The Adelaide Writers’ Week has managed the rare feat of turning what was supposed to be a literary festival into a full-blown political incident.

That’s thanks to a shambolic sequence of decisions, backtracking, resignations and legal threats.

The Adelaide Festival board disinvited Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from this year’s program, explaining it would not be ‘culturally sensitive’ to proceed so soon after the Bondi attack.

It was a line designed to calm everyone down. But the festival board dragged the worst antisemitic atrocity on Australian soil into a programming dispute, then tried to insist it wasn’t drawing a connection. All while simultaneously citing Abdel-Fattah’s ‘past statements’ as the reason for pulling the pin on her attendance.

That isn’t ‘cultural sensitivity’. It’s bureaucratic cowardice, dressed up as virtue.

But here is the part Adelaide’s cultural establishment still seems determined to avoid saying out loud: this was a mess waiting to happen because the good doctor never should have been invited in the first place.

Not because writers’ festivals should avoid controversy, or because robust debate is unwelcome, but because this particular controversy is not incidental to her public profile. It is central to it.

When a public figure repeatedly trades in inflammatory claims, moral absolutes and political agitation on a subject as combustible as Israel and Palestine, the organisers don’t get to feign surprise when a mess ensues.

Palestinian-Australian Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah was dropped from the Adelaide Writers' Week, with the board citing a need for cultural sensitivity following the Bondi massacre - sparking a massive fallout

A day after the October 7 massacre in Israel, Dr Abdel-Fattah updated her Facebook profile by sharing this image of a parachutist in the colours of a Palestinian flag

They don’t get to pretend they were curating a polite conversation about literature and accidentally wandered into the front line of a culture war.

What this fiasco really exposes is the comfortable little secret of too many writers’ festivals: they no longer curate arguments, they curate affirmation.

The panels are built around polemicists whose worldview is already shared by the organisers and their cultural tribe, while the occasional ‘opponent’ is wheeled in as a foil. Not to persuade, but to be tut-tutted. Or only because they have written critical works about their own ideological allies on the right.

The whole thing is then sold as brave, necessary, and challenging, when it is mostly just ideological brand management with a wine tent. Adelaide has not stumbled into the culture war by accident. It has been leaning into it for many years, while pretending it is simply celebrating books.