Just discovered that bookshops around the world are celebrating the right to read freely today, in support of the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem which was recently targeted by Israeli police.

The Educational Bookshop is a small family-run chain of bookshops that’s been around for over four decades. According to this Jerusalem Post article, the police raid was carried out on the grounds of “affiliation with a terror organization and ‘inciting material.’”

What’s troubling about this case is that the ‘inciting material’ consisted entirely of books. Specifically, “books with the word ‘Palestine’ or the Palestinian flag on them, a copy of a Haaretz article with a photo of the hostages on it, the books of Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, and My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit.”

In other words, the bookshop owners were arrested for selling books. There’s been no suggestion that they were in any way involved in terrorism or violence—their ‘crime’ was to sell books that the police didn’t like. That’s a very dangerous precedent, and it feels like part of a growing trend to see books as threatening, not just in Israel but in other countries—there’s a concerted and growing effort to ban books in the USA, for example, particularly ones concerning race, gender and sexuality.

The Jerusalem Post article does a good job of providing the context for this raid as part of a wider campaign of intimidation and suppression of Palestinian culture. Former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg described the Educational Bookshop as a place of openness and dialogue:

“It’s about enabling people from different walks of life to meet, to encounter, to accept, and to contradict. And this is the beauty of dialogue. You live in a society of so many harsh monologues, and all of a sudden you have a dialogue in this place.”

Perhaps that, more than the books themselves, is what’s most threatening to people who want to perpetuate a single narrative. I don’t know. All I know is that reading fosters empathy, and we desperately need more of that in the world right now. So please do what you can to support this initiative, which was organised by Saqi Books.

If you’re on social media (which I’m not really these days), there’s a hashtag #BooksellingIsNotACrime where you can find more information and see if your local bookshop is participating.

Please also check out the fundraiser, which is aimed at helping the Educational Bookshop replace the books that were seized during the raid, fixing the damage that was done to the bookshop, and paying staff to keep the shop open (one of the terms of the owners’ release is that they can not return to bookselling for a minimum of 20 days).

They’ve already smashed their original £25,000 target, which is great, but it sounds like the kind of place that would make good use of any extra cash they get, so please consider donating if you can. If we can help them to buy an even wider range of books, to foster an even more open dialogue between different communities and people with opposing views, then so much the better. So much of our recent history has been about widening divisions, and we need to find ways to break down those entrenched positions and talk to each other. This feels like one small way to help that process along.