They came for the books as though they were weapons. Stormed the bookstores as though they were arms factories. Confiscated the pages as though the ink on paper could be detonated.
But, that is the mistake every occupier makes.
Stories do not die when you burn them. They slip through the cracks, hide between margins, and smuggle themselves across borders. They whisper their way into history, into memory, into the hands of the next generation.
When Israeli forces raided Palestinian bookstores in Jerusalem earlier this month, tearing books from shelves and arresting their owners, they were not just targeting words. They were trying to erase a people. To erase a people, you do not need to bomb their homes or massacre their families. You need only erase their stories.
Colonial powers have always understood this.
The Spanish burned Indigenous codices to erase the history of the Americas before rewriting it in their own language. The British criminalised Irish literature in an attempt to sever a nation from its own voice. The Nazis piled books into flames, terrified that ideas could dismantle their regime. Now, in 2025, Israel raids Palestinian bookstores in Jerusalem, confiscating literature as though a poem is more dangerous than a gun.
To them, it is.
I know this war intimately.
I carry a Palestinian hawiyah, an ID card that Israel would rather not exist. A document that is, in itself, an act of defiance. In claiming this little piece of paper that Baba got me when I was younger, we chose to recognise our Palestinian-ness, despite people’s efforts to talk us out of it. A simple document trumped my Australian identity. From that very day, I could no longer travel to the other parts of Palestine; to my own home. A single bureaucratic decision turned me into an exile.
Isn’t that what this has always been about?
Erasing the proof. The maps. The names. The land deeds. The archives. The books.
What happens when a nation’s history is confiscated from the shelves? When their poetry is no longer printed? When their literature disappears? If the story is not written, does the world assume it never happened?
This is how they burn it all down—not just by setting books on fire, but by arresting those who bring us the truth, by rewriting history to cast themselves as the victim, by fabricating a story that absolves them of their crimes.
Bassem Khandakji knows this better than anyone. He, too, was meant to be erased. A Palestinian writer, who is locked away in an Israeli colonial settler prison, stripped of his freedom, buried behind walls designed to suffocate voices like his. But they still failed.
From his cell, he wrote a novel, A Mask the Colour of the Sky. A book so powerful it escaped his prison before he did. It won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, an honour that should have meant a triumphant book launch, a literary tour, a moment of celebration. Instead, he remained in his cell. Another nameless prisoner to the world. Another body behind bars.
This is how they try to control the narrative. They arrest the authors and rewrite their endings.
What they do not understand is that stories are not confined by borders, by prison walls, or by military occupation. They slip through cracks. They cross checkpoints. They outlive regimes.
That is why they fear them.
If literature was not dangerous, why have all colonial empires sought to control it?
Why does Israel flood the world with propaganda films, fabricating its own mythologies, while banning Palestinian authors from publishing their works? Why do they erase Palestinian villages from maps, forcing an entire generation to learn geography through exile? Why do they criminalise books, poems, even simple phrases?
Because storytelling builds humanity, and humanity dismantles oppression.
Literature forces you to step into another’s shoes. To see through their eyes, to grieve their grief, to love what they love. That is why the best stories outlive their time periods. They become trans-temporal, resisting the confines of history because they are no longer bound to the moment they were written in.
As a child of the diaspora and a Palestinian writer, I have always yearned to make a difference. Growing up, I had little access to books about kids like me, Palestinians with my experiences. This absence fueled my desire to create a literary world that resonated with the stories of many.
Backtrack to Year 12, when I was deciding on the form of my English Extension 2 major work, I struggled. I wanted to write non-fiction: an essay dissecting the erasure of Palestinian identity, the distortion of history, the way maps had been rewritten to scrub us from existence. I wanted to fill the pages with facts, with evidence, with unshakable proof that could leave no room for doubt.
But something felt wrong. It wasn’t enough. Facts can be ignored. Statistics can be manipulated. Data can be dismissed.
But stories? Stories cling to people. They haunt them. They follow them home.
A character you cannot look away from. A life that, for just a moment, feels indistinguishable from your own.
That is what storytelling does: it forces you to step inside a world you would have otherwise never entered. It makes oppression personal. It gives the numbers names, the statistics faces, the history a heartbeat.
And so, instead of a thesis, I wrote a short story. A world where a Palestinian girl held onto the last remnants of her family through the books they left behind. A story about memory, about grief, about refusing to be erased. Because fiction is never just fiction: it is a testament, a reclamation, a form of resistance that lingers long after the last word is read.
That is why Israel fears our literature. It is never “just a book.” It is a link between past and present, homeland and exile, the living and the martyred.
And for Palestinians (especially those in the diaspora), stories are how we find each other.
We are scattered across continents, our land fragmented beneath checkpoints, our history deliberately distorted. But, when we read the same books, recite the same poems, tell the same stories, we stitch ourselves back together. My tayta’s lullabies, my Baba’s stories of Jaffa, my own writing… they all belong to the same narrative. Our narrative is one that Israel has spent decades trying to erase.
When a Palestinian child in Chile picks up Men in the Sun, they are connected to a Palestinian elder in a Lebanese refugee camp who read it decades before them. When someone in Australia reads Returning to Haifa, they unknowingly continue the legacy of someone in Gaza who had to smuggle that same book across a border. When a reader in the United States immerses themselves in Samah Sabawi’s Cactus Pear For My Beloved, they are sharing in the resilience of a family from Gaza. When a European enthusiast delves into Sonia Nimr’s Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, they traverse the rich landscapes of Palestinian folklore and history.
No matter how much land they take from us, they cannot take this.
They can rewrite the maps but not erase the stories that came before them.
They can desecrate the land, but they cannot undo the generations who built it.
They can ban the books, but they will never silence those who write them.
Storytelling is how we keep our Asl.
أصل
Our origins. Our roots. The thing they will never have.
As Mahmoud Darwish once wrote:
“Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.”
كل قصيدة جميلة هي فعل مقاومة.
Kullu qaseedatin jameelatin hiya fi’l muqawama.
If words were powerless, they would not be banned. If poetry did not threaten power, it would not be criminalised.
That is why they burn them.
That is why they will always fail.
