“It is important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, UN Security Council Meeting, 24.10.23

We do not condone the attacks of October 7^th. As the UN Secretary-General above though, we recognise recent escalating conflict is preceded by decades of Israeli occupation, oppression, and war crimes against Palestine and its people.

The Book Planters was born out of an urge to highlight this reality, and is a form of literary resistance fighting for a free Palestine.

This fight is one challenged by global ignorance alongside deliberate repression and misinformation. Fortunately it has been endorsed by credible figures on both sides of the conflict who seek justice and accountability of Israel’s unremitting brutality. Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian, is one such example. In his seminal work ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, Pappe details the violent reality of Israeli occupation stemming from the inception of the state, highlighting the Zionist agenda that led to the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. Termed ‘The Catastrophe’ or the ‘Nakba’, Pappe writes of our collective amnesia of this:

“And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.”

More than 1.5 million Palestinians today are refugees. Why have we forgotten it has been Zionist aggressions and Israeli nationalism that has forced them so? Renowned Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, of ‘Orientalism’ fame, too spoke out against this nationalism that threatens the very existence of his people in his work ‘The Question of Palestine.’

In her book ‘Minor Detail’, based on real events, author and essayist Adania Shibli recounts the gang rape of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers. This was subsequently shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and won the German LiBeraturpreis for 2023 – but Shibli never received her prize. The award ceremony scheduled for October 2023 at the world’s largest book fair in Frankfurt was cancelled as Israeli writers were given prominence and efforts were made to elevate their more ‘palatable’ works instead. 

Israel has long painted itself in the colours of victimhood, particularly of late, and the world has been encouraged to believe this above all else. If we are able to condemn previous colonial empires, how then can we endorse Israel’s disproportionate ‘right to defend itself’ in the same breath? With a legacy of war crimes unchecked, indiscriminate carpet bombing of Palestinian populations, hospitals, and refugee camps, and now Israeli strikes to civilian populations in neighbouring regions, who is really the victim? As the world watches a Zionist agenda shift from ethnic cleansing to a callous genocide, land and trees are razed, oppressed and dissenting voices are silenced, and their stories lie blank or forgotten.

We will not be complicit.

We will raise these voices. We will share their books with you.

And we hope you will then too plant their words so the truth might finally grow.