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How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, by US writer Adam Johnson, had been withdrawn from Waverley Library.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.