Israeli police raid Palestinian bookstores in East Jerusalem and detain owners

Israeli police raided a Palestinian-owned bookstore in east Jerusalem on Sunday detaining its owners and confiscating books about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Established over 40 years ago, the Educational Bookshop is one of East Jerusalem’s best-known cultural hubs, with three branches across the city that regularly host events.

The three-story bookstore had been especially popular among researchers, journalists and foreign diplomates, with a large selection of books, mainly in Arabic and English, about the conflict and the wider Middle East, including many by Israeli and Jewish authors.

Hundreds of titles confiscated

The bookstore’s owners, Ahmed and Mahmoud Muna, were detained after police confiscated hundreds of titles related to the conflict before ordering the store’s closure, according to May Muna, Mahmoud’s wife.

She said the soldiers picked out books with Palestinian titles or flags, “without knowing what any of them meant.” She also claimed they used Google Translate to examine some of the Arabic titles before taking them away in plastic bags.

This follows another police raid just last week of a Palestinian-owned bookstore in the Old City in east Jerusalem.

In a statement, the police said the two owners were arrested on suspicion of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism.”

As an example, the police referred to an English-language children’s colouring book entitled “From the River to the Sea,” a reference to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that today includes Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Escalating tensions

Palestinians and hard-line Israelis each view the entire area as their national homeland. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government is opposed to Palestinian statehood, has said Israel must maintain indefinite control over all the territory west of the Jordan.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions have soared since Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. A ceasefire has paused the fighting and led to the release of several Israeli hostages abducted in the attack as well as hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. Tensions have also soared in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the 7 October attack and abducted around 250 people. The war that followed has killed over 47,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, and the Palestinians want all three territories for their future state. The last serious and substantive peace talks broke down after Netanyahu returned to power in 2009.