Where Books are Burned

A fixture in the city for decades, the Educational Bookshop is owned by the Palestinian Muna family. It offers books in English and Arabic—fiction and nonfiction—on the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, as the owners describe, books that challenge both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives.

After being detained and questioned for two days, the owners remain confused about the reason for their detention in shocking and inhumane conditions.

The incident quickly made headlines worldwide. This small bookshop is not only immensely popular among journalists, diplomats, academics, and writers, but the act of raiding and destroying books also evokes memories of some of history’s darkest moments—signals of an alarming descent into suppression, oppression, and fascism.

While these historical recollections resonate across societies, they hold particular weight in the collective memory of Jews, recalling Nazi book bans and book burnings.

Furthermore, as the "people of the book," Jews should find the censorship, destruction, and ransacking of books and bookstores especially painful and alarming.

One of the justifications given by Israeli police for the raid was a colouring book titled From the River to the Sea.

This justification was then seized upon by Israel supporters worldwide, with accusations of the raid being justified as the book was incitement to violence, even though the police themselves did not seek prosecution approval to open an investigation into incitement, stating their reasoning instead as "undermining public safety."

Recounting the police questioning, one of the owners, Mahmoud Muna, noted that most of the inquiries were general and procedural—where he lives, where he works—and lasted only 15 minutes.

For over a year now, powerful voices have been advocating increasingly draconian censorship and even punishment, not just for actions but for specific words, phrases, and ideas.

While the popular protest chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"—or the more controversial Arabic version, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab"—may make many uncomfortable, criminalizing the chant was and remains a dangerously anti-democratic move. We are now witnessing the chilling effects of such actions.

Once a phrase is framed as so dangerous and threatening that it must not only be silenced but criminalized, the next steps—banning books, destroying livelihoods, and ultimately dehumanizing people—become inevitable.

One need not look far to see the hypocrisy of such claims. The Israeli government’s own coalition agreements include their version of "from the river to the sea": "The Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The Government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel—the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, and Judea and Samaria."

This was never just about the phrase itself—it was about manufacturing consent for increasingly extreme measures to silence Palestinian voices. Voices like the Muna's, who advocate for peace and coexistence, threaten the Israeli government’s efforts to paint all Palestinians as terrorists.

Throughout history, every book ban and act of book destruction has been justified with some rationale. Enough people either agreed with or were apathetic to these justifications, allowing them to happen. Perhaps these books challenged their worldview, made them uncomfortable, or even frightened them.

There will always be books, films, poetry, and art that unsettle us, challenge us, and make us feel vulnerable. But we do not oppose banning them because we agree with their content—we oppose banning them because doing so is fundamentally anti-democratic and a dangerous sign of authoritarianism.

It is easy to defend words, art, and ideas that align with our beliefs. It is much harder to do so when they unsettle us. But the cornerstone of democracy and freedom is not the right to express only the ideas we agree with—it is the right to express the ideas we oppose.

We must remember past attacks on books, words, and ideas to prevent the erosion of democracy and individual rights. Not only because others will suffer, but because history shows that such repression eventually comes for all of us.

As the German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine famously warned: "Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too."