Writers’ Week—an annual gathering taking place in the city of Adelaide and considered one of Australia’s most prestigious literary events—has this year been marred by the withdrawal of some prominent participants and sponsors. Provoking these withdrawals, above all, is the participation in the festival of the Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa, who has vocally expressed her support for Russia in its war against Ukraine, and called the leader of the latter country “a depraved Zionist.” Colin Rubenstein comments:

The way organizers of the partly taxpayer-funded Adelaide Writers’ Week have been defending extremist invitees . . . offers a prime example of the way anti-Semitism is excused and even defended in “woke” progressive culture, as long as it is conflated with criticism of Israel—especially if the offender is Palestinian.

Abulhawa, who [was] flown in to participate in three sessions during the event in early March, has form. She keeps a picture above her desk of the Palestinian terrorist Dalal Mughrabi—one of the perpetrators of the infamous 1978 Coastal Road Massacre, which saw the slaughter of 38 Israeli civilians—and has made social-media posts both calling Israelis “worse than Nazis” and asserting that “It’s possible to be Jewish and a Nazi at the same time. It’s called Israel,” while implying all Israelis are legitimate targets for violence.

When pressed in an interview with Radio Adelaide to defend the decision to invite Abulhawa, [the] Writers’ Week director Louise Adler said, “our business is to operate not a safe space, but an open space in which ideas that might be confronting, disturbing, provocative are debated with civility.” However, this isn’t actually true. According to Adler’s own words posted in an open letter on the Writers’ Week home page, this year’s event actually seeks to shut down debate on unspecified issues.

In this year’s festival, at least ten writers listed as Palestinians are on the program—plus the Egyptian-born founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and several other virulent anti-Israel activists. No Jewish Israeli writers were invited, nor, to our knowledge, any author who has defended Israel in his writing or has the expertise to offer attendees anything counter to the Palestinian narrative. It would appear that the Palestinian narrative counts as something “beyond debate” to the organizers.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.