Selling Books Is Now a Crime in Jerusalem

Candy cane-striped tape marks an “X” across an empty bookcase in Jerusalem’s Gateway Café and Bookstore. Once lined with books on Palestine, the shelves are now bare except for stickers decrying censorship and applauding free speech.

On September 3, 2025, Israeli police raided the shop, located next to the Old City’s New Gate in Jerusalem’s Christian Quarter, confiscated books alleging they contained “incitement content,” and arrested the owner, Anton Sabella, on suspicion of “disturbing the peace.”1 Sabella was taken to al-Qishleh police station and released with a 15-day ban from his business.2 He has since returned to the cafe and cleared the bookshelves. Sabella declined to speak with Jerusalem Story about what happened, because he is facing continued harassment from the police and the Jerusalem Municipality.

Following the raid and Sabella’s detention, many organizations and individuals expressed messages of solidarity on social media, including East Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop, which was also raided by Israeli police twice in 2025.

On February 9, 2025, Israeli police raided two of the three bookstores’ branches—confiscating 300 books—and arrested co-owner Mahmoud Muna and his assistant, Ahmad Muna, on charges of incitement.3 The Munas were charged with “disturbing the public order” and banned from the bookstore for 20 days. Police raided the shop again, a month later, on March 11, and arrested co-owner Imad Muna, after an individual called the police reporting that the bookshop was selling “books containing inciting content.”4

Palestinian cultural institutions have been under attack since October 7, 2023. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Israel has damaged 110 historical and cultural sites in Gaza throughout its war on the besieged enclave.5 In Jerusalem, authorities shuttered the Arabic bookshop Maktabat al-Quds in the Old City a week before the first police raid on the Educational Bookshop, and police also raided Yabous Cultural Centre in August 2024 and shut down the screening of the first film in the series Gaza’s Untold Stories from Ground Zero, a project of 22 short films shot on the ground during Israel’s ongoing genocide against Gaza.

“I wouldn’t take this as just a matter of censorship,” Xavier Abu Eid, author of Rooted in Palestine, a book displayed in both the Educational Bookshop and the Gateway Café, told Jerusalem Story.6 “This is part of an overall plan to make living conditions for Palestinians impossible.”

“It goes way beyond an issue of freedom of expression, because what we see in Israel is that, for example, now calling for a genocide against the Palestinian people can actually get you elected and become a minister. But if you’re a Palestinian citizen of Israel or a Palestinian Jerusalemite and you call for freedom for Palestine, you could end up being arrested,” Abu Eid added.

Abu Eid explained that the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition, made up of extremist, settler politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, has saturated Israeli society so deeply that any remaining Israeli sympathy for the Palestinian people has all but evaporated. Recent public opinion polls support this observation, with 82 percent of Israelis supporting expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and 47 percent supporting killing all Palestinians in Gaza.7

Not only has the Israeli government been vehemently opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, for instance, but that sentiment is now the overwhelming majority within the Israeli public. According to an Israeli-conducted survey published in April 2025, 81 percent of Israelis are against a Palestinian state.8

“Therefore, I think regular Israeli customers would love to go to the Gateway to have an Arab serving them coffee or a glass of wine and say that there’s coexistence,” Abu Eid said. “But they don’t like this Arab to have a book there that says the word Palestine.”