Early in January, the organisers of Adelaide Writers’ Week withdrew their invitation to the Palestinian novelist Randa Abdel-Fattah. The decision was supposedly taken in the wake of the Bondi Beach shooting, and the organisers claimed it would not be “culturally sensitive” to have Abdel-Fattah – a vocal critic of Israel’s assault on Gaza – appear at the festival in March. The Jewish Community Council of South Australia had lobbied for her removal, and the premier of South Australia said he “wholeheartedly” supported the decision.

But more than 180 speakers withdrew from the festival, and its director Louise Adler resigned in protest, leading to its total collapse; the organisers have now apologised to Abdel-Fattah and promised to invite her next year. Here, the Australian poet Omar Sakr describes the events in Adelaide as part of a wider, targeted campaign to reconstitute the very notion of “hate speech”.

Omar Sakr

In Sderot, Israelis pay five shekels to use mounted binoculars and get a close look at the bombardment of Gaza. They call it the best show in town. At Darling Harbour in Sydney, the artist Julia Phillips has an installation called Observer, Observed: mounted binoculars are connected to a giant screen broadcasting the eyes of the spectator to the crowd. I keep thinking of the plea, “all eyes on Gaza,” on Rafah, on Khan Younis, on the West Bank. How all that looking did nothing except, perhaps, put the lens itself in the sniper’s scope.

In Adelaide now, the largest writer’s festival in the country is dead, after Zionists successfully erased the Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the programme, sparking a wide-scale revolt of participants. As the genocide unfolds, the status quo in the West has tried to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from public life, to ban the keffiyeh and all protests, to label any attempt to save Palestinian lives as ‘hate’ of the murderers. Needless to say, it’s impossible to consider or allow that anyone might love an Arab man, woman or child.

The Australian government is debating a new bill about hate speech, in the wake of December’s terror attack in Bondi. I am astonished at the idea that terror can be ascribed to so discrete and specific a violence, a body, a name, a heritage; more specifically, at the idea that some people have not felt terror pulsing through every moment of the day these past few years. Part of this new legislation includes a provision whereby describing an event, no matter how accurate – like, say, Israelis paying to watch people slaughtered at a permanent murder observatory, with vending machines nearby to offer refreshments – could be construed as hate speech.

In retrospect, that a war was declared on terror should have told us from the beginning that ending feeling itself was the true objective. This murder was driven by hate, and that murder by pride, and this murder by love, and thatmurder by duty, and this murder by that endless monster, country. Feeling is not so much ended as buried, gaslit, mistranslated. They say our art is hate, our protest is hate, human rights is hate, law is hate, history is hate. At this point, it is more instructive perhaps to consider what we are told is not hateful. The billionaires controlling the media; the arms manufacturers, naturally, who must be protected at all costs; the soldiers; the politicians and rabbis crowing Amalek; the settlers blocking aid; the gestapo in America shooting people in the streets; this is all just business and if it must be characterised by any emotion, then the only apt one is glee.

Now, do you want me to moan that the jobs are drying up? The gigs are gone? The horror is that any of us are working at all, maintaining all this fucking business. Wretchedly, I want to: I have kids, one sick, one healthy, I’m the richest man in the world, and still, I need to work. Elon Musk and I share that, and nothing else. One day we will look back at all this, and wonder, did people really gather to talk about books? Did they venture into a space full of strangers, to sit, and listen, and wonder, and feel a little bit more human? Even while the bombs fell? Yes, even while the bombs fell. That is when we needed to feel it the most.

The Nicolás Maduro trope-watch

Is it just us, or is it getting harder and harder to write – leave alone read – the news? When not resorting to X-feed style “update” listicles, every new article about the abduction of Nicolás Maduro seems to lower the bar for insight. Foreign affairs have always been generative for cliché – “graveyard of empires” and so on – but the commentariat has been in unusually bland form this month, whether it’s appeals to “shock and awe” or the armchair-realpolitiker’s insistence that the strike’s real impact lies in Beijing and Moscow… Above all, there’s the “rules-based order,” which may have been abused as much by recent takes as recent events. Only after several hundred words blustering through the fog of metaphor might the reader find, on occasion, a few lines about the roughly 75 people, including civilians, killed in the January raid.

With that in mind, we set up a Venezuela bingo card: a compendium of stock phrases that the media is hitting with tedious regularity. Play along as you read the weekend papers!