Yesterday, Israel bombed one of the biggest bookshops in Gaza. The Samir Mansour bookshop was one of the few publishing houses in Gaza as well. I saw a video of the owner of the bookshop fighting tears and talking about how much this bookshop meant to him and how he used to skip meals to be able to save money to get this bookshop going. This bookshop was part of the Kahil building which had various stores and offices.
In another video that was circulating, a guy from Gaza was explaining why Israel targets these buildings and towers. Every day you hear about a building targeted and leveled. He explains that these towers have been the main destination for the youth of Gaza as they usually contain coffee shops, bookshops, restaurants, educational and learning centres. So by destroying them, Israel is destroying memories and any potential for communal relationships.
This is what we mean when we say Israel is not only committing a full blown genocide as we have been witnessing publicly for days now, with over 200 deaths in the span of a week (as of May 19, 2021), but also this other form of incremental genocide that has been ongoing for decades; even when Israel isn’t bombing Gaza on a daily basis, there has always been an effort to erase Palestinian history and culture, from appropriating tatreez and the Palestinian cuisine to destroying literary works.
Highly recommend watching The Great Book Robbery documentary for more on that as it goes into the details about Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian books during the Nakba.
Erasing culture is an essential component of settler-colonialism, and what Israel is targeting in Gaza right now is by no means coincidental or “accidental”.
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