Attempted Ethnocide in Palestine

How and why Israel tried to steal the Palestinian cultural heritage. In April of 1948 Israeli soldiers invaded the Arab ‘Katamon quarter’ of Jerusalem. Many of the city’s Palestinian inhabitants were driven out by force. The rest fled, fearful of being massacred.

How and why Israel tried to steal the Palestinian cultural heritage!

In April of 1948 Israeli soldiers invaded the Arab ‘Katamon quarter’ of Jerusalem. Many of the city’s Palestinian inhabitants were driven out by force. The rest fled, fearful of being massacred.
Among those refugees was a renowned educator and writer named Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian whose diaries have now been partly translated. Like all the Palestinian refugees driven out by fear or by force, Sakakini was never permitted to return to his home, even though international law guaranteed the right of return. Instead, his house and all his property – like that of all the Palestinian refugees - were seized by the Israelis and ‘redistributed’ to Jewish settlers, and his library was plundered and given to the Israeli National Library.
It was the loss of the library that wounded Sakakini the most. Prevented from returning to his home in Jerusalem and forced to settle in Cairo, he penned a poignant farewell in his diary to his beloved books:
"Farewell, my library! …Goodbye, my books!... I know not what has become of you after we left: Were you looted? Burnt? Ceremonially transferred to a private or public library? Did you end up on the shelves of grocery stores with your pages used to wrap onions? We now know what became of Sakakini’s library. In the summer of 1967 his daughter Hala visited the Jewish National and University Library and there she discovered her father’s books, scrawled with his handwritten notes."
This was no isolated case. Over seventy thousand invaluable books were looted from Palestinian homes by the Israelis and made ‘property of the Jewish National Library’. In doing so, Israel was attempting to appropriate the Palestinian intellectual heritage while destroying its Palestinian identity. For decades thereafter Zionist and Israeli propaganda falsely described the Palestinians as “people without a culture”. Those Palestinians who managed to remain in what became Israel were forbidden from studying their own culture or even speaking publicly about their immediate past. Their memory was seen as dangerous, something to be controlled, suppressed and destroyed.
This was ethnocide – “the deliberate and systematic destruction of the culture of an ethnic group” (Oxford Dictionary). Israel tried to rob the Palestinian People of not just their land, but of their past, their culture, and their memory as well.
For over sixty years, Palestinians have continued to resist this odious crime and have struggled to obtain the justice that is their right under international law.
To learn more, visit: www.thegreatbookrobbery.org
Distributed by PAJU (Palestinian and Jewish Unity)
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