Meditation on the Occasion of the Looting of the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem

     That was but a prelude;
     where they burn books,
     they will ultimately burn people as well.
                                  —Heinrich Heine, 1820

   We’ve known about book censorship and book burning for a long time—and, appropriately, some of the most poignant accounts of such events occur in books themselves. One of the memorable passages in Cervantes’ Don Quixote is the auto-da-fé to which the priest commits Quixote’s books, the presumed source of his madness—while preserving a few books for the priest’s own perusal. In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the only extant copy of Aristotle’s treatise on Comedy is preserved far from the eyes of all readers—on peril of death; presumably, the “message” that Aristotle attributes to the comic mode is so threatening to church doctrine that it must be kept from the masses, and indeed from the priests themselves. And that’s “only” fiction. As the so-called “people of the book,” we Jews presumably hold the printed word sacred—not only for religious texts.

   My first book, published in 1980, was called By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. In studying the atrocities of the Holocaust as reflected in the words of survivors, written in the immediate and longer aftermath of WWII, I could not have imagined, in my wildest nightmares, that 45 years later I would be writing about book burnings by Jews in East Jerusalem.

Well not quite burnings (not yet, anyway), but confiscation of books deemed incendiary in themselves. It seems that the Jerusalem authorities know the power of words. Words have always been the Jewish default weapon—but many of those in our government, who now have “swords,” seem to feel compelled to use them against those whose only power is in the pen.

On February 9, Israeli police entered two bookstores on Salah al-Din Street in East Jerusalem owned by the Muna family that feature books on what used to be called the “Arab-Israeli Conflict” and now could be called the Arab-Israeli Zero-Sum Game. They rifled through the bookshelves, knocking down many volumes and confiscating those they deemed incendiary. According to Haaretz reporter Nir Hasson, Google translate was used to render many of the titles intelligible to law enforcement agents—who clearly had a very limited education themselves.

One of the confiscated volumes was a children’s coloring book with the title From the River to the Sea. This phrase, used by Palestinian sympathizers worldwide, may trigger some resistance even among our most liberal interlocutors. But if we parse that phrase for a moment, we realize that the claims of both annexationist Israelis and maximalist Palestinians is to the entire territory and that the only humane solution is a border drawn between the two entities (or some creative confederal arrangement). Let’s imagine an eight-year old Palestinian, sitting beside an eight-year old Israeli, with their markers “negotiating” where the line should be in the coloring book.

Recently, I attended an evening featuring the man who is now in custody, Mahmoud Muna, and Matthew Teller, a journalist from the U.K. The two had jointly published Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture. It is a heartrending collection of voices from Gaza recorded over the past year—the testimonies, prayers, hopes and fears of ordinary men and women, students, teachers, artists, doctors, shopkeepers, trying to eke out a living and protect (or mourn) their loved ones in the rubble of their former lives. Some of the people represented in those pages may no longer be alive. Philippe Sands endorses the book as “the timeliest of reminders of our common humanity and the irrepressible force of the written word.”

Also within the past two weeks, there was an event held in Jaffa before a packed audience of Israeli Jews and Palestinians. “We’re having this evening even though it causes some of us fear,” admitted Palestinian-Israeli poet Ayat Abou Shmeiss as she opened the event – which she had arranged along with Hebrew educator, Dr. Rachel Korazim. An actor comes on stage, in front of a picture of Gazan poet Hind Joudeh (aka Joudah). The actor reads:

     What does it mean to be a poet in times of war
     It means apologizing
     Top of Form
     Bottom of Form
     Extensively apologizing
     To the burnt trees
     To the nest-less birds
     To the crushed homes
     To the long cracks along the streets
      To the pale faces of children before and after death
      To the faces of every sad or murdered mother
      What does it mean to be safe in times of war?

   Back to the courtroom where Mahmoud and his nephew Ahmad had been brought for extension of their arrest…for what crime, exactly? Standing outside this august building, soul (and sole)-weary from hours, days and months of standing in protest—first against the government coup that tried to strip whatever democratic guardrails still existed in “Jewish and democratic” Israel, and then for the release of hostages and the end of the carnage in Gaza—I could only think, in the bitter cold of a rainy Jerusalem morning, of where all this could lead.

Books that were confiscated and then burned in 1933, during the early rise of Nazism, included volumes by Einstein, Freud, Brecht, Brod, Döblin, Kaiser, the Mann brothers, Zweig, Hoffmannsthal, Kästner, Kraus, Lasker-Schüler, Werfel. Today the Bebelplatz, where the book burnings took place, is famous for the monument to the “empty library” by Micha Ullmann:

Is all this inevitable? Book looting followed by book burning followed by expulsion and/or persecution of a whole people? We are weary but not ready to give up the struggle.