Zero Sum

The Adelaide Festival vs The Levantine Troubles

No Australian should have to care about the Adelaide Festival. This is the point of arts festivals, they’re meant to silo the tote bag and enamel pin people away from anything that matters, lock them in a series of claustrophobic theatres and lecture halls while they listen to each other prattle on about how Donald Trump gave them an anxiety disorder or how we need more female representation in publishing to a room full of women in publishing.

For the blissfully unaware, Adelaide has a reasonably well subscribed arts festival called, creatively enough, The Adelaide Festival and it’s causing a ruckus in Australia’s legacy media because of Palestine. Apologies, a criticism that’s frequently levelled at me is I have a habit of starting pieces in media res and providing no context: There is a place called Adelaide in Australia, you’d be forgiven for not knowing it exists because it’s produced nothing of inherent value in the last two centuries, they have a reasonably well subscribed arts festival…

A woman called Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian author and academic was pulled from the speakers list for the event. Which was 125 speakers deep already. I mean, whatever she said, I would have made some cuts long before that. They should have trimmed a bunch of non Palestinian authors and academics as well and just said it was for time. But instead, they admitted it was because Abdel-Fattah said something bad about Jews and Israel. I’ve skimmed it. My judgement on these things is off because I have no strong feelings either either way on the Levantine Troubles. It’s a war, wars have winners and losers and dead babies and endless propaganda. That’s what happens in wars, that’s why they’re generally inadvisable. Having an opinion on the Israel - Palestine conflict is like having an opinion on your best mate’s relationship drama. It would be better for you if they stopped, it risks spilling over into your own life occassionally, and it’s all around annoying, but you shouldn’t get involved. That’s going to make it worse. No one on the left of politics seems to get this memo, least of all, Palestinian authors and academics.

It’s fascinating to me that Palestine produces so many authors, academics and journalists but not a single decent military strategist. These last two generations of Palestinians, a not statistically insignificant cohort have managed to slip Israel’s noose, go to the West and attend universities. But instead of learning anything of practical value to the Palestinian cause they get one-shotted reading Ta-Nehisi Coates and start churning out papers on struggle while the actual kinetic struggle for their homeland gets lost on the ground everyday. And the hilarious irony of all this was in a way, it was kind of working. The Palestinian cause had effectively colonized every university campus around the world even as Israel was literally colonizing their homeland. If you think in pure square mileage, they had control of more land in Western universities than they did in Gaza. But instead of leveraging their enormous power in legacy institutions they… flew paragliders into Israel and murdered civilians and raped women at a dance party. Forcing all these intellectual exiles to rationalize it in public, instead of in tutorials and papers in obscure journals.

There’s a very Levantine suicidal tendency when you think about it. The first Palestinian suicide bombers in the 1940s were actually Zionists. Scholars (probably the ones Palestine keeps exporting) claim the first suicide attack was actually Samson in Judges 16:30. For thousands of years these people regard any strategic impasse as an opportunity to do the most irrational and self destructive thing possible. Palestinian pseudointellectuals, or even their supporters and allies, are not immune from this impulse.

If you’re one of these Palestinian intellectual exiles you’re on a pretty good wicket. All care, no responsibility. You’re feted and indulged by the West’s enormously lucrative civil arts regimes, you’re paid to do nothing essential except exist in a permanent state of grievance with a perpetual frown on your face for the benefit of an audience of midwits. Artificial intelligence has taken out most of the toil, as even third generation large language models could reliably churn out academic traumaporn indistinguishable from meat writing. All these people have to do to exist as part of one of the West’s protected classes with a high standard of living is exercise a modicum of restraint.

But they just can’t. Any more than Palestine’s strategic leadership can not pointlessly murder Israeli civilians. Or their ancestors who couldn’t not blow themselves up on buses. All the way back to before a plucky Arabian merchant prophet triggered an Israelite schism and Zionists and Palestinians were the same people killing themselves over having to pay taxes to Rome. This is just what they’re like.

Randa Abdel-Fattah couldn’t take a couple of steps back and say, hey, I have a very nice life in Australia. I’m a permanent fixture on the national literary circuit that is predominantly funded by Jews¹ and there is a very obvious line around how much pro-Palestinian agitprop they are willing to indulge to maintain their cultural status points and the point at which they will end my career. The line was openly celebrating the October 7 attacks by changing her profile picture to a Hamas propaganda poster of one of the murderous paragliders by the way.

This should not be a particularly noteworthy story, but this is Australia after all. Australian journalism degrees teach you about the nobility of the Palestinian struggle but not Man Bites Dog, so we end up with a two week news cycle of recrimination and counter points about an entirely prosaic circumstance like woman whose entire cultural relevance is adjacent to Jewish philanthropy realizes she shouldn’t have been antisemitic.

I think one of the biggest problems with the world today is children aren’t taught about losing anymore and so the idea that all externalities have winners and losers is completely unknown to them. It is incomprehensible to the millennial mind that you can lose a war. There was a moment, just a brief moment there where I thought, you know maybe Palestine could pull this off. Starting a war with the region’s military superpower that is funded by the United States military industrial complex and with the tacit support of the world’s largest financial interests by murdering their civilians and kidnapping them seems superficially like a bad idea, but their ace in the hole was the Randa Abdel-Fattahs of the world. Within days of October 7 there was this extremely well organised and for a while at least, effective propaganda campaign waged outside Palestine, funded by other regional actors, and it seemed like it was working. They exploited the bifurcated nature of modern Western politics, leveraged their assets in civil institutions, legacy media were walking on egg shells about the whole thing. Palestine were winning an inch of news print for every inch of land they lost.

Israel, to my mind at least, misjudged this badly in the early days of the war. To be fair to them, they had a lot to deal with in their own backyard and perhaps they didn’t have the best picture of the cultural and social moment the West, of whom they are a vassal, were living in. Israel thought it was still the 2010s, that they could do no wrong and would be cossetted by their supposed friends no matter what. There’s a limit to everything, including Western indulgence in Israel’s territorial ambitions as it turns out.

There’s an elegant simplicity to Israel’s response once strategic clarity was achieved - knowing they’d eventually be forced to end the war they went to war even harder, flattening Gaza, neutralizing Hamas’ enduring ability to retaliate, and only reacting with their own external propaganda efforts after the fighting was finished. What could have been only a tactical victory and a strategic defeat is now both. Palestine as a country only exists on the increasingly irrelevant stationary of the United Nations, and as an ethnicity will likely endure only in the by lines of various Western authors, academics and journalists. Israel 1, Palestine 0.

But this is very hard to explain to someone with no conception of losing. To the millennial mind no one loses, so they just end up existing in emotional stasis without accepting that a situation has changed. Palestine is rubble, the military leadership of Hamas hiding in Qatar or wherever with one eye on the sky for the Raytheon R9X missile whose spinning Ginsu blades will slice them into pieces small enough to fit into a recycled Free Palestine tote bag. The foreign Israel lobby, run by Jewish capital’s failsons and asleep at the wheel for two years has woken up and making up for lost time with cultural crackdowns across the world.

When these people, the Randa Abdel-Fattahs of the world, changed their social media profile pictures to celebrate October 7, it never occurred to them this might happen. That in the real world, whoever you think are the good guys don’t always win. In fact they rarely win. The winner is always who drops the most bombs, not who books the most speakers at writers festivals.

The tote bag people have stopped protesting the war now, suggesting that at the managerial pinnacle of pro Palestinian agitprop someone has figured out they lost, or maybe the money simply ran out. Because people with money generally know the difference between winning and losing.

Modern ignorance of win / loss conditions cuts both ways though. Just as Palestine’s supporters don’t realize they lost, Israel’s don’t seem to realize they won either, which is just as dangerous. Here in Australia you can see the signs that they’re trying to push the culture all the way back beyond where it was before October 7, when the tote bag people could all go to the same parties, eat the same canapes and read the same books, funded by the same people.

Nothing of value is really lost if Australia’s arts and culture scene never recovers from this. When you look at the 50 speakers at the Adelaide Festival who have pulled out it’s staggering to think anyone was showing up to see them speak anyway, if their output on social media is anything to go by.

But it does highlight just how on its last leg Australia’s legacy institutions really are, no longer just deprived of relevance and credibility, but resilience. There’s no doubt that they too, have lost, in an ephemeral war for cultural capital they probably didn’t realize was even happening until it was too late. People don’t need writers festivals and a board of directors to curate them when you can curate your own online. This week Anthony Albanese, in cahoots with the Labour Internationale took a swipe at Elon Musk and X (he’s aggrieved that Grok keeps putting him in a bikini, which you’d think I could get a good Substack out of but it’s too puerile even for me).

This won’t work, although we all have to pretend like it will, because that’s the propaganda war we’re fighting. The establishment are much like grotty Palestinian rebels in that regard, living in a state of hope and cope that their grip on legacy institutions will win them column inches in newspapers no one reads while they can see out the window them losing the ground that matters.

The winner is always who drops the most bombs.

1. I normally wouldn’t do this but we live in a period of heightened bullshit so here is the Adelaide Festival’s website scroll down to the bottom to see who actually funds the thing.