The Lattouf case and the ongoing chilling effects

On pro-Israel pressure campaigns and Australia’s cultural organisations

The Lattouf decision is an indictment of ABC management. The court case exposed the arbitrary, incoherent nature of the ABC’s social media and editorial policies, senior management’s susceptibility to outside pressure, the complete failure of HR processes in response to board pressure, serious editorial over-reach by the chair, and most importantly a sorry lack of support for its own employees.

The ABC board spent millions defending this case, when it could have settled for $80,000 last year. Its most senior managers at the time, Ita Buttrose, David Anderson and Chris Oliver-Taylor, are no longer with the ABC, and the reputation of all three has been sullied permanently by their failures. The court judgement painted a picture of an organisation dishevelled by its own lack of courage. Faced with pressure from pro-Israel activists and The Australian, management went to water, abandoning the ABC’s commitments to free expression and fairness.

There are lessons to be learnt by ABC management, but they should be heeded by every cultural organisation, government authority and news outlet around the country, especially those that responded the same way to pro-Israel pressure. Victims of similar campaigns include artist Khaled Sabsabi, poet Omar Sakr, author Ren Wyld and pianist Jayson Gillham. Like Antoinette Lattouf, they paid the price for having a political opinion. Nothing more – and sometimes barely even that. And these are only the most public cases; we’ll never know about the artists, writers and presenters who were silenced, quietly excluded or denied opportunities in the first place.

On the other hand, the organised pro-Israel groups backgrounding journalists or haranguing ministers or board members have faced no consequences, despite the chaos they’ve caused. They haven’t been named or called to account in any way. It’s a perverse effect of the pressure-campaign tactics: only the victims of these attacks (the pro-Palestinian artists, writers, presenters) are put on public trial.

More significantly, the damage to the institutions – the damage they have done to themselves in wronging these individuals – is not being discussed.

There is a common fallacy that these institutions are protecting themselves when they hang individuals out to dry. Pressure campaigns rely on this notion when in fact the opposite is true: board members and chief executives made knee-jerk decisions under the pressure of a news deadline, thinking they’d dampen the threat, only to find the repercussions were much greater. Catastrophic, in fact.

The fallout from the Lattouf affair can’t be measured only in the dollars and hours spent by the public broadcaster defending it. The reputational damage has been massive, and the affair was demoralising for many ABC staff, who watched in dismay as a fellow journalist was put through the wringer.

Creative Australia, which unceremoniously dropped artist Khaled Sabsabi from Australia’s Venice pavilion, immediately faced a mass revolt from the arts community. Several senior staff and a board member resigned. It suffered the opprobrium of panellists in the Biennale selection process and the other artistic teams involved. There was international embarrassment, calls for CEO Adrian Collette to resign, and ultimately the resignation of board chair Robert Morgan. It’s still unclear if any art will appear in the Australian pavilion next year. In other words, it’s been an unmitigated, self-inflicted disaster.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s cancellation of a concert by pianist Jayson Gillham over his political statements also unleashed hell. Cat Empire and Jet “postponed” their concerts in response, and, as the AFR reported, “Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has recorded the biggest loss in its 118-year history, as legal bills and termination payments helped blow a $3.3 million hole in its budget.” Those costs will continue to mount through 2025, “after MSO’s attempt to strike out Gillham’s suit on the basis he was not a permanent employee failed in the Federal Court last month”.

When the State Library of Victoria hastily cancelled its Teen Writing Bootcamps (because presenters Omar Sakr, Alison Evans and Jinghua Qian had all been vocal critics of Israel’s war in Gaza), it cited “the need to ensure safety for all involved”. This was patently untrue: the library showed no care at all for the welfare of the three authors. The message to them was clear as day: your political views cost you the job. Over 100 library staff argued in a letter to management that the library committed “censorship and discrimination” in its decision. Writers including Michelle de Kretser and Tony Birch boycotted the library, citing the damage to authors’ reputations and to the trust between authors and the library. The crisis dragged on for another year, as library management was forced to explain and justify their decision, appease staff and the literary community, and re-write their own policies.

In May the State Library of Queensland was set to award a $15,000 fellowship and publishing opportunity to Martu author Ren Wyld. Hours before the ceremony to announce it, with Wyld already on her way to Brisbane to accept, the library cancelled the announcement. At the instruction of the Queensland arts minister, following threats by The Australian, the library acquiesced and Wyld’s fellowship was revoked. The decision was tied explicitly to her perceived political views (which had nothing to do with the work selected for the fellowship). At least four judges of the Queensland literary awards immediately resigned, the Australian Society of Authors condemned the decision, and the future of other Queensland awards and fellowships is now under a cloud as the library launches “an independent review” of them.

These esteemed Australian institutions all undermined their own values, their own processes, their own staff, contractors and community, and caused immense harm to artists’ lives and livelihoods. These artist were smeared as being supporters of terrorism, or antisemitic, due to their expressions of solidarity (and yes, these included the occasional rash comment) with the Palestinians who were suffering unimaginable oppression. Not that these smears are ever stated outright. Why? Because then someone would need to prove them.

All groups, including pro-Israel ones, have a right to lobby and to object to funding decisions. They’re entitled to argue cases, interpret comments and exert political pressure. That’s democracy. But they don’t have the right to defame.

It’s the responsibility of institutions and their custodians to consider, filter, and judge the merits of these calls – in accordance with their own institutional values. These organisations purport to protect liberal values, yet none of them mounted defences of artistic freedom, and none provided an opportunity for Lattouf or Sabsabi or any of the victims of these pressure campaigns to defend themselves. The institutions didn’t try to understand or clarify the views of their artists/creators/employees, or protect them in any way. They just cancelled them, leaving them to face wild accusations and acrimony. The signal was clear, and chilling.

Board members and executives are entrusted by the Australian public to protect critical cultural bodies, and in these cases they failed. Ultimately, by succumbing to pressure from pro-Israel voices, they each damaged their institutions. For what is a cultural organisation that doesn’t stand up for free expression? Or an arts body that abandons artists?

Artists, writers and journalists throughout the country have felt the effect of this cowardice, and public debate has been stymied. Free expression on Gaza and Israel has become the preserve of the few who are able to stick their head above the parapet.

It’s absurd and embarrassing in a liberal democracy to have to say this, but people shouldn’t be punished for protesting against genocidal oppression. They should be supported. It’s also the height of intellectual dishonesty (not to mention morally repugnant) to imply without firm evidence that those advocating for the human rights of Palestinians are antisemitic or support terrorism.

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It’s a terrible irony that the Lattouf affair revolved around a social post by Human Rights Watch which said that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. The statement was unacceptable to the ABC then, and eighteen months later the broadcaster still appears unable to report this matter properly.

Earlier this year, Israel cut off all aid to Gaza for nearly three months. Almost two million people faced starvation as a result. International human rights organisations once ran around 200 food distribution points in Gaza, but these have been replaced by four Israeli-controlled outlets. A UN agency called the new distribution mechanism a “death trap”, because Israeli forces regularly open fire or launch artillery at waiting, starving crowds. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that IDF officers and soldiers “were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, prompting the military prosecution to call for a review into possible war crimes”. International aid organisations are prevented from directly providing starvation aid to a starving, trapped population. Yet the ABC has barely reported on this situation, and even then only via the words of others. It still refuses to use the terms war crimes or ethnic cleansing in relation to Gaza, let alone genocide, unless it adds quote marks and a response by Israeli spokespeople. Nor did ABC news identify the recent attacks on Iran as illegal under international law, despite having no hesitation doing this in relation to, for example, Russia’s attacks on Ukraine.

The Lattouf decision was a welcome one, and a rare instance of a public figure highlighting and describing a pro-Israeli pressure campaign. But the effects of these pressure campaigns are still with us, in institutions and media across the country. As if to prove this, the new managing director of the ABC, Hugh Marks, fronted the public hours after the Lattouf decision was handed down, saying, “I don't think there’s any change that’s needed.” As my colleagues at Lamestream pointed out, “The ABC is treating Antoinette Lattouf's unlawful sacking like a temporary lapse in judgement. The broadcaster ‘regrets’ that on this one occasion, it broke public trust and everything its charter stands for.”

Here’s a simple test of whether the broadcaster has learnt anything about resisting pressure campaigns: Would the ABC hire someone like Antoinette Lattouf today? The answer is obvious.