Apartheid Israel can demolish homes, burn universities and shred children with reckless abandon, but it cannot destroy the resistant culture of literature and scholarship that has kept the Palestinian nation whole. My friend Mahmoud Muna, the bookseller of Jerusalem, and his brother Ahmed embody that culture. Their Educational Bookstore is an intellectual oasis in an occupied city being transformed day by day into a toxic wasteland of messianic Zionism. It is for this reason that the Israeli Gestapo arrested them after raiding their shop and seizing hundreds of volumes (most likely including my own) as though they were weapons in an enemy arsenal. Indeed, Israel’s authorities are so threatened by the contents of books that expose and unravel the manipulative and deceitful underpinnings of their regime, they now seek to classify their distribution as a form of terrorism. Israel burns books as it does people but the anti-Zionist idea only proliferates. #FreeMahmoudMuna
Mike