Palestinian Narratives Silenced: The Story behind Israel’s Bookstore Raids

Israel’s raid of Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop and detention of booksellers Mahmoud Muna and Ahmad Muna is one more pivotal moment in its attempts to silence the Palestinian narrative by threatening outspoken Palestinians and restricting their access to ideas.

This is “a war on libraries and books in Jerusalem,” Palestinian writer Ibrahim Johar told Jerusalem Story, lamenting that, after killing people, stones, and trees, Israel was now turning to paper and thought.1

The February 9, 2025, raid of the bookstore on Salah al-Din Street, which has been a beloved resource for visitors to East Jerusalem and Palestinians alike, came just a week after authorities forcibly closed the treasured Arabic bookshop Maktabat al-Quds in Khan al-Zeit in the Old City.

Limiting access to books is one of the long-standing but previously hidden ways that Israel exercises censorship.

After the brazenly filmed destruction of libraries, educational institutions, and cultural heritage in the Gaza Strip over the past 16 months—what Ahmad Ibsais called “cultural genocide with no attempt to hide it”—attacks on these booksellers in East Jerusalem take on additional weight.2

“[We] fear that the raid on the store, the confiscation of books from it, and the imprisonment of its owner under the pretext of ‘violating public order’ is a regime provocation, designed to erase the Palestinian cultural narrative and harass those involved in it,” wrote a number of Israel’s most renowned writers in an open appeal.3

Since the events of October 7, 2023, hundreds of Palestinians across the country have been detained for social media posts or other forms of expression that Israel says support Hamas or its attacks. On January 21, 2025, the parliament passed a new law formally criminalizing such speech, punishing it with five years in jail.4 Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a prominent expert in state crimes, was detained and then suspended from her long-term tenured professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for questioning the Israeli narrative of the October 7 events.5

These different crackdowns can be viewed as stages in silencing before the historical narrative is formed, according to writer Michel Rolph-Trouillot. Certain sources are silenced, archives are silenced, narratives are silenced, and finally history is silenced.6

When bookstore co-owner Mahmoud Muna and his assistant, Ahmad Muna, went before a court one day after being detained in the raid on the bookstore, prosecutors alleged that they were selling books that incite violence. Family members said that police in street clothes entered two of their three bookstores on February 10 and started crudely rummaging through the books, checking Arabic titles with Google Translate and examining those with Palestinian flags or symbols.

Police confiscated approximately 300 books, including a children’s coloring book titled From the River to the Sea that was in a back storeroom in a pile sent to the store for consideration. Eight books in English, German, and Arabic were deemed incitement, but the children’s coloring book was the only one shown to the court.7

Responding to the charges at the Central Court, the Munas’ lawyer, Nasser Odeh, said, “(The arrests are) part of a new policy followed by Israeli police in Jerusalem to suppress freedom of expression and Palestinian thought, and prevent learning and education."8

Diplomats from nine countries attended the court hearing, signaling international concern over the detentions.

When the Munas’ lawyer tried to object to incitement charges, explaining that the chain of bookstores—two on Salah-al-Din Street facing each other and one in the American Colony Hotel—are mainly frequented by foreigners, the police lawyer interjected, “I don’t know [who the customers are], and it really doesn’t matter. The important thing is that there is an audience, and the court should understand that.”9

Mahmoud recently edited a series of vignettes by Gaza residents, Daybreak in Gaza, with BBC radio reporter and author Mathew Teller. (This was not one of the books targeted.)

“The charges against [Mahmoud and Ahmad] are fabricated and malicious,” Teller told Jerusalem Story, “and the manner of their arrest—an undercover raid on a reputable bookselling business, followed by vandalism, handcuffing, and many hours of interrogation and detention—is reprehensible. This illegitimate act marks yet another escalation in the suppression by Israeli authorities of the rights and freedoms of the people of Jerusalem. The time is long past for the international community to reassess its backing for Israel, and to condition any future support on the active and immediate dismantling of structures of oppressive control.”

The Munas were released on February 12, 2025, to five days of house arrest for “disturbing the public order” and forbidden from going to their bookstores for 20 days.

Mahmoud’s brother, Murad, opened the bookstore in their absence and said he could barely keep up with business as supporters bought books to show their solidarity.

“The bookstore has become part of our identity,” Mahmoud said in an interview after his release. “As a family, we have always tried to use it as a workshop—a place for conversations, discussions, and open exchanges of ideas. It is a place where people can speak freely and candidly.”10

Control of ideas and memory has been central to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land since 1948, when private Palestinian libraries were raided and confiscated, their contents now held in part by the Hebrew University.

“About 4.1 million books and manuscripts and documents were taken to the Hebrew University,” librarian Diana Sayej Nasser said in a 2016 interview. “Some—about 30 percent—are available to Israeli researchers in the Middle East section. The other 70 percent are stored on the underground floors of the Hebrew University—just given the label ‘Abandoned Property.’”11

Nasser and fellow interviewee retired Al-Quds University librarian Randa Kamal described how contemporary Palestinian libraries still struggle to obtain books in Arabic and English. When they place orders, some of the texts are invariably confiscated at the border, which is controlled by Israel. And every year, libraries receive a list of banned books from the Israeli military censor. If those texts are found on the premises, the library can be closed by the military government.

“They are books on all topics, but mainly on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If they are published in Syria or Lebanon, we are not allowed to have them. And many of the best books in Arabic are written and published in Lebanon and in Syria,” she laments. This is especially challenging for educators in East Jerusalem and Palestinian communities in Israel, where there is pressure to use Hebrew literature and collections of Arabic-language books are sparse.12

In 1965, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), consolidating its role as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, established the Palestine Research Center in Beirut. Almost two decades later, invading Israeli soldiers confiscated the center’s library and took its contents and archives back to East Jerusalem, where it became the source material for Israeli historian Raphael Israeli’s 1983 Israel-positive PLO in Lebanon.13 Despite Palestinian efforts to reconstitute various remaining collections at the Research Center headquarters, Israel destroyed these in a 1983 car bombing.

But that was not the end of the archives: when the PLO negotiated a prisoner swap after the 1982 Lebanon War, it demanded the return of its papers in the exchange. More than a hundred boxes, unverified because the inventory remained with Israel, were sent to storage in Algeria to languish while PLO leaders busied themselves with state-building.14 By some accounts, some of the archive remains at the Hebrew University, inaccessible to most Palestinians.15

The Arab Studies Society, based in the Orient House in 1983, also conducted research and archival work and maintained a library. Israeli security forces stole many of these documents in an August 10, 2001, raid, after which the organization—the home of Palestinians’ political leadership for decades—was ordered closed, many of its documents left inside to gather dust and decay over decades.16

Between 2000 and 2020, Israel shuttered more than 42 Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem using a variety of tools, ranging from charging them with “illegal” political affiliation to unpaid bills. Because actual political representation was banned in East Jerusalem, Palestinian political expression often happened at cultural institutions.17

On July 22, 2020, Israeli forces looted the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, Yabous Cultural Centre, and the Jerusalem Arts Network (Shafaq), hauled off all computers and papers on the premises, and arrested their directors purportedly “in connection with tax evasion and fraud” and “suspicion of money laundering [and] funding terror,” charges that never materialized. The Palestinian National Theatre, El-Hakawati, has had its doors closed dozens of times and also faced charges of tax evasion.

Writer Johar expresses befuddlement at the crackdown on the Educational Bookshop. “No sane person can imagine today such an attack on books and libraries in the age of technology and easy access to any book. [This is] the blind confusion of those who found themselves in a corner, alone and besieged, and afflicted with madness and hatred.”