A Library Book, a Survivor's Complaint, and a Law Designed to Stop Exactly This

Waverley council has pulled the book How to Sell a Genocide from its Bondi Junction library after a survivor of the December antisemitic attack at Bondi beach — in which 15 people were killed — complained about finding it on the library's "new release / hot item" shelf.

According to the Jewish news outlet JWire, the survivor wrote on Facebook that the display was distressing for survivors and bereaved families. A Waverley council spokesperson said the book had been removed for review and that the council would consider processes for closer oversight of book selection (The Guardian).

Here's the catch: Waverley council doesn't actually curate its own collection. Book selection, ordering and purchasing are outsourced, so no council officer individually chose the title. That makes the council's talk of "closer oversight" a fairly significant shift in how it proposes to manage a function it currently contracts out.

The book, by media analyst Adam Johnson, critiques what it claims is the US media's "complicity in the destruction of Gaza." Johnson has an event planned at The New School in which he discusses the book with Natasha Lennard of the Center for Publishing and Creative Justice (The New School).

Johnson criticised the removal. He said calling Israel's actions in Gaza a genocide was not "a fringe or radical position" and that the fact of genocide in Gaza is "the overwhelming consensus of the human rights world." He stated that over 20,000 children had been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023 (The Guardian).

The major Jewish communal bodies have stayed out of it. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies both declined to comment on the removal.

Not everyone on the other side of the debate is cheering the council's move either. Bart Shteinman, an executive member of the progressive Jewish Council of Australia, called the decision to remove the book for review "deeply alarming." He said that if the council permanently removes the book, mayor Will Nemesh and special minister of state John Graham must explain how the decision is not in breach of the law.

That legal reference is not abstract. Earlier this year the NSW government passed legislation amending the state's Library Act — the law that governs how public libraries operate — to better protect institutions from campaigns to ban books. The amendments were designed precisely for this kind of situation: a complaint, a removal, and a question about whether a council is responding to community concern or capitulating to a pressure campaign. The council says the book is under review, not permanently withdrawn. But the distinction between a temporary removal for review and a de facto ban is where the legal and political argument will be fought.

Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, said it was a library's duty to provide its community access to a broad range of published works, including those that may challenge or discomfort (The Guardian).

The broader context here is that this is not a straightforward culture-war binary. The complaint came from a survivor of a mass-casualty antisemitic attack, not an organised advocacy group. The book's subject matter is a live, bitterly contested geopolitical issue. And the institution caught in the middle is a public library that does not even select its own stock, now being asked to account for a title it acquired through an outsourced process, under a legal framework that was strengthened specifically to prevent exactly this kind of removal.

If Waverley returns the book to the shelves, it will antagonise those who found the display distressing. If it does not, it faces a credible legal challenge under the amended Library Act and the charge of censorship from across the political spectrum, including from within the Jewish community itself. The council has, in effect, bought itself time with the word "review." How long that holds depends on what process it devises, and whether that process can withstand scrutiny under the legislation the NSW parliament passed to stop councils doing what Waverley has just done.