‘I use it with belief’: Sydney Festival headliner defends show that refers to ‘genocide’

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Khalid Abdalla is living at the heart of a global storm. In the last month, the British-Egyptian actor has stood before a Massive Attack crowd to call for Palestinian solidarity, campaigned for a charity lullaby to top the UK charts at Christmas and recorded a song of his own about the young lives lost in Gaza.

As he prepares to bring his solo show Nowhere to the Sydney Festival next week, Abdalla has now found his activism colliding with a city still reeling from the Bondi Beach terror attack.

Khalid Abdalla performs Nowhere in the UK.

Speaking from London ahead of his show, which some Jewish-Australians have criticised as irresponsible and inappropriate, Abadalla says Nowhere is about the desire for a better world for everyone and is not a threat to Jewish safety after the Bondi attack.

“Nowhere is in search of a better world that we desperately need for everyone, everywhere,” Abadalla says. “My thoughts are with everyone affected by this awful, antisemitic, tragic attack. I feel it as an assault on our common humanity and everything I believe in.”

Abdalla, best known for playing Dodi Fayed in the British TV series The Crown and the Hollywood films The Kite Runner, United 93, and Green Zone, has crafted a story about his Arab identity within cataclysmic world events, using projected images, audio voiceovers, personal stories, song, and dance.

Among these events are the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Arab Spring in 2011, the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

But some members of the Jewish-Australian community have questioned having Abdalla as a headliner for the festival. They argue that a performance by a prominent Palestinian advocate – one that explicitly references “genocide” – is wrong so soon after the Bondi Beach terror attack, where two gunmen targeted a Hanukkah celebration and killed 15 people.

Visual artist Nina Sanadze says it is “profoundly irresponsible” of the festival to run a show that refers to genocide in Gaza, given the sharp rise of antisemitism and renewed fears for Jewish safety since Bondi. Those fears have led her to temporarily close her Melbourne gallery.

“[The phrase] ‘genocide in Gaza’ is a blood libel to demonise Jews and hurt them,” she says. Having Nowhere in the festival is “incredibly insensitive and dangerous because we fear copycat attacks … We’re fearing for our lives.”

Khalid Abdalla as Dodi Fayed and Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in The Crown.

Despite the criticism, the Sydney Festival is standing by Nowhere. Festival director Kris Nelson says Abdalla is “an artist who works with incredible empathy and is a very thoughtful and open-hearted kind of storyteller” and denied the show was inflammatory or antisemitic.

In the UK, Abdalla’s activism has drawn official scrutiny. Last year, he was summoned by the Metropolitan Police for a “formal interview” about his involvement in a Palestine Solidarity Campaign protest. While no charges were laid, Abdalla says the police interest was an “egregious over-reach” and an attempt to stifle the right to protest.

He has performed Nowhere in the UK to largely positive reviews which have noted that the show’s message is about peace. Abdalla says he has found “circles of solidarity that are far wider and far more encouraging and far deeper” than he expected.

The Scottish-born, London-raised Abdalla drafted Nowhere after eight years living and working in Egypt. The son and grandson of high-profile Egyptian political dissidents, he was a founding member of the media activist group the Mosireen Collective which documented the Egyptian revolution. Returning to the UK in 2016, he was working in theatre and on other projects, and had become a father to two children, when he felt compelled to write the show.

“COVID happened and then George Floyd was murdered and my body just erupted with a sense of ‘if not now, when?’,” he says. “Ten, twelve thousand words poured out of me in six days ...

“[It started] as a processing of my revolutionary experience of Egypt, being the son and grandson of political prisoners in Egypt, being an actor who graduated from university in 2003 – the year of the war in Iraq, following on from 9/11 – [who] made films about 9/11, the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Egyptian revolution, all of these things. How does that create a prism for what it means to stand on a stage?”

When he started performing Nowhere in 2023, Abdalla says he felt “profoundly lonely” in his activism.

“But now we’re in a situation where ... thousands of people have signed up to pledges and letters and all sorts of things that you never would have imagined,” he says. “I remember seeing the image of people in Sydney walking across the Bridge. These are profoundly important moments.”

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters reject the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, overseas reviews say Abdalla refers in the show to Israel facilitating “genocide live-streamed into our phones” in Nowhere.

“Obviously I use [the word] with belief,” he says. “But also I think we need to use it. When the UN Commission of Inquiry, when all the major human rights organisations, when hundreds of genocide scholars – amongst them, scholars of the Holocaust – are using the word, I think it becomes encumbent on us to do so …

“It’s just very clear that it’s very important for us to use that word because part of what it also means is the duty to prevent.”

Abdalla calls Palestinian support “the anti-apartheid movement of our times, the civil rights movement of our times, the anti-genocide movement of our times”.

He is hoping audiences in Sydney respond as positively as they have overseas.

“The warmth of the encounters I have had when performing the show has kept the experience of what it has to offer feeling deeply valuable through these times we are living in,” he says.

After helping organise the Together for Palestine concert at Wembley Arena in September, Abdalla campaigned for Lullaby to be the UK number one Christmas single to raise funds for Palestinian causes. While Kylie Minogue’s XMAS took the title, the track reached number five.

“Part of what we’re trying to do is bring [Palestine] into the conversation,” he says. “This is a moment again, like what happened during the [Egyptian] counter revolution, where it seems to me there’s this attempt to push this genocide and what’s happened into the shadows, as if it’s gone now and we can ignore it. That’s not the way that these moments work.”