A Letter from ABA and ABFE Regarding Palestine and Our Commitment to Equity

Over the past year and more, dozens of independent bookstores have contacted ABA about harassment, and we hear our members who have shared with us that they have faced harassment and threats for carrying books about Palestine. ABA has offered support, shared resources, offered deescalation seminars, provided crisis communication counseling, and set up a hotline for members challenged for their curation, identity, or political beliefs. This is the work that ABA is empowered to do by our Ends Policies and allowed to do as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association supporting 2,800 independent bookstores with independent views. We cannot make a political statement on behalf of our members, but we can and do support our members in their right to express those views.

Unfortunately, the harassment of bookstores and the attempt to narrow the range of books that can be sold has become one of the biggest challenges for many of our members and for our organization. Book curation is a form of speech, and it must remain free. We condemn any harassment or threat to our members that aims to abridge this freedom.

Censorship of marginalized voices because of their identity is unacceptable. This includes censorship of Black and Brown authors. This includes the censorship of LGBTQIA2S+ authors, emphatically including Trans authors. This includes the censorship of Jewish and Muslim authors. And it includes the censorship of Palestinian authors, Palestinian books, booksellers who support Palestine, and booksellers who merely include Palestinian authors in their inventory.

We thank our members who have spoken up in two consecutive Community Forums. Dialogue with members is essential in keeping us informed of the organization’s evolving needs, even as our mission remains fundamentally the same: to keep independent bookstores in business and as strong as possible.

This is one step towards further transparency that our mission for equity and against censorship includes Palestinian literature. ABA has spoken out when Palestinian booksellers were arrested in East Jerusalem and we’ve come to booksellers’ aid when books by Palestinian authors were targeted in their stores. We’ve supported the inclusion of Palestinian authors and books in our programming and resources like the Indie Next List. ABA is making this statement now because we hear the members who spoke during the Community Forum, and because we have received eight separate calls this past year from bookstores that are being harassed or threatened because they carry Palestinian authors or support Palestinian causes.

This is almost certainly not a full count of harassment incidents booksellers have experienced over the past year. We urge booksellers who are impacted in the future or have been in the past year to contact ABA’s free expression initiative American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE) for support and resources, and we urge booksellers to let us know when harassment and censorship is occurring. With censorship happening on so many fronts, ABA and ABFE can’t know everything that’s happening unless our members help keep us informed.

We want to be clear: our commitments to support stores faced with antisemitic harassment and to support stores faced with threats on the basis of including Palestinian voices are not in conflict. Just as we work behind the scenes to support stores facing harassment for carrying books about Palestine, we also work to support stores facing harassment for carrying books by Jewish authors or facing disturbing attacks featuring Nazi symbols. And we want to make clear that the acts of supporting Palestinian voices, or a bookstore carrying a Palestinian author, are not intrinsically antisemitic acts.

ABA supports free expression and protests, and we condemn all attacks on bookstores. Our only expression limits in ABA’s channels are our Code of Conduct and our policy rejecting hate speech in our institutional channels, policies that exist to ensure a free and open forum for the exchange of ideas and understanding.

We also want to note that some of the attacks on marginalized voices we have witnessed are perpetrated by hate groups attempting to sow division and make everyone less free. That's the prize that we as a community and a democracy need to keep our eyes on — everyone’s freedom.