“If I talk to a man or woman my age from Syria or Egypt, I see the difference,” Ms. Azaizeh said. “We were taught differently. We read different books.” And until martial law was lifted in 1966, she said, “Israel decided what to publish in Arabic. They decided what Arabs should read.”

The library she went to as a youngster, she said, “stops in the Soviet Union, because the intellectuals were part of the Communist Party. So you see Dostoyevsky, Lenin and Marx. The whole library is so yellow. There’s nothing new there.”

Ms. Azaizeh said she started the book festival at Fattoush, a cavernous restaurant, bar and performance space in Haifa, in 2017 because she had been bringing books into Israel from Jordan and Egypt herself, but realized that many Arab citizens lacked a way to gain access to important or popular literature, poetry and nonfiction without traveling.

“People don’t feel this, because they’re not used to having good books,” she said. “If you deprive society of something for long enough, they will not feel the loss.”

Israel applies the same ban on importing books from “enemy states” in its occupation of the West Bank, said Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer and deputy director-general at Adalah, the legal center for Arab rights in Israel.

A decade ago, Adalah represented a Haifa bookseller who had been importing books from Lebanese and other forbidden publishers under a special Israeli license — until the state abruptly canceled it. But when Adalah sued, the state resumed giving the bookseller his license, and the lawsuit was dismissed, short-circuiting any chance of overturning the policy, Ms. Zaher said.

The import ban is particularly crippling for Israel’s Arab readers because both Beirut and Damascus, at least before the Syrian civil war, were long known as the publishing capitals of the Arab world, Ms. Zaher said. Books by Arab-Israeli authors are readily available to Arab citizens of Israel, “but they’re interested to read the books that everyone is talking about, the best sellers in the Arab region,” she said.