Book Week, with all its importance and significance in recent decades, is a festive but rather sleepy event.
Consumers move between the stalls, politeness prevails, and authors' autographs on their books are often the highlight and the great thrill that book fairs have to offer.
This week, in the Sarona compound in Tel Aviv, the sleepy and routine nature of the event was broken when the members of the protest, who already knows what it is against, came to the stand of the Sela Meir publishing house, which is characterized by conservative-right-wing books, and demonstrated as usual in a blatant manner against the arrival of MK Simcha Rotman and other writers, using the traditional zamboras, megaphones and cries of shame.
The demonstration was not only against Rothman or another writer, but against the very existence of a shining rock stand there. Ilan Schoenfeld, head of the writers' and poets' protest, wrote that "one must be very careless in order to allow the extreme right-wing publishing house to stand at the fair, to allow these two [Rotman and Avishai Ben Haim, A.P.] to come sign their books in Sarona without thinking that this will provoke a reaction from the protesters."
The Brothers in Arms movement also called the expense, in a statement calling for people to come and demonstrate, as spreading "homophobia, racism, fascism and incitement to the masses."
The demonstrators actually identified a danger in the Sela Meir books themselves and would prefer that they be excluded at best from a specific Sarona compound, and at worst from the public sphere in general.
The realization that books should be seen as dangerous is a disturbing development far beyond the loud interruption and disruption of the book fair itself. The path it marks not only violates freedom of expression, but leads to a reality that ends badly almost by default.
There is not even a need to address the mythological sentence of what will happen "where books are burned." The situation is not that serious, and books have not yet been burned on a city street, but even quiet or noisy confiscation is a serious enough act, and you can see what is happening right now in places where silence is being taken and books are treated as a danger around the world.
As an example, we can take what is happening in Hong Kong, a country where a huge and important book fair is held, one of the largest in Asia: in recent years, with China's takeover of the country, a message has been sent to booksellers, authors and publishers not to write and distribute books with "inappropriate" content. This led to a significant reduction in the diversity of books and self-censorship.
But this is China, and we want to resemble Western countries, such as the United States, where for some time there has been a struggle in which books are censored from the left as well, and laws are passed preventing books from being placed in schools from the right as well.
The result is censorship for the sake of turning a blind eye. In recent weeks, this has reached an absurdity when censorship laws have been used to remove Bibles from Utah schools, something that has happened in Texas before. What begins with labeling a book as a danger will almost inevitably end with a diminution of consciousness, exclusion, an infringement of freedom of expression, and the politics of cultural eye-catching. This is where the democratic and enlightened demonstrators from Sarona lead. And if this does not stop, this is what the future of Israeli literature will look like.
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