Israeli police have raided the best-known Palestinian-owned bookshop in Jerusalem and detained its two owners after using Google translate to examine the shop’s stock.
Rights groups called for the men’s immediate release, describing the arrests on Sunday as part of a broader campaign of harassment of Palestinian intellectuals.
Mahmoud Mouna and his nephew Ahmed Mouna were held overnight on charges of “violating public order” after the Educational Bookstore shops were ransacked. Images on social media showed piles of books swept on to the floor, and a selection of others that had been confiscated.
They were due to appear in court in Jerusalem on Monday morning. A crowd of demonstrators gathered outside in support. “No to censorship, No to book bans,” read one placard.
“They took every book that had the Palestinian flag on it,” one of the men’s brothers told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He shared an image of books that had been seized by police and later returned.
They included the artist Banksy’s Wall and Piece and Gaza in Crisis by the US academic Noam Chomsky and the Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé, and Love Wins by the Canadian film-maker and photographer Afzal Huda.
Police also examined an English-language copy of Haaretz, with images of returned hostages, and told the owners it constituted incitement, the owner’s brother said.
All prosecutions relating to freedom of speech have to be approved by the attorney general’s office, but police can carry out arrests on suspicion of violations of public order on their own authority.
The Educational Bookstore is an East Jerusalem establishment with three branches, two on Salah al-Din Street, the main shopping road in East Jerusalem, which were raided on Sunday.
The third is in the American Colony, a Jerusalem hotel popular for decades with visiting leaders and celebrities from Mikhail Gorbachev and Tony Blair to Bob Dylan, Uma Thurman and Giorgio Armani.
Rights group B’Tselem called for the immediate release of the two men, and an end to the persecution of Palestinian intellectuals.
“The attempt to crush the Palestinian people includes the harassment and arrest of intellectuals,” the group said in a statement.
“Mahmoud and Ahmad Muna, well-known figures in the Jerusalem cultural scene, run the Educational Bookshop – a meeting point for cultural and political discussion. Israel must immediately release them from detention and stop persecuting Palestinian intellectuals.”
Last year police arrested and interrogated Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a leading Palestinian legal scholar based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There have also been widespread detentions of Palestinian citizens of Israel who publicly criticised the war in Gaza.
Article by:Source: Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem
