From all sides, writers in Adelaide grieving for social cohesion

For Don Dunstan, Adelaide was, “the Athens of the South” and this year’s Adelaide Writers Week lived up to that billing.

Over six days, some 240 writers shared their thoughts on writing about love, war, loss, inequality, human rights and often, themselves. They shared the joys of gardening, art and architecture and even of watching football. Listening to all this, the audience exuded gratitude.

At the same time, the civility of the park setting was tinged with palpable grief. At a personal level, Geraldine Brooks and others shared their devastation at the sudden loss of their beloved partner/s. Other writers drew on their loss of family and friends as their source of both trauma and inspiration.

At a macro level, there was profound grief that our world has once more become seriously unstable. War and disharmony abound. In Australia, the social cohesion facilitated by 50 years of multiculturalism is dissolving. We are also still reckoning with our colonial past.

The theme of the festival, the third curated by Louise Adler, was Words Matter. Unsurprisingly, the speakers’ views differed about the causes and cures for our current woes. Also unsurprisingly, writers ascribed different meanings to the words they use to make sense of it all, and this was particularly evident in the themes I review here - Zionism, antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza, explained that as a Hindu Indian he started out admiring Israel as model of a strong, cohesive nation with a socialist ethos. No more.  

He argued that the “memorialisation of the Holocaust”, which “exploded’ in the 1990s, gave Jews (especially American Jewry) a foundational narrative for the establishment of the State of Israel and a self-serving “cultivated collective memory” for the West.

In his view, this distorted memory of the Holocaust underscores the West’s support for Israel now. Competitive suffering, memory cultures and victimhood narratives instil fear of the future because they are fixated on the past. As I listened to Mishra, the elephant in the room is no longer Holocaust denial, but Holocaust delegitimisation, even ennui.

Mishra said that the world’s centre of gravity has shifted to Asia, including China. Decolonised nations are poised to reshape the world. The dominant ideology of the 21^st century, he contends, is anti-colonialism.

Acknowledgment of the devastating impact of colonialism, has, according to Mishra, ruptured the moral compass of the West - hitherto marked by the defeat of the Nazism and the fall of communism. The avowed mission of anticolonialism is to liberate the world from European dominance by subverting racial (white) privilege. The response to Gaza is this project’s defining moment, he argued.

Sir Simon Schama delivered the Festival’s Oration on the topic of antisemitism. Rejecting the anti-Zionist settler-colonialist critique of Israel, he argued that Zionism is the consequence, not the cause, of antisemitism.

Israel became a nation state not for colonial aggrandisement. It is wrong to confuse desperation with colonialism. The State of Israel provided a safe haven not just for the refugees from Europe, but also the 850,000 Jews dispossessed by the Jewish Nakba- the expulsion of Jews from the Arab countries where they had lived for centuries.

Schama rejected the projection of righteous imperial guilt on to Israel. Representing Zionist Jews as the embodiment of colonialism is not just wrong, but actually, a little weird (and I would add, often antisemitic).

Criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic. It is also possible to be a Zionist and criticise Israel (as the millions of Israelis who demonstrated against Netanyahu for months before October 7, and after).

Schama himself professes to being a minimalist Zionist, believing in the need for, and legitimacy of, a Jewish state and its right to exist. He warned against “maximalists”: any state based on messianic revelation is antithetical to tolerance and co-existence. Equally, the creation of an Islamic state would be more than a disaster.

The 2008 Oslo peace plan, proposed by Likud Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, offered a two-state solution with Jerusalem as a shared capital. Its rejection by the Palestinian leadership was, according to Schama, a tragic watershed. As many writers across various sessions lamented, history is littered with missed opportunities. The historical retroscope can be heart-breaking.  

Schama maintained there is much to be learned from the Jewish experience. Jews are experts on both the troubles of, as well beacons for, the joys and contributions of migration.

When Donald Trump repurposes antisemitic tropes to demonise immigrants, Jews are sick with recognition, Schama said. As the world faces the prospect of a massive transference of populations through climate change, the history of Jewish mobility and adaptability is instructive. More particularly, Jews have always depended upon, and championed, equality as essential to their survival.

Unfortunately, Shama wryly observed, “critical, liberal Zionists are now an endangered species”.

In a session on “Islamophobia – what’s the problem?” Waleed Aly (a prominent Muslim journalist, academic and commentator) and his partner, Susan Carland (a writer, academic, and TV presenter who is a specialist in Islam) probed the increase in Islamophobic incidents in Australia since the war in Gaza. The goodwill toward Muslims after the Christchurch shootings has all but disappeared. Their sense is that the environment for Muslims now feels “heavy”.

In public settings, Muslims are subjected to hatred and violence. Muslim women are disproportionally targeted - spitting has become a favoured tactic. Mosques and Islamic schools are vandalised but Muslims have to press to have their rights protected, and many have given up reporting, Aly and Carland asserted.

More broadly, they conceded that Islamophobia is hard to define. Aly preferred the term, “anti-Muslim prejudice”. It’s always a matter of motive, tone and nuance. (Jews well know the problem of definition.)

They argued that Islamophobia is unique because it alone includes what they identified as all four of the bases of discrimination - race, sectarianism, migration and a public affairs context.

I would add a fifth – “perceived power”. There are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world who constitute 25% of the world’s population. Muslims live in some of the poorest countries in the world but also in some of the richest. This prejudice relates not just to sheer numbers (the fear of “the Asian hordes” underscored Australia’s discriminatory White Australia Policy) but the claim that wealthy Muslims in the northern hemisphere are pulling the strings behind politicians and business.

In a multicultural society, tackling prejudice and discrimination requires united action - there should be no competition in ensuring that the inalienable dignity of each person and community is respected and protected, they concluded.

Although grief stalked the festival, there was no session explicitly addressing what many (for different reasons) have been feeling over the last 18 months or more – collective grief.

For progressives across the world, election results, most notably in the USA, are undoing all the hard-won gains of the last half century. In Australia, the “No” vote for giving a voice to Australia’s First Peoples was a bitter blow to many. A week later there was the brutal attack on Israel led by Hamas. Israel’s response resulted in a bloody war in Gaza. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had already revealed, borders are no longer settled. Violence and war have re-emerged as the way to stake territorial claims.

We are overwhelmed by all the dissent which invades the safety of our homes and communities. American commentator Peter Beinart, an observant Jew, begins his book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza, with a Letter to Friends who now shun him. The peace of the family Shabbat table, he writes, has been shattered by profound disagreements about Gaza and Israel.

Beinart’s family came from South Africa and his perspective is informed by that experience, including support for the anti-Israel BDS campaign. He maintains that Israel has a right to exist but its political system does not.

The festival’s focus on the craft of writing alerted me to the dangers of rhetorical strategies based on comparison. Metaphor and simile might be the stock in trade of poetry and lyrical fiction, but casual comparisons distort and confound sophisticated analysis of policy and politics. Israel is not South Africa and Israelis are not Nazis.

There is, though, no doubting the deep social fractures caused by the war in Gaza. It has set some parents against their children, neighbours against neighbours, students against their teachers and caused rifts between Israel and sections of its diaspora. Several writers sought to account for the mass protests over Gaza as a problem of social media, youth culture, and the failures of our education system.

Although the political philosopher Hannah Arendt rejected the idea of “collective grief”, no explanation of the mass protests and regular displays of public mourning across the world is complete without that idea. Israelis, Palestinians, and young people coping with genuine existential angst about their future of the planet, regularly gather in large numbers to protest certainly, but also to mourn together. 

I will end this review with the joke Simon Schama told at the beginning of his oration.

What’s the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?

The pessimist opines, “things can’t get any worse”.

The optimist retorts, “oh yes they can!”

Let’s hope not.