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Israeli police cited a children’s colouring book by South African illustrator, Nathi Ngubane, among those items that they regarded as proof of ‘incitement’ to raid Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem.
Before social media, booksellers and libraries were the frontline of freedom of speech and repositories of ideas and cultural heritage.
This also made them targets of destruction driven by political, cultural and racial motives. Many of these attacks, some of which obliterated any trace of the collections, have been recorded in history and include the sacking of the great libraries of Alexandria, Baghdad and Cordoba, and more recently the destruction of libraries in Bosnia, Timbuktu and India.
Public book burnings were common in Europe and go as far back as the 15th century during the Spanish Inquisition when books, mainly from Muslim and Jewish communities, were burned because they were deemed heretical. In Germany, Nazi-dominated student groups initiated the burning of books in 1933 claiming that they propagated ‘un-German’ ideas, and this set off a chain of public bonfires throughout the decade. In the 1990s, Serbian nationalists targeted books by Muslims for burning. During the Apartheid era there were weekly burnings of books and magazines which the regime considered ‘undesirable’. As in some the states in USA, even children’s books were not spared from the furnace.
Apart from the burning of books, the suppression of ideas has extended to the arrests and disappearance of booksellers.
On Sunday, February 10, Israeli police raided two branches of a world-famous Palestinian bookshop in occupied East Jerusalem. The news website, +972.com, reported that the owner and his nephew were arrested, and police seized a selection of books – including a children’s colouring book, From the River to the Sea, by South African illustrator Nathi Ngubane.
Israeli police cited the colouring book among those items that they regarded as proof of ‘incitement’ to raid Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem.
Israel and Apartheid South Africa parallels
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In Apartheid South Africa bookshops were regularly visited to check if they stocked ‘subversive’ content that could even remotely suggest equality of races.
Their ridiculousness led to the banning of the children’s novel Black Beauty, based on its name, without consideration that it was about a ‘black’ horse.
Burger’s Daughter was banned because it included the ‘indecency’ of a black and white child playing together.
South African Apartheid ‘censors’ (often from the security branch) would regularly visit bookstores or check imported items before delivery. Most often they would miss more nuanced works and booksellers would keep items ‘under the counter’ or in store rooms and wrap them in brown paper, for select customers.
Even books by Nobel Literature winners like Nadine Gordimer were banned, as were books with no controversy, simply because the author may be ‘undesirable’.
This essay published by The Conversation explains five strategies used by Apartheid South Africa:
- Manufactured outrage
- White discomfort
- Euphemism
- Proxy Wars
- Unbanning and other doublespeak
It is in this light that we need to see the Israeli action – including the confiscation of a children’s colouring book – as part of a pogrom of cultural genocide.
Authors, publishers, librarians and bookseller are critical to the exchange of ideas and preservation of history and culture.
The cultural genocide is real and must be stopped.
Useful links
The day Israel came for the booksellers: https://www.972mag.com/educational-bookshop-east-jerusalem-raid-arrests/
Wiki: Nazi Book Burnings: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings
What the US can learn from apartheid-era book bans in South Africa: https://theconversation.com/what-the-us-can-learn-from-apartheid-era-book-bans-in-south-africa-185114
How the apartheid regime burnt books – in their tens of thousands: https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/how-apartheid-regime-burnt-books-their-tens-thousands-24-october-2018
Issued by the South African Muslim Network (SAMNET) in the interest of protecting the cultural, historical and intellectual heritage of Palestine and all across the world.
