Filipino trauma journalist Patricia Evangelista spoke out against the attacks on journalists and media practitioners in Palestine at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest international trade fair for books, on Friday, October 17. Evangelista delivered her speech amid calls for Filipino writers and publishing institutions to boycott the fair for its support of Israel, which, for two consecutive years now, has carried out strikes and aid blockades on the Gaza Strip.
Sharing a video taken by filmmaker Alyx Ayn Arumpac at the book fair, Evangelista said she was supposed to read an excerpt from her memoir Some People Need Killing at a forum entitled “Language is a Human Right,” which was organized by the United Nations Publications and the Frankfurt Book Fair. Instead, she said, “We are told that the Frankfurt Book Fair for 500 years has ‘committed to freedom of speech and freedom to publish.’ Today, we speak politely of language as a human right, when that right for two years has been defended in blood in Palestine by journalists who woke to drones and slept to bombs.”
She went on to read from the work of journalists Ahmed Jalal, Shrouq Al Aila, and Anas Al-Sharif, who was killed by an Israeli air strike in August after receiving multiple threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The excerpts detailed their personal experiences covering the Palestinian genocide.
Evangelista also said that she had spoken to a German man earlier in the year, who told her that it was “funny that a country so far away feels so strongly about what is happening in Gaza.”
The journalist closed her speech, saying, “To kill a journalist is a war crime. That crime is not bound by any national border. Any person, any institution, any book fair, that purports to champion free speech and the freedom to publish should condemn the killing of those who would’ve told the story. The dead do not publish. The dead do not speak. For us to say we defend the freedom to speak, we defend the people who would’ve told the story. Dead journalists tell no stories.”
In October 2023, Frankfurt Book Fair director Juergen Boos released a statement that said “Frankfurter Buchmesse [Book Fair] stands with complete solidarity on the side of Israel” in response to Palestinian militant group Hamas’ attacks on Israel. Later that month, book fair organizers postponed the awarding ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s novel A Minor Detail, which centers on the rape of a Bedouin-Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers. In 2024, they awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to American journalist Anne Applebaum, who denied the IDF’s killing of civilians in Gaza.