ShareJERUSALEM: Dozens of people gathered Monday outside a Jerusalem court to protest the arrest of two Palestinian booksellers in the city’s east, occupied by the Zionist entity since 1967 and later annexed, in a move considered illegal by the international community.
The Educational Bookshop, close to the Old City, has been a Jerusalem landmark for decades, with a wide selection of books in Arabic and English, ranging from literary fiction to non-fiction works on the Middle East and world politics. The bookshop has been owned by the Muna family for forty years, according to MEE. Two of the book shop’s owners, Mahmoud and Ahmad Muna were arrested on Sunday, February 9, and held overnight. A separate branch, located in the nearby American Colony Hotel, was also raided.
Popular with foreign diplomats, aid workers and tourists, the book shop has played an important part in Palestinian intellectual life and the arrests were seen as a blow against the wider cultural environment of the city. “The attempt to crush the Palestinian people includes the harassment and arrest of intellectuals,” rights group B’Tselem said in a statement. “(Zionist entity) must immediately release them from detention and stop persecuting Palestinian intellectuals.”
Protesters on Monday shouted slogans denouncing the Zionist entity as a “fascist state” and held placards accusing the country of “cowardice”. Witnesses told MEE that Zionist agents in plain clothes entered two of the bookshop’s three branches on Sunday around 3pm as if they were regular customers. After five minutes they suddenly produced a search warrant and ordered customers to leave.
“They closed the door and started to move the books to the floor,” one witness told MEE, preferring to remain anonymous. “They were brutal and disrespectful.” The Zionists, who were armed, tipped half of the shop’s books on the floor, leaving the shelves bare.
Police accused the two men of selling books “containing incitement and support for terrorism,” it said in a statement. During the operation, the police found books on “nationalist Palestinian themes”, the statement said, adding police were asking the court for an extension of the booksellers’ detention. The Muna family’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, said “hundreds of books” had been seized on Sunday.
Steffen Seibert, former German ambassador to the Zionist entity, posted on X that the Muna family are “peace-loving proud Palestinian Jerusalemites open for discussion and intellectual exchange”.
Sidra Ezrahi, a woman taking part in the demonstration, called the arrests “unbelievable”. “We’ve been coming to this bookshop not for years but for generations,” the protester in her 80s said, adding the arrests were “exactly what fascist states are doing”. Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, also condemned the raid.
“Shocked by (Zionist entity) forces’ raid on East Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop — an intellectual lighthouse and family-run gem resisting Palestinian erasure under apartheid,” she wrote on X. “Internationals in Jerusalem: please show up, stand with the Muna family, and protect this vital hub,” she added. — Agencies
