraine, with the suggestion that he is about to start World War 3. 

Acknowledging that I haven’t read her actual tweets and have to rely on the odd newspaper reports and information I can get through Google (I suspect that most of the indignant people I have spoken to haven’t either and I do wonder how the Chinese whisper factory has expanded things) it made me wonder what was it that drove her to speak out in this way. And, incidentally, to be eternally grateful I don’t have access to Twitter where I would have been sure to vent my spleen in moments of outrage over some issue or other and maybe come to regret my over-simplified, angry statements devoid of reasons in justification. Is this the case for Susan Abulhawa? Maybe.

I can only imagine why she might have vented her spleen, perhaps unwisely, on Twitter.

If I were, say, a Palestinian-Australian, watching as present day Israeli settlers rampage through the Nablus area, burning houses and shops and cars, and injuring hundreds of people, I think I’d be very angry. It seems to have been the worst of settler violence in decades and occurred hours after Israeli and Palestinian officials agreed on a range of measures to de-escalate tensions in the occupied West Bank. 

Or, watching the massive western support for Ukraine today, I couldn’t help but compare it with the total lack of western support for Palestine ever since the Israeli-Arab War of 1948, and reflect on the cynical dealings of the British in the establishment of the modern state of Israel.

Perhaps the icing on the cake for me would be the United Nations General Assembly vote in December 2022 to have the International Court of Justice weigh in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to the Times of Israel (ToI), Zelensky was at that time asking Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to provide defensive aid for Ukraine. Until then assistance had been restricted to humanitarian aid only. Netanyahu had been careful not to be openly supportive of either side in the conflict, although he has verbally condemned Russia on several occasions. The ToI report suggests that his caution is believed to be Israel’s strategic need to maintain freedom of operations in Syria as part of its efforts to prevent Iranian entrenchment on its doorstep. Hence Israel cooperates with the Russian military which largely controls Syria’s airspace. Netanyahu, it is reported, asked President Zelinski to vote against the resolution. 

Now, one can hardly criticise Zelensky for seeking help wherever he can get it given the extent of Russian aggression and force Ukraine faces right now. In addition, Ukraine’s stated support for the UN resolution in November did spark a diplomatic spat with Israel. Maybe it is to Zelensky’s credit that he chose to miss the December vote rather than directly vote against it, ‘in order to give a chance to the relationship with Netanyahu’ according to a Kyiv official as reported in the ToI. But the utter helplessness of the Palestinian people in face of the cynicism and national self-interests of international diplomacy would certainly make me very angry.

I don’t know what the solution can be for the ongoing terrible conflicts between Israel and Palestine, but the current hard-line stance of Netanyahu’s new right wing coalition government will go  no way to help.  

I think it a great pity that three Ukrainian speakers have decided to withdraw from Writers’ Week in protest. As Louise Adler said, such writers’ forums are ‘courageous places to air opposing views.’ I, for one, will be interested to listen to Abulhawa speak on panels addressing the power of literature to reimagine what has been distorted in the real world, and explore the shared history of dispossession with some of Australia’s First Nations people.