Publishers for Palestine condemns the Bologna Book Fair’s silence on Gaza.
Publishers for Palestine, a global solidarity collective of nearly 600 publishers across 50 countries, has condemned the ongoing silence of the world’s largest children’s book fair on the slaughter of children in Gaza.
In a press release issued earlier today, the advocacy coalition took the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF) to task for its failure “to speak out in protest of the horrific ongoing violence against Palestinian children,” and for ignoring calls by Palestinian and Arab publishers to suspend Israel’s participation.
As the statement details:
BCBF’s silence persists as Palestinian children have their educational infrastructure—their books, libraries, schools, teachers, and mentors—targeted and destroyed. It persists as Palestinian children are amputated, injured, starved, displaced, deprived of medical treatment, and traumatized watching their families killed and their communities suffer. It persists as Palestinian children continue to endure relentless fear of death by bombardment due to Israel’s onslaught, supported by the US, Germany, and other states that continue to supply weapons, funding, and diplomatic support for Israel in direct violation of rulings from the world’s top courts.
n addition to contributing to this dehumanization of Palestinian children through its silence, and having hosted complicit Israeli publishers, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair has chosen to welcome a representative of the Israeli PR firm Galili Publishing (aka Galili Communications) as one of its exhibitors. Galili has published Zionist propaganda, including books on the “legacy” and success of the Haganah and the IDF.
At least 15,600 children have been confirmed killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023 (though the actual death toll is thought to be significantly higher). This year’s edition of the BCBF, which came to a close today, arrived just two weeks after Israel committed the largest child massacre in its history, with more than 200 children killed in a single day. Prior to the October 7 attacks, 2023 had already been the deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank.
Earlier this year, Publishers for Palestine called for an industry-wide boycott of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest trade fair for books, for its “repeated failure to address its longstanding ties to German state and corporate partnership in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.”
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Here is today’s press release in full:
April 3, 2025
BOLOGNA—As its 62nd edition closes today, and on the day after International Children’s Book Day, the world’s largest and oldest trade fair in children’s publishing has failed to speak out in protest of the horrific ongoing violence against Palestinian children. The Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF) has remained consistently silent regarding Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, and has ignored calls from Palestinian and Arab publishers to suspend Israel’s participation.
Last Monday, the Gaza Health Ministry released a 1516-page document listing over 50,000 Palestinians confirmed dead, killed by Israel. Among their names are those of over 15,600 children.
According to Save the Children, over the span of just one week starting March 18th, 2025—a date that marks one of the largest massacres of children in history—at least 270 children were killed by Israel. Israel’s definitive breaking of the ceasefire agreement and its renewal of aggressive bombardment and brutal siege conditions this month make it more urgent for institutions to take up the guidelines of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement in both policy and action.
According to estimates based on the UN’s World Population Prospects 2024, the life expectancy of Palestinian children fell by 11.5 years from October to December 2023 alone. Israel has long practiced the illegal kidnapping, imprisonment, and abuse of Palestinian children, and hundreds of Palestinian children continue to be imprisoned in Israeli jails at the time of writing.
The world’s largest children’s book fair claims on its website, that it “always endeavours to reserve space for marginalised voices,” but remains conspicuously silent as thousands of children are brutally murdered by Israel, publicly denouncing Israel’s genocide and acknowledging the horrific violence that Palestinian children have been subjected to. We urge BCBF to take up a BDS resolution that follows PACBI’s guidelines (the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).
BCBF’s silence persists as Palestinian children have their educational infrastructure—their books, libraries, schools, teachers, and mentors—targeted and destroyed. It persists as Palestinian children are amputated, injured, starved, displaced, deprived of medical treatment, and traumatized watching their families killed and their communities suffer. It persists as Palestinian children continue to endure relentless fear of death by bombardment due to Israel’s onslaught, supported by the US, Germany, and other states that continue to supply weapons, funding, and diplomatic support for Israel in direct violation of rulings from the world’s top courts.
In addition to contributing to this dehumanization of Palestinian children through its silence, and having hosted complicit Israeli publishers, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair has chosen to welcome a representative of the Israeli PR firm Galili Publishing (aka Galili Communications) as one of its exhibitors. Galili has published Zionist propaganda, including books on the “legacy” and success of the Haganah and the IDF.
PACBI stipulates that “Israeli cultural institutions, unless proven otherwise, are complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation and denial of basic Palestinian rights, whether through their silence or actual involvement in justifying, whitewashing or otherwise deliberately diverting attention from Israel’s violations of international law and human rights.” The vast majority of Israel’s publishing institutions fail to affirm the inalienable, legally-enshrined rights of the Palestinian people according to international law. The BCBF has invited Israeli publishers that are complicit through their own silence, and, in an escalation of the BCBF’s complicity, has welcomed a Zionist propagandist publisher to its 2025 edition.
This year, the world’s single largest annual publishing event, the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse, or FBM), faces a boycott called for by the international network Publishers for Palestine, and endorsed by the BDS Movement—for its deep and longstanding complicity in Israel’s long occupation, apartheid, and genocide.
Frankfurt’s complicity spans decades, but came to the attention of the mainstream publishing world in 2023 after it shamefully cancelled an award ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli, and openly proclaimed its position of “complete solidarity on the side of Israel.” Two enormous publishing industry players, BCBF and FBM are also partners; FBM is the creator of the“German Collective Stand” at BCBF, and BCBF’s new “Games Business Centre” was “created in collaboration with the Frankfurter Buchmesse.”
The BCBF’s BolognaRagazzi Award with a 2025 special focus on “sustainability” claims to be “in line with the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals,” awarding books for exploring themes like “reduced inequalities,” “life on land,” “peace, justice, and strong institutions,” and “zero hunger”—yet BCBF remains shamefully silent on the blatant violations of children’s rights manifest in those same issues when it comes to Palestinian children.
The City of Bologna has long been a site of protest against the Israeli occupation, and students at the University of Bologna have maintained a sustained divestment campaign against their intransigent administration. The Bologna Children’s Book Fair is of course not ignorant of the genocide. In 2024 it ignored a 2024 industry-based call from Palestinian and Arab publishers, authors, illustrators, and designers, to suspend Israeli publishers, and it similarly ignored a series of events designed by a collective of Italian illustrators to raise awareness of Israel’s genocide and the Fair’s complicity, and to raise funds for UNRWA.
It shouldn’t need to be stated that Palestinian children have the same inalienable right to life, sustenance, housing, healthcare, education, dignity, and a healthy environment as children anywhere, but they are being deprived of all of these rights. The silence of the children’s book industry, including of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, contributes to the ongoing denial of those basic rights.
We celebrate the many children’s literature publishers, authors, illustrators, and book workers who continue to speak out against Israel’s genocide, and continue to raise their voices, bringing their colleagues and peers into their ranks. Despite the many efforts to silence us, our numbers continue to grow.
As an institution that is ostensibly ethically focused on children, books, and education, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair should not escape scrutiny for its resounding silence on crimes that have impacted many generations of Palestinian children. Its silence on Israel’s war crimes, specifically its war on Palestinian children, is unacceptable; the world’s largest children’s book fair must denounce the world’s worst perpetrator of crimes against children; this means that it must denounce the Israeli occupation, apartheid regime, and the genocide of the Palestinian people, and ban the participation of Israeli publishers that are complicit in Israel’s crimes.
