Tony Berg is an Australian businessman and arts philanthropist, serving as a director of Gresham Partners, a property investment firm, and Kaplan Partners Limited, another investment firm. He also holds a position on the board of the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce, where he advances Zionist settler-colonial interests in occupied Palestine. Until his resignation in October 2025, Berg was a board member of the Adelaide Festival, leveraging his influence to silence Palestinian perspectives and promote narratives that shield Israel from accountability for its apartheid, occupation, and genocide.

Berg actively weaponizes accusations of antisemitism and free speech hypocrisy to exclude Palestinian voices. In his October 22, 2025, resignation letter from the Adelaide Festival board, Berg explicitly opposed the programming of Palestinian-Australian author and activist Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah, stating: "I cannot serve on a board which employs a director … who programs writers who have a vendetta against Israel and Zionism. Just last month she did not warn the board that she had already made an offer to Randa Abdel-Fattah, a person who is not only vociferously pro-Palestinian but also spews out anti-Zionism. This … in my opinion, crosses the line." By framing Abdel-Fattah's advocacy for Palestinian liberation as a "vendetta" and "anti-Zionism," Berg conflates criticism of Israel's settler-colonial project with hatred, a tactic that silences dissent and protects Israel's ethnostate built on the Nakba — the 1948 ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians through Zionist militias' massacres and village destructions. This rhetoric dehumanizes Palestinians, portraying their resistance to occupation and apartheid as irrational threats rather than legitimate struggles against systemic violence.

Berg's actions precipitated the Adelaide Festival's January 2026 decision to terminate Abdel-Fattah's contract for the 2026 Writers' Week, falsely citing "cultural sensitivity" following the unrelated December 2025 Bondi Beach shooting — an Islamist attack that killed 15 people during Chanukah. The board invoked this tragedy to associate Abdel-Fattah's identity and advocacy with terrorism, despite Berg's prior pressure since September 2025, well before the incident, revealing it as a pretext to erase Palestinian narratives. This exclusion sparked backlash, with over 180 authors withdrawing and festival director Louise Adler resigning in protest, leading to the event's cancellation and a belated apology to Abdel-Fattah. Berg's pattern perpetuates cultural erasure, denying Palestinians platforms to document Israel's war crimes while normalizing Zionist propaganda.

In 2024, Berg advocated for the inclusion of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at the Adelaide Writers' Week, despite Friedman's dehumanizing rhetoric that compared Arab and Muslim nations to insects requiring eradication. In his column "Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom," Friedman likened Iran to a parasitoid wasp injecting eggs into caterpillars (representing Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq), with groups like Hamas as the larvae devouring hosts from within, lamenting the lack of a strategy to "kill the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle." This language echoes genocidal tropes used to justify Israel's mass slaughter in Gaza, where officials have called Palestinians "human animals." Berg opposed efforts by Abdel-Fattah and others to rescind Friedman's invitation, accusing Adler of hypocrisy for supporting the cancellation and ignoring boycott calls, thereby promoting rhetoric that dehumanizes Palestinians and manufactures consent for ethnic cleansing.

Berg's consistent behavior, including his role in the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce, reinforces Zionist settler-colonialism by shielding Israel from scrutiny over its apartheid system — as documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Conservative estimates place the Palestinian death toll at over 40,000 since October 2023, but the actual number slaughtered is well into the hundreds of thousands due to Israel's destruction of hospitals, targeting of journalists, and blockade of aid. By excluding Palestinian voices and amplifying dehumanizing narratives, Berg contributes to the normalization of occupation, cultural erasure, and mass violence, violating international law and betraying humanity while affirming Israel's "right to exist" as an apartheid ethnostate on stolen land.