Israel is an “apartheid” state, a “colonialist” enterprise guilty of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” against the Palestinian people.
If you wanted to be assailed by a barrage of such polemics — left damningly unchallenged and uncorrected — all you needed do last Friday was turn up at Carriageworks, venue for much of this year’s Sydney Writers Festival, and attend a session obscurely titled Somewhere in the Middle: Israel and Palestine.
The panel, declared the promotional material, would “consider whether, for the first time in decades, a new path to peace can be forged in the Israel-Palestine conflict”.
This seemingly laudable objective never saw the light of day — indeed, could never see the light of day given the glaringly stacked panel the SWF put together. In no particular order there was John Lyons, a former Sydney Morning Herald editor and present head of investigative and in-depth journalism at the ABC, who spent six years in Israel as The Australian’s correspondent.
Read the article by Vic Alhadeff in The Australian.