I didn't read past the "nonpartisan reading list" in the news, and of course there was more to it.

#auspol

> The charades of Australia’s literati

https://szegounplugged.substack.com/p/the-charades-of-australias-literati

QUOTE

Or: a long good-bye to my writer friends

...

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.”