Israel’s arrests of two Palestinian booksellers who operate the famous Educational Bookshop stores, a cultural hub in East Jerusalem for decades, has received widespread condemnation.
Mahmoud Muna (41) and his nephew Ahmed (33) were both arrested on Sunday after undercover Israeli police raided two of their stores. Photographs showed books pulled off the shelves of the shops on to the floor.
Mahmoud Muna, who has written for the London Review of Books among other publications, is widely known as the “bookseller of Jerusalem”. The three bookshops under the Educational Bookshop name carry close to 1,600 titles, ranging from fiction and art to history and politics, and covering a wide range of perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict, among other topics.
Witnesses said the Israeli police were using Google Translate to examine books they found in the shop.
In a statement on the social media platform X, the Israel Police said the booksellers were arrested on suspicion of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism”. Books seized included “a children’s colouring book with nationalist content”, the statement said. The statement was accompanied by a photograph of a book titled From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book.
In an interview in East Jerusalem last summer, Muna told The Irish Times that an increasing number of Israelis had been visiting the stores – “Israelis who are willing to read the other narratives.”
At the same time, he said, Israeli oppression had increased since the Hamas-led attack of October 7th, 2023 “against any one who wanted to say his opinion”.
A representative of Ireland’s Embassy in Tel Aviv was among a diplomatic presence from at least nine countries attending the booksellers’ court hearing on Monday. A post on the Embassy’s X page called the raid and arrests “an attack on freedom of expression and fundamental democratic values”.
Author Nathan Thrall, who held the launch for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama in a branch of the Educational Bookshop, condemned the arrests as “totalitarian”, saying they were “part of a long-standing Israeli policy of suppressing Palestinian nationalism and indeed Palestinian cultural life in East Jerusalem”.
Thrall protested outside the court on Monday, as the booksellers had their detention extended until Tuesday. Photographs showed the two men in handcuffs. Their lawyer, Nasser Odeh, said they were kept in freezing conditions the night before. He said the police had made a further application that they be subjected to house arrest and banned from going to their bookshops.
Thrall said the development underlined that it was wrong to call Israel a democracy. “The arrests were made in East Jerusalem, in territory Israel has annexed and considers to be within its so-called democratic borders ... By making these arrests Israel is telling on itself. Only an ideology as thin as paper is threatened by words on the page,” he said.
“The world has seen the nature of regimes that arrest and imprison booksellers before,” said Matthew Teller, who with Muna co-edited the book Daybreak in Gaza, which came out last October. “The time is long past for Britain and the international community to reassess its backing for Israel, and to condition any future support on the active and immediate dismantling of structures of oppressive control,” Teller said.
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After the Israeli assault on Gaza began, Muna said producing a book “was basic instinct… As a bookseller, [I asked] what can I do at that time?” Daybreak in Gaza includes vignettes about artists, acrobats, doctors, students, shopkeepers and teachers, with Muna saying it was vital to give Gazans a platform when so much in their lives was being destroyed.
Writing was a “representation of the Palestinian struggle”, Muna told The Irish Times. “A Palestinian poem is a demonstration. A Palestinian artist is a journalistic piece about the story. Every exploration of art and culture by Palestinians is a form of resistance.”
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