Five days under house arrest for selling books on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict

Mahmud and his nephew Ahmed Muna look very different from the tired and worried appearance they wore when they appeared in the Jerusalem magistrate’s court 10 days ago, in handcuffs. They belong to a well-known Palestinian family that opened Educational Bookshop 40 years ago — today one of the city’s most emblematic bookstores — and they had never been arrested. Until February 9, when six Israeli policemen burst into the two bookshops and searched them for two hours, examining book covers and translating titles with the help of their cellphones, looking for volumes that could be classified as inciting violence. Mahmud and Ahmed were then detained.

The case quickly became notorious, both for its symbolism and because the bookshop is frequented by diplomats (nine of whom, mainly Europeans, attended the court hearing), foreign journalists and researchers. After spending two days in prison, Mahmud and Ahmed received EL PAÍS during the five days of house arrest they were ordered to serve in the same family building on the Mount of Olives. On different floors, with a ban on communication. They are now free, but are still banned from going near their bookshop until next week.

Their account and the events at the court hearing (which this newspaper attended) point to a case of police inefficiency, but at the same time exemplify the growing cultural siege of Palestinians in the eastern part of Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967. In court, the police representative initially claimed that the officers had confiscated more than 10 books. When the lawyer replied that they left with large bags, he admitted they had removed “about 35 or 40.” According to Mahmud, there were 258 items, including books and DVDs. All but eight books were later returned, which remain confiscated.

“The funny thing,” Ahmed recalls, “is that they came looking for content, but they didn’t understand Arabic or English, so they looked at the titles, only some of which are translatable [because of the Arabic calligraphy]. They started looking at the cover design. Anything that had the word Palestine on it, a Palestinian flag, a picture of a martyr, a prisoner, a child, an Israeli soldier, a map, the Temple Mount, the Old City… For me, as a bookseller who makes sure the books are organized and put in the right place, what broke my heart was seeing them being taken away in garbage bags.”

During the trial, the police representative refused to comment “on what is in the press” when the defense lawyer pointed out that the police spokesperson herself had published a photo of one of the eight books suspected of inciting violence. It is a children’s coloring book entitled From the River to the Sea, a well-known slogan used to claim the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, or as a generic show of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. “It was not even on display,” Mahmud explains. “It was taken from a shelf in the warehouse where we keep the books pending review. We had not reviewed it, we were not selling it, and it was not in the system. That is why there was only that one copy.”

Mahmud and Ahmed have not yet managed to find out what the other seven volumes the police are still holding are, since the report of the search is, in Mahmud’s words, “even more Orwellian.” It does not specify the title, author, publisher, or ISBN, but describes them as “book in Arabic with such and such a photo, black book with such and such a photo...”

As such, they checked the descriptions against their own memories and what remains missing from the over 200 titles the police took with them. They are sure of some: a book of paintings of Jerusalem through the eyes of Palestinian artists; an essay in favor of a one-state solution to the Middle East conflict by Jeff Halper (a well-known American-Israeli anthropologist and activist who founded the Committee Against Palestinian House Demolitions); All That Remains, about the Nakba, by Walid Khalidi; an essay in German “critical of Hamas”; or a book by a British photographer about the First Intifada.

The “brutality” of prison

They were first questioned separately for just 15 minutes. “The questions were generic and a bit technical, nothing like the books. The first was: ‘Tell me more about yourself,’” Ahmed says. The judge agreed to extend their arrest by two days, from the eight requested by the police. For two people who had never been in prison, those 48 hours in jail provided a limited window (not literary, but first-hand) into the reality of many other Palestinians. In most families there is someone who has been arrested at some point.

Mahmud was held in a cell in the Russian Compound police station with nine others; Ahmed was held in solitary confinement in the Old City. He describes it as “horrendous.” “Those two days opened my eyes. I knew about the brutality of the prison system in this country, but not how far it has gone,” he says. He mentions constant insults, pushing and humiliation at every transfer; small cells, with no windows and hardly any hygiene; a thin mat to sleep on or little food. “One of the guards asked me: ‘And you, what have you done? ’ I replied: ‘Nothing. ’ – ‘Yeah, you all act innocent. ’ – ‘Nothing, really, it was in the bookstore. ’ – ‘Oh, you’re the one who sells Hamas books! ’” Ahmad recalls. “It provokes you emotionally. Normally, you are innocent until proven guilty. Here we were guilty until proven innocent.”

However, Mahmud believes that the police quickly went from “euphoria” (“they thought they had found the house of the most dangerous terrorists”) to “watching the balloon deflate.” The case was eventually downgraded to alleged “disturbance of public order.” In confirming the extension of the arrest, one of the judges criticized the police for having justified the search on the grounds of alleged incitement to violence, knowing that they needed the green light from the prosecution beforehand and that such an accusation requires a more solid basis.

Mahmoud uses a mention of the future of the case (which remains open) to hit Israel — which never misses an opportunity to present itself as the only democracy in the Middle East — where it hurts the most. “We want it to end with a complete exoneration and the closing of the criminal case. Or, if this country wants to start banning books, let them make a list, because we want to do our job legally. It’s very easy. They can look at Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan… and learn how to ban books. There is a scheme: you create a Ministry of Information, you bring in bureaucrats, they read books, newspapers and magazines and start marking them green or red. We don’t want to be in that grey area where a clever investigator or a policeman determines whether there is [alleged] incitement.”

Mahmud recalls that in recent years the police have closed or banned events at other cultural institutions in the city, such as the Al Hakawati theater, the Yabous centre and the music school. Two weeks earlier they raided another bookshop, where they found a book about Yahia Sinwar, the mastermind behind the Hamas attack on 7 October, who was killed in combat in Gaza last year.

In a rare development, particularly since the Hamas attack and the Gaza invasion, some 1,200 Israeli writers, booksellers and cultural figures — almost all of them Jewish, including names such as David Grossman, Etgar Keret, singers Noa and Mira Awad, Fania Oz-Salzberger and Shira Geffen — signed a letter rejecting the police raid on the Educational Bookshop, quoting the poet Heinrich Heine: “We know from our history that where books burn, people will end up being burned.” Mahmud believes the letter was not born out of support for the Palestinian cause — many of the signatories belong to the national cultural mainstream — but out of fear of becoming next. “I don’t think it will be long before we see an attack on Israel’s liberal institutions. They have seen the danger and how it can spread to their cultural sphere as well,” he says.

Educational Bookshop has some 3,000 books, mainly in Arabic and English (but also in French, German, Spanish and Italian) and with a strong presence of political essays and novels on the Middle East, with a focus on Palestine.

—Are you going to rethink which books to sell?

— If FIFA decides that Jerusalem will host the World Cup next year, we will sell books about football, Mahmud says ironically. But if this area is going to continue experiencing conflict, it would be ridiculous to talk about polar bears. Bookshops are part of a context, they operate in the society they belong to. We are looking forward to the end of this conflict and to start selling trashy romance novels.

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