The Palestinian writer Atef Abu Saif could hardly contain his indignation. The Israeli military has destroyed not just buildings, but an entire culture, he told DW. He wants to use the medium of writing to save what can still be saved. But what can be saved in a war-torn wasteland? Only memories remain, says the author.<\/p>\n
Saif is one of the most famous Palestinian writers, and his reputation owes in part to the fact that he was the Palestinian Authority’s culture minister and spokesman for the Fatah party in Ramallah from 2019 to 2024. He was born in Jabalia, a 1948 refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. Due to his political office, he later moved to the West Bank with his family.<\/p>\n
On July 7, 2023, the day Hamas militants launched their armed invasion of Israel, kidnapping hundreds and killing over a thousand civilians, Saif visited the Gaza Strip with his son. Unlike previous wars, at the outbreak of this latest conflict, he was in fear for his youngest son’s life and his own. After almost three months of suffering and destruction, including the loss of family members killed and injured in the attacks, he finally managed to leave the Gaza Strip with his son.<\/p>\n
Last year he published a book about his experiences called Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide. The work documents the horrors of the Gaza war, and writing the book also helped him regain his self-confidence. Since his departure from the Gaza Strip, the author has frequently changed locations. \u201cI\u2019m not alive,\u201d he says. \u201cI exist.\u201d However, as a writer, he feels obliged to portray the events as they happened.<\/p>\n
The German journalist and author Sarah Levy lives near Tel Aviv. She sees it as her duty to continue writing and protesting against a government that she believes aims to \u201cmake the country less democratic.\u201d In Frankfurt, Levy presented her new book, entitled "No Other Land \u2014 Notes from Israel", which describes how the country has changed under Prime Minister Netanyahu since October 7, 2023.<\/p>\n
Levy, who is Jewish, emigrated from Germany to Israel in 2019, is married to an Israeli and has a three-year-old son who has spent half his life in the war. The nightly bombings regularly woke him up from his sleep. At the same time, Sarah Levy always compares her family’s situation with what the people of Gaza are going through – and refuses to close her eyes to the suffering and death.<\/p>\n
Mahmoud Muna was also born in the year his father opened the \u201cEducational Bookshop\u201d in East Jerusalem, which now includes two other shops. Mahmoud and his family run it. The bookstores specialize in Palestinian culture and history, Jerusalem, and the Middle East conflict. Sometimes the books also tell uncomfortable truths. Muna wants people to question the narrative, learn about history, and be inspired to imagine a different future.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere there are books there is a peaceful place,\u201d his father always said. "[Our bookshops are] one of the places where people can still meet,\u201d he says. Muna is known as the \u201cBooksellers of Jerusalem,\u201d it caused an international stir when Israeli police raided two of its bookstores and arrested him and his nephew in February 2025.<\/p>\n
Sigalit Gelfand heads the publicly funded \u201cIsraeli Institute of Hebrew Literature,\u201d which has aimed to promote the translation of works by Israeli authors into other languages \u200b\u200bsince its founding in 1962. It had a stand in one of the book fair’s international exhibition halls and also organized events with Israeli authors. This closed a gap because in 2025 not a single publisher from Israel would come to Frankfurt.<\/p>\n
Given the ongoing war in Gaza, there have been calls for publishers to boycott the event due to Germany’s stance towards Israel. In the end, only the Israelis stayed home. The last two years have been terrible, says Gelfand, with the rise of anti-Semitism and the experience of being excluded from cultural events. A colleague’s invitation to a festival was canceled and foreign publishers were very cautious in the negotiations.<\/p>\n
Gelfand is confident that things will get better in the future, even if the release date for some of her books may be postponed. Last month she invited international publishers to Tel Aviv for talks. 25 publishers came, which was seen as a great success by the Israeli media. Now she hopes that the ceasefire will hold and the hatred will end. And that things can somehow go back to normal. So a wish probably shared by everyone \u2013 Palestinians and Israelis alike. However, there may still be a long way to go before it can become a reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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