In late October 2023, Massachusetts-based independent publisher Interlink Publishing, one of the few Palestinian-owned publishers in the United States, launched a major promotion of its Palestinian catalogue on Amazon Ads.
The aim, Harrison Williams , Interlink's Production and Design Director, explained, was to counter "the one-sided narrative that portrays Palestinians in such a dehumanising manner."
The campaign included 43 titles, backed by an unusually large ad spend for the small publisher.
But the campaign quickly ran into obstacles.
Amazon Ads rejected roughly half of the titles, preventing books such as Wrestling with Zionism: Jewish Voices of Dissent , We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon , The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist , Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea , and Night in Gaza from appearing in sponsored placements or keyword searches.
In its messaging to Interlink, Amazon cited its ad policy requirements as the reason for the denials.
"When you witness such violence being unleashed on a people who cannot escape it, there is a desperation to want to enact change with the limited power that you do have," Williams told The New Arab. "It's heartbreaking when the use of that power is denied by a corporate policy."
Interlink's experience was far from unique, reflecting a broader pattern confronting independent publishers.
While Amazon has not removed these books from its marketplace, its Amazon Ads moderation significantly limits their discoverability. For publishers, this means that titles addressing Palestinian perspectives struggle to reach readers, limiting their discoverability on platforms dominated by algorithms and ad-driven visibility.
London-based independent publisher of Middle Eastern and North African literature, Saqi Books , also filed several appeals after three of its book titles were moderated by Amazon Ads on 10 May 2024. The books included A River Dies of Thirst , The Arabs and the Holocaust , and After Zionism . Amazon Ads told Saqi Books that their moderation came from those titles being flagged as content related to current events: "The following ads are non-compliant to creative acceptance policies. Specifically, for the following reason: Your ad contains content or book(s) temporarily restricted from advertising due to current events. Your campaigns can be reactivated when these restrictions are lifted."
Brooklyn-based publisher Street Noise Books faced a similar restriction when promoting Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine . Meanwhile, Chicago-based Haymarket Books had all but one of their titles containing the word "Palestine" blocked when they tried to run an ad bundle focused on Palestinian books, suggesting that Amazon Ads scrutinises any title referencing Palestine more closely.
Amazon Ads policies restrict some advertisements related to political content, current events, or controversial social issues.
In practice, this means that books dealing with what it believes are contentious contemporary issues — including Palestine and Gaza — are often barred from the very promotional tools that help other titles find their audience.
For independent publishers already operating on thin margins and limited visibility, this creates an added barrier. Without the visibility that sponsored ads provide, titles with urgent, necessary perspectives risk being buried beneath the algorithmic weight of bestsellers and mainstream categories.
What remains on Amazon's marketplace may still be available for purchase, but the pathways that lead readers to those titles — search discovery, keyword targeting and sponsored placements — are quietly closed off.
What further ails publishers is that no specific timeline is given for when a book that addresses a highly debated topic would be cleared. The 'Palestine' problem Publishers also noticed that the application of the "current events" moderation appears to disproportionately affect Palestinian titles.
Saqi noted in their correspondence that they have also published several books on Afghanistan, Sudan, and other conflict zones and that those titles passed through Amazon Ads' moderation system without being flagged.
Likewise, Interlink's books on Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan received no moderation. Amazon's citing of "current events" for its moderation of these titles suggests it would like to remain above the fray of a fraught situation in Gaza, but Amazon has faced criticism over its involvement in Project Nimbus , a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, as well as internal protests by employees opposing the company's work with Israeli institutions.
But decoupling from Amazon may not be a great solution for independent publishers. "There's not really any space in a market, an independent publishing house, particularly, to not deal with Amazon," said Saqi Publishing Director Elizabeth Briggs . Reflecting on Amazon's dominance in the book market, Briggs added, "A vast number of readers buy their books on Amazon. This is particularly true in an eBook. If we withdrew our books from Amazon in the UK and US, the losses would be significant."
According to a 2020 report by the House Judiciary Committee, Amazon controls roughly half of online print book sales and around 80 percent of the e-book market.
Amazon Ads allows self-publishers, independent publishers, and major publishers to leverage this market dominance to increase the discoverability of their books. By bidding on keywords and targeted products, sellers on Amazon Ads can get their products sponsored, which comprises one-third of a search engine results page on Amazon.
Since these ads appear at the top, they take 50-60 percent of the above-the-fold space on the desktop. For publishers of Palestinian literature, being denied on Amazon Ads removes a powerful tool that allows these books to reach their audience.
As global search interest in Israel's war in Gaza surged in 2023, Interlink was attuned to this when it launched its ad campaign. They bid on terms such as "1948," "Gaza," "Gaza Strip," "Gaza conflict," "Nakba," and "Palestine." But Amazon Ads' denial of their books meant those titles could not take advantage of those search terms. Buried by algorithms Amazon's algorithm remains opaque to its users, but it prioritises reviews and buys.
Without the boosts from Amazon Ads, independent publishers risk having their Palestinian titles languish on Amazon. "Discovered books will exponentially flourish, while those that are not obvious remain obscure," Briggs added. In November 2025, a prominent independent publisher released a collection of Palestinian fiction on Amazon without using Amazon Ads.
Despite receiving positive reviews and gaining strong traction on social media, the book — which included the word "Palestine" in its title — sold only two copies. The publisher suspects the title may have been quietly suppressed by Amazon's algorithms.
Two other Palestinian books from the same publisher, neither of which included the word "Palestine" in their titles, performed markedly better.
When Palestinian titles cannot use targeted advertising, they lose access to one of the platform's main mechanisms for visibility.
Without sponsored placement, these books cannot appear alongside bestsellers or widely recognised works in the literary canon, nor can they easily surface alongside the small number of pro-Palestinian titles that Amazon Ads allows to be promoted.
In addition, publishers have no control over which titles appear as sponsored ads on the pages of their books. Selective visibility In 2024, author Nathan Thrall noticed something unusual on the Amazon page for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama , which follows a Palestinian father's search for his son after a bus crash outside Jerusalem.
"On my own page for my book, I would see ads for very political pro-Israel books," Thrall told The New Arab. "I thought, how is it possible that these ads are running?"
Among the titles he saw was My Brother's Keeper?: The Complicated Relationship between American Jews and Israel by Guy Chet and Guy Golan, a book examining the relationship between American and Israeli Jews, as well as the intersection between evangelical Christianity and Israel.
Yet Thrall's own book cannot run sponsored ads on Amazon.
Meanwhile, advertisements for pro-Israel titles continue to appear on its page, including I srael Is Just the Beginning: How Israel's Fight Against Radical Islam and Progressivism Protects the Identity and Liberty of the Civilized World , by former Likud Knesset member Moshe Feiglin, and The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz, described as "an ardent defence of Israel's rights, supported by indisputable evidence."
For critics, the disparity raises difficult questions about how Amazon Ads moderation is applied — and whether books centred on Palestinian experiences are less likely to receive the promotional visibility afforded to other political titles.
For independent publishers, the issue is not simply about advertising policy but about visibility in a marketplace increasingly shaped by algorithms and sponsored placement.
When Palestinian titles cannot access the same promotional tools as other books, their stories risk being pushed to the margins of the world's largest bookseller, and for publishers trying to amplify Palestinian voices, the challenge is not just getting their books printed — it is ensuring they can be seen.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment by publication time. Kori Davis is a writer from Texas, currently based in New York City