It is widely known that when more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from Palestine before and after the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel in 1948 by force of arms, most Palestinian land and belongings were stolen, lost or destroyed. What is not well-known is that at least 70,000 books were looted from Palestinian homes, institutions and libraries in 1948. Rare manuscripts (estimated as numbering around 50,000 originating from 56 libraries in and around Jerusalem) are not included in the estimates and are totally unaccounted for. There are rare Palestinian manuscripts in the collection at the National Library, but they are not accessible by the general public. There are also rare Palestinian manuscripts at Hebrew University. Today, there is but one public Palestinian library in Jerusalem. Dr GISH AMIT* documents the plunder and the self-serving rationale of the Zionists that they were “saving” this rich treasury of the people of Palestine, as well as giving an engrossing insight into the many outstanding personalities who animated Palestinian political and cultural life. With the exception of the first photo, all graphics and captions have been added by myself. – TS
Over the last decades, with the declassification of most of Israel’s official documents pertaining to the 1948 war and the emergence of a new critical Israeli historiography, much has been written about the dispossession and dispersal of Palestinians, [1] yet only limited attention has been paid to its catastrophic consequences on Palestinian culture. This is due to several factors: the nature of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, which has made the Palestinian experience difficult to reconstruct in later years; [2] the erasure from memory of the urban spaces where that cultural and intellectual life thrived; [3] and the trauma of the Palestinian catastrophe itself, making it both impossible to escape and difficult to discuss. [4] Continue reading →