Join bookshops around the world to celebrate the right to read freely.
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.
There are 4 comments
What a world we’re living in.
I’m with them, of course I am.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, Emma? So many basic values that I thought we mostly all agreed on are now under assault. Whatever we do in response doesn’t feel like enough, but we have to do something. Thanks very much for your comment!
I was following this in the news, but appreciated your recap here too. Look at all the amazing comments on your What’s Literary Fiction post; I hope all those people are preparing their comments for this post too which, arguably, matters even more for anyone who values the written word and literature. Of course people are busy–I’ve not been able to catch up with online reading for three weeks and this time of year, in this hemisphere, there’s a lot of respiratory illness circulating–but I wonder if that’s all there is to it. I want to believe that bookish people are going to be more attentive and empathetic–not less–when it comes to issues of censorship and persecution and free speech, at least when it pertains to literature even if not more broadly. (As it turns out, technical issues could have affected commenting: I hope that’s the only reason there are fewer responses here!)
Thanks so much for this, Marcie! Apparently things got worse after I wrote the post—the police raided the shop again and arrested another brother: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/police-raid-jerusalems-educational-bookshop-for-second-time-and-arrest-manager
I think the quote in that article by Andrew Franklin, Profile Books founder and trustee of Index on Censorship, says it all: “It is unbearable that people are being arrested simply for selling books. Freedom of speech is under threat everywhere, nowhere more so than Israel. This is the second time this shop has been raided and all it does is sell books.”