The charades of Australia’s literati

Or: a long good-bye to my writer friends

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

We’re all acquainted with the cliche of the serious author: crippled with self-doubt, hunched over their manuscript in the dead of night, tortured by existential questions. Can words ever capture the complexities of life? Does this sentence land? Do my observations in this passage ring true or do I lack some fundamental self-awareness that will render me a laughing stock? Do I lack nuance?

Writers have a high regard for “nuance.”

Indeed some of Australia’s top name writers prize the quality so keenly they’re prepared to part with their hard-earned dollars — very hard-earned given the contracting state of the publishing industry — to individually enlighten the nation’s 227 MPs and senators over the summer break.

To enlighten them about what?, I hear you ask. About the same topic that’s propelled a staggering 6000 writers and counting to sign a petition .. on .. oh, go on, guess!

“What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?” asks Arash Azizi in The Atlantic. Rhetorically, in case you were wondering.

Neuroticism aside, the contemporary scribe is clearly unfazed by accusations of groupthink.

So back to the summer reading hamper dispatched to Canberra. Prominent authors, including Tim Winton, JM Coetzee, Anna Funder, Charlotte Wood and Michelle de Kretser, were reportedly among 60 writers who forked out for a set of five books on the Israel-Palestine conflict to be sent to every federal politician. Another 30 writers endorsed the campaign without contributing funds. Another set of books, compiled by my Substack comrade, author and former Age editor, Michael Gawenda, has since been sent to MPs as a rejoinder — more on this later.

Some of the writers backing the five books campaign. Source: Instagram.

As to the 90 signatories: has each read all five books or were they prepared to endorse them on faith as “authoritative” as the covering letter to the pollies asserts? I’m curious because I’ve had the privilege of working and playing alongside many of these writers: we’ve been in the same reading groups, moved in the same social circles, shared platforms at writers festivals, attended workshops together interstate, laughed over drinks, tossed ideas around at airport terminals and on long drives — all of this was before October 7, obviously. My point is: I can testify to their intellectual rigour and moral sensitivity. To their neuroticism, I suppose. They understand that “authoritative” work requires exhaustive research and honest reflection.

For example, I’d be gobsmacked if these writers were to lend their names to a petition about, I dunno, the wars in Sudan or Yemen or Syria. They would surely feel exposed and uncertain, worried that they knew too little about these conflicts between peoples whose cultures they didn’t understand and whose languages they didn’t speak. They would surely protect their good names and hard-earned reputations and err on the side of humility. I can’t imagine any celebrated author devoting roughly half a book to the conflict in Sudan after a mere 10 days of highly curated touring in the African state. And yet the multi award-winning Ta-Nehisi Coates did exactly this in his excoriation of Israel in The Message.

When it comes to Israel-Palestine, writers on the other side of the world are so certain they can adjudicate on the five most “authoritative” texts about the conflict. Where does their certainty come from? These writers who in the main speak neither Hebrew nor Arabic, who have visited neither the Jewish state nor the Palestinian territories for any serious length of time or at all, who last studied the region as undergraduates and maybe not even then? Does their confidence spring from a sense of safety in numbers? Is it somehow unsafe for folks in the literary world not to expound on Israel-Palestine?

The covering letter to the MPs explains:

“The political debate in Australia and internationally rarely touches on the issues, events, and historical analyses that these books reveal — despite their direct relevance to what is happening today.”

Commendable then, given this apparent silence at the heart of the Middle East debate, that the signatories managed to unearth the revelatory texts. Five in number as in the Old Testament — or am I reading too much into it? They are: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi; Palestine A-Z, an alphabetised list of definitions and common terms by Kate Thompson; The Sunbird, by Sara Haddad; A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappé; and Balcony over Jerusalem by John Lyons.

The campaign’s organisers — publisher Aviva Tuffield, architect Marcus O’Reilly, writer Paddy O’Reilly and IT specialist Jol Blazey — describe the books as “non-partisan,” chosen to foster “nuance” in the Israel-Gaza debate as The Guardian and the ABC uncritically report.

And yet this “carefully curated,” “non-partisan” and “nuanced” book list is endorsed by the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network and the Jewish Council of Australia — the former by definition partisan, its president, Nasser Mashni, recently cheering on the prospect of Israel “falling over,” and the latter, despite what the name suggests, effectively an anti-Zionist organisation on the same page as APAN. (“Jewish safety is not at odds with Palestinian freedom,” the Council proclaims, never mind the Iran-backed flag-bearers of the Palestinian resistance insist otherwise.)

Even more odd, the characterisation of these books as “non-partisan” or illuminating complexity, or advocating for “nuanced” debate contradicts how the writers themselves characterise their texts. The title, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, leaves us in no doubt where Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, is coming from.

Irish writer Kate Thompson is similarly an open-book with Palestine A-Z, in which she explicitly rejects the case for “nuance.” As she explains in the introduction, her glossary of terms is intended “to contradict” the oft-cited claim that “the Israeli occupation of Palestine,” is “complicated.” For instance, anti-Semitism is defined as “a largely European phenomenon” — again, this is very reassuring not least for the families of those slaughtered on October 7 by the ecstatic Hamas militant who boasted, “Dad I’m calling you from the phone of a Jew! I just killed her and her husband, with my own hands I killed 10!”

In his “nuanced” and “non-partisan,” A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Pappé describes Zionism’s origins as a 16th century “evangelical Christian project in Europe” that transformed into a “settler-colonial project” in the 1920s with Jewish land purchases in Palestine. He attributes the flight of Jews to Israel from the Arab and Muslim world exclusively to the Zionists’ “aggressive campaign of persuasion often resorting to underhanded methods” such as false-flag operations, with anti-Semitism playing virtually no role at all. (Jew-hatred, as we know from Thompson, being a largely European phenomenon.)

Pappé, incidentally, was a former senior lecturer at the Middle Eastern History Department and the Political Science Department of the University of Haifa for more than 20 years until his vocal support for an academic boycott of Israel made his position untenable — in 2007 he left Israel for Exeter.

While I’ve struggled to obtain a copy of The Sunbird, the novella’s author, Sara Haddad, is a Lebanese-Australian. The novella’s central character was expelled from her village in Palestine as a six year-old; as an adult she catches the bus into the city for weekly pro-Palestine demonstrations. Haddad sees her main character as “a modern parable which tells the story of millions (of Palestinians) who just want to go home.” Now, it’s entirely possible that in The Sunbird Haddad makes a heartfelt and courageous effort to grapple with the Jews’ yearning, over two millennia, to return home, to be free and safe and in command of their destiny. And if the novella does so I will joyfully correct my hunch that it does no such thing — whatever its literary merits, and they may well be substantial, the text skimps on “nuance.”

Balcony Over Jerusalem is the only one of the five books to approximate a “non-partisan” view of the conflict, even if Lyons says so himself by way of a disclaimer early on: “To use an old Australian saying, I don’t have a dog in this fight.” But his book made headlines less for its forensic analysis of events on the ground in the Middle East than for its claims the Australian media is captured by what he ominously refers to as The Lobby.

The pro-Israel lobby, in Lyons’ telling, compromises and suppresses media reporting on the awful truths in this conflict. As others have pointed out, Lyons’ own account throws up no examples of his reporting actually being censored or massaged as a result of undue pressure from “the Lobby.” On the contrary: he documents a consistent — and admirable — pattern of support from his managers at The Australian and the ABC in the face of pressure from the pro-Israel lobby group, AIJAC. Still, the fact the public broadcaster had to be roused to a vigorous high-level defence of Lyons’ reporting leads him to conclude the lobby has “real power”; lesser journalists and news organisations could be prevailed upon to “self-censor.”

Well, these days I can think of a number of lobby groups with power real enough to actually self-censor ABC reporters or at least those reporters aren’t already activists for the cause in question. In this category I might include the staff activists who shortly after October 7 signed an open letter calling on the media to report Israel-Palestine according to a fixed meta-narrative in which the Jewish state is cast as the irredeemably guilty party. I would suggest this worldview is already the newsroom orthodoxy. Refer back to my earlier comments on the ABC’s flattering reporting on the 90 Australian authors and the five books they deem the oracle on the Middle East.

Photo by MikhailMishchenko at iStock

**

As I mentioned earlier, a rival set of books on the Middle East was chosen by Michael Gawenda and distributed to all MPs and senators by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. They are: Israel, A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby, My Promised Land by Israeli Ari Shavit, Letters to my Palestinian Neighbour by Yossi Klein Halevi, Israel A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis and Gawenda’s own memoir, My Life as A Jew.

His covering letter to the MPs referred to the five books they had been sent earlier:

“Most of these books offer a particular view of the conflict and its history, which is not to say they are not worth reading. I am a writer, and I would never advocate for books not to be read.

“I do think, however, that the books you will receive today .. offer a nuanced and different view of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”

So, this new set of books is once again described as offering a “nuanced” view of the conflict.

At this point a good chunk of the reading public might be inclined to split the difference and conclude that one side’s “nuance” is another side’s bias and that reading both book sets is one’s best chance of grasping the conflict in all its complexity.

Or maybe I’m wildly underestimating the success of the decades-long campaign to de-legitimise Israel. It could be that a good chunk of the reading public — a group that by definition skews to what is nowadays an increasingly gormless left — would employ the same frame as The Guardian’s Jonathan Guyer when he a year ago reviewed Tishby’s Israel, A Simple Guide, alongside Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

It may shock you to learn Guyer dismisses Tishby’s book as “Israeli talking points in Carrie Bradshaw’s voice” while praising Khalidi’s for its historical sweep “of Zionism as a colonial project”, for drawing on scholarly research and the author’s experience “to explain Palestinian dispossession and perseverance in the face of colonialism,” and for engaging in “nuanced self-criticism” — that word again! — on how Arafat got screwed over by Israel (I’m paraphrasing only slightly) during the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.

“You could judge them (the two books) by their covers,” goes Guyer’s intricate analysis, “Khalidi’s blurbs are from the Financial Times, the Nation and Middle East academics, while Bill Maher, Aaron Sorkin, Ritchie Torres and Ben Shapiro line up behind Tishby.” Notice how the political left has transformed from fiercely anti-establishment in the late 1960s to loyal cheerleader for institutional power? What a joke! Nine times out of 10 I’d take Bill Maher’s view over the “resistance by any means necessary” school of thought that has colonised the Ivy Leagues and almost all sense-making institutions.

I haven’t read Tishby’s book or all of Gawenda’s five recommended books. But as Gawenda himself explains, while each author affirms Israel’s right to exist, affirms the Jewish story that led to a movement for self-determination, none denies the legitimacy of the Palestinian case for self-determination or the tragic plight of the Palestinian people since Israel’s establishment.

And even the most haughty reviewer of Shavit’s My Promised Land — again in The Guardian, this time by Avi Shlaim — concedes he engages with Zionism’s “problematic parts” and rejects the current Israeli-Palestinian status quo as unsustainable. “But,” Shlaim sermonises, “the brilliance of Shavit's style tends to conceal the ethnocentric character of his commentary and his inability to confront the moral consequences of the triumph of Zionism.”

Thus, the Western intelligentsia dismisses every exercise in Zionist self-criticism, no matter how strenuous, as blind, deluded and self-serving, while at the same time deeming every cartoonish portrayal of Zionism as “settler colonialism”, nothing less than pristine Truth.

I agree with Gawenda that Australia’s MPs should read the five books endorsed by the 90 writers. Some might find the collective content revealing.

As to the 90 writers, including my former friends and colleagues who signed on to the must-read campaign: whether consciously or otherwise (and I fear I know the answer) they’re part of a movement that seeks not open debate and reconciliation in the Middle East but a linguistic stitch-up — Israel is a “settler-colonial” regime, the Gaza war is a “genocide” and so on — designed to foreclose open debate and reconciliation.

In this, they’re guilty of a crime against literature; the deployment of cowardly weasel words. If they truly believe that justice demands the world’s sole Jewish state be somehow dismantled and replaced with an Arab-majority state from the river to the sea they should say so explicitly, and argue their case in the court of public opinion. If they believe that justice demands their literary spaces be cleansed of Zionists such as myself — after all, if Israel is illegitimate then surely its supporters deserve to be at least sidelined? — again, they should say so explicitly.

Instead, they peddle ethno-nationalist propaganda and call it “nuance.”