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The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A moral crisis': how the Sydney writers' festival grappled with the Israel-Gaza war
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. 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'. IDF 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, 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.' 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. 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.'
Middle East Eye
13-05-2025
- Middle East Eye
Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials
Ancient buildings are the keepers of secrets: the ghosts and stories of the people who have gone before rest within their walls. Despite attempts to conceal the past, remnants stubbornly remain, as anyone who has renovated can attest - faded posters, peeling wallpaper, chipped paint - such immutable objects can bear witness to a forgotten time. In this meditative travelogue, Raja Shehadeh and his wife Penny Johnson, both in their eighth decade, contemplate the hidden history and geography of historic Palestine, now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. This is a place where even 'archaeology is politicised'. The couple's quest is to reveal the lost, neglected and intentionally erased stories that criss-cross and sustain the land. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters In languid prose their journey illustrates how a rich, cultural heritage has been lost, and how these forgotten monuments and memorials reveal much about a common past and a possible future. The book, the seed of which germinated from a lockdown walk on a deserted road near the wall separating the occupied West Bank from Israel, and a chance discovery of a forgotten memorial stone for three Egyptian soldiers who perished in the 1967 war, is divided into five distinct sections that illustrate its historical breadth. The authors cover Palestine's past and its troubled present; Ottoman times; traces of the Nakba; intimations of mortality (where they visit the graves of friends, including the poet Mahmoud Darwish); and Ramallah ruins and the future of our pasts. Under our anointed tour guides, time slows and information is imbibed. Mindful to the burden of detail, the couple gently unpeel layers to reveal the fascinating narratives that underpin the places they visit. 'Bearing the weight of many pasts' This is not without hindrance; the authors are forced to negotiate checkpoints, road barriers and detours to reach these destinations, whose very geography has been splintered on purpose. They travel to Nablus, a city that 'bears the weight of many pasts', from Ramallah along the congested Highway 60. Their memories of the old road with its 'near pristine hills and agricultural landscapes' become an ever distant echo, as Israeli bulldozers gouge into the hills near the town of Hawara on the approach to Nablus, as they construct a four-lane bypass connecting Israeli settlements in the west to those of the east. In Nablus, they come across a triptych, strangely evocative of the lustrous 'religious three-panelled paintings that graced altars in Byzantine or Renaissance churches', except this memorial is rendered on stark white stone brick with a black fence protecting it. Namesake: Reflections on Nusaiba, a warrior woman of early Islam Read More » On the wall are the faded posters of young men organised as a trinity, martyrs who perished during the first and second Palestinian intifadas, condemned to be young forever. The couple relate the history of the Old City, how it was the eye of the storm during the Second Intifada in April 2002, and how both Palestinian civilians and fighters perished during a 10-day curfew, with homes and historic buildings, including an Ottoman era palace, sustaining collateral damage. Sometimes there are no signs of what has gone before. Shehadeh and Johnson travel to Kfar Kanna, a town near Nazareth, which according to Christians is famed as the place where Jesus turned water into wine, in search of a memorial to the Nakba. In an unremarkable circular plaza stocked with plastic chairs, they find a sole monument - a rectangular pillar topped with an urn filled with drooping plants. Squint at the wall behind it and the dead are listed through the decades, from the 1930s to the 2000s. The monument was unveiled in September 2000, a few days before the Second Intifada. As the traffic roars around them, the couple feel the weight of silence. Reclaiming narratives Voids in memory are often filled by art. In the museum of Ein Harod, an Israeli kibbutz, a major retrospective profiles Palestinian artist Asim Abu Shakra's vivid paintings of potted cacti. The artist, who tragically died of cancer in 1990 at the age of 28, repeatedly painted these hardy plants in bright colours in order to reclaim the narrative surrounding them. For Israelis, the cactus has been adopted as a national symbol, but the plant is also replete with meaning for Palestinians - its thorns offering protection; its fruit sustenance. (Profile Books) The artist was drawn to it because of its 'amazing ability to flower out of death'. As our authors note, his work offered 'beauty in response to the Nakba and its consequences'. Erasure is a constant theme. The couple visit Charles Clore Park, a seaside resort built on the ruins of Manshiya, a coastal city that Palestinians once named 'the bride of the sea'. The story behind the park's creation - it was named after the UK billionaire that funded its construction - and the obliteration of a city with 12,000 inhabitants, has sobering parallels with Trump's ideas of turning Gaza into the 'Riviera of the Middle East'. The authors observe that this is an ongoing historical tragedy; they are unable to access the Gaza Strip and note that the eradication and erasure of its cultural heritage will ultimately lead to the dispossession and displacement of its people, who will no longer be able to prove their connection to the land. Towards the end of the book, Johnson sees a ruby red anemone blossoming amongst the rubble and ruins that dot the Ramallah hills. There is always hope. The past can never be completely erased, clues remain for those willing to look closely. This precious jewel of a book is a call to preserve the past in order to secure the future. Its hauntingly evocative prose stays with you long after its final pages have been turned. Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials (2025) by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson in published by Profile Books
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials review
Raja Shehadeh – lawyer, activist and Palestine's greatest prose writer – has long been a voice of sanity and measure in the fraught, tendentious world of Arab-Israeli politics. His first non-academic book, When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, chronicled the 2002 siege of his hometown, Ramallah, while Palestinian Walks, which won the Orwell prize, traced how Israel's de facto occupation of the West Bank had fundamentally altered both its geography and its history. Last year, Shehadeh published What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, his first book since the attacks of 7 October. It was a work in two parts: the first, a characteristically measured analysis of how history led us to this point; the second, a bitterly furious record of the devastation wrought upon Gaza. The overwhelming impression was of a man who, after decades of engagement, had finally, tragically, succumbed to despair. So it is an unexpected relief to find in Forgotten something different: a Shehadeh who is engaged, forensic, alert to history's weight but unwilling to let it crush him. Perhaps this is due to the presence of his co-author, his wife, the academic Penny Johnson. The prose remains lawyerly, precise to the point of fastidiousness, but the collaboration lends it a quiet strength. The first-person plural voice used throughout the book is intimate yet resolute, while the occasional references to 'Raja' and 'Penny' in the third person suggest a certain distance – a recognition that they, too, are subjects in this vast historical tragedy, just as much as its narrators. The project of Forgotten echoes Palestinian Walks, but this time there is a clear objective to Shehadeh and Johnson's wanderings. They are searching for evidence of Palestinian history in the West Bank – traces both ancient and recent of the thriving culture that has endured here for millennia, and the memorials that bear witness to the suffering of those who call this place home. Again and again, I thought of WG Sebald as I read Forgotten. The resemblance lies not only in the mournful elegance of the prose but also in its method: a meditative excavation of history embedded in the landscape. Readers of The Rings of Saturn, in which Sebald wanders the East Anglian coast uncovering the buried violence of empire, will recognise the impulse. But here, in occupied Palestine, the violence is neither buried nor historical. It is immediate, ongoing. 'How many human lives and how many futures would have been preserved … had the Israeli government … prevented further settlements?', the authors ask. 'Thousands have died since, and so here we were, on our way to see how Palestinians memorialise their dead in Nablus.' At the heart of Shehadeh's work – and the conflict itself – is the idea of biopolitics, as explored by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Forgotten, like Palestinian Walks, examines the way geography and history are manipulated, controlled and erased. To move through Palestine is to navigate a web of restrictions – permits, checkpoints, detours – designed not only to obstruct but to exhaust. It is a book about memory and memorials, but also about the sheer difficulty of reaching them. 'Checkpoints, closures and a regime of exclusions have deprived new generations from gaining an impression of the country as a geographical unit,' write Shehadeh and Johnson. And that, of course, is precisely the point. The writers seek out the ruins of Kafr Bir'im, a Palestinian village in Galilee destroyed by the Israeli army in 1953, and the tomb of Mahmoud Darwish, Shehadeh's friend and Palestine's great poet. They visit Ottoman khans – way stations for desert caravans – and search for the remnants of ancient Gibeon and Qasr al-Yahud on the River Jordan, the site of Christ's baptism. They find a monument to a squadron of Turkish aeronauts and the only public memorial to the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Everywhere, history is distorted or obliterated, rewritten by Israeli power. And yet, for all this, Forgotten is a book of resistance – not just political, but existential. Shehadeh and Johnson, now in their 70s, offer a vision of Palestinian heritage that refuses to be erased, tracing a lineage that stretches back millennia and persists today despite the relentless attempts to efface it. History, like the land itself, cannot be so easily obliterated. Even after bulldozers and bombs, flowers bloom, trees reclaim razed earth, red anemones push through rock. Shehadeh and Johnson remain awed by the hills, by vultures and eagles wheeling above them, by the annual clouds of almond blossom. All this layered past, Forgotten insists, holds within it the promise of a future just as rich, just as enduring. In previous reviews, I wrote that Shehadeh's books are like beacons held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression. Forgotten is perhaps the brightest light of all. Forgotten by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson is published by Profile (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
