Sydney council pulls book critical of Israel from library shelves

A Sydney council has pulled a book scrutinising Israel’s actions in Gaza from its library shelves pending a “review”.

Waverley Council confirmed How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, by US writer Adam Johnson, had been withdrawn from Waverley Library. The library serves Bondi and surrounding suburbs in Sydney’s east, home to one of Australia’s largest Jewish communities and close to the site of the December 2025 massacre.

“Like most public libraries, Waverley Council outsources its book curation, ordering and purchasing, meaning book selection is not undertaken by council officers,” a council spokesperson said on Tuesday. “The book has been removed from library shelves for review, and council will further consider processes to ensure closer oversight of book selection.”

The move follows a report by Jewish news service JWire last week that a survivor of the Bondi Beach massacre had posted on Facebook that she was distressed to see the book displayed on the new-release “What’s Hot” shelf of Waverley Library.

The council received multiple complaints about the book, which remains listed in the library’s catalogue and is still available to reserve.

The book was published in April by Pluto Press, a long-established British publisher that describes itself as a “radical political publishing house”. The book argues that Israel’s war in Gaza could not have continued without the “active, sustained complicity” of US media, and that major news outlets “systematically sanitised Israel’s war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanised the Palestinian people”. Pluto Press and Johnson have been contacted for comment.

“They seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide’,” Johnson was quoted in The Guardian as saying.

“But ‘genocide’ is not my word, or my finding. The fact of genocide in Gaza is the overwhelming consensus of the human rights world, and it is a wholly mainstream opinion among those tasked with studying and determining such matters.

“That it makes some people upset is unfortunate, but reality is often upsetting. This particular reality is especially upsetting … to the parents of the over 20,000 children killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023. Do Sydney officials plan on removing pro-Israel books from their libraries because it potentially upsets these community members?”

Waverley Council declined to answer questions about how many complaints it had received, its process for handling them, the criteria for removing books from its collection, when the review would be completed or whether its findings would be made public. Mayor Will Nemesh has been contacted for comment.

The removal comes two months after the NSW parliament amended the Library Act to protect libraries’ freedom to collect material, with Arts Minister John Graham saying the changes would guard against a US-style wave of book bans and culture wars.

There have been more than 300 attempts to exclude more than 180 titles from library shelves around Australia since 2023, according to reports to the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA).

In 2024, Cumberland City Council in Sydney’s west sparked national controversy by banning a children’s book about same-sex parents from its libraries – a decision councillors later overturned after protests and a fiery four-hour meeting.

“Selection and availability of items in a collection is made by library staff with professional expertise and experience and is not based on personal, cultural, political, moral, philosophical and/or religious views,” ALIA chief executive Cathie Warburton said.

While public libraries have collection development policies governing what they stock, some – as appears the case with Waverley Council – outsource selection and purchasing of books to specialist suppliers that deal directly with publishers.

Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, welcomed the book’s removal, saying it had “no place on the shelves of this library”.

“A book of this sort has no place on the shelves of a library, especially one within minutes of where Australians were slaughtered in large part due to the dehumanisation of Jews precisely through this sort of libel,” Ryvchin said. “I commend the individual who spotted the book, herself a survivor of the massacre, and acted to have it removed.”

The City of Sydney, Northern Beaches, City of Parramatta and Sutherland Shire are among the library networks that have Johnson’s book available to borrow.

Waverley Greens councillor Ludovico Fabiano said the feelings of people distressed by the book needed to be taken into account, but defended the principle of allowing readers to make their own choice.

“We live in a free society where we should be able to express ourselves, and sometimes that is uncomfortable,” Fabiano said.

“I feel terrible for the person suffering at the moment – we all are suffering. But should it have been taken off the shelves or not? I’ll leave it up to the officers to work out. From a personal perspective, for me, it’s just another book that you find on the shelf, and you get the choice whether you want to read it or not.”

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