A string of controversies are engulfing Melbourne Writers’ Festival, the Perth Festival’s Writers’ Weekend, the Sydney Opera House’s All About Women and Adelaide Writers Week. There’s a high-profile resignation, calls to cancel speakers and allegations of the spread of “historically untrue” facts and of normalising violence.

All, in one way or another, have been generated by divisions over the war in Gaza.

Writers’ festivals are in a fraught position. They navigate the frontier between social media’s echo chambers of outrage and the traditional public square’s conventions, where restraint, reason and tolerance in the face of opposing views are the basis for civilised debate.

How is it all playing out, and what are the consequences for the public exchange of ideas?

At Melbourne Writers Festival, the deputy chair of the board, Dr Leslie Reti, has resigned over a poetry session that will involve Aboriginal and Palestinian poets reading their work.

The session is guest-curated by Koori-Lebanese writer Mykaela Saunders. It is based on the proposition Aboriginal and Palestinian people have a shared experience of having been colonised, becoming victims of atrocities by the colonising power.

Melbourne Writers Festival artistic director Michaela McGuire has confirmed the dispute is centred on a line of program copy that reads:

Aboriginal and Palestinian solidarity has a long history, a relationship that is more vital than ever in the movement to resist colonialism and speak out against atrocities.

This is a historically contentious proposition. Dr Reti, a retired Jewish clinician, said he respected McGuire’s curatorial independence, but described the material in the draft program as “historically untrue and deeply offensive”.

Prominent Aboriginal scholar Professor Marcia Langton, of the University of Melbourne, has also rejected proposed similarity between the experience of Aboriginal and Palestinian people, saying, “there is very little comparable in our respective situations, other than our humanity”.

Saunders was one of 132 Indigenous activists, artists and intellectuals who signed a petition released on October 27 last year that claimed: “The past two weeks of horrific violence in Gaza resulted from 75 years of Israeli settler colonial dispossession”.

McGuire has defended her decision not to change the copy for Saunders’ event, titled Let it Bring Hope, saying “I completely support the right to self-determined programming”.

She told ABC Radio on Monday: “This entire event is about........

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