Two Jerusalem booksellers detained this week on charges their books were causing “public disorder” have said the experience reflected an intensifying campaign by the Israeli government against Palestinian culture and free speech.
Mahmoud Muna and his nephew Ahmed, whose family has owned the Educational Bookshop for more than 40 years, spent two days in detention and will remain under house arrest until Sunday, despite the absence of evidence to support the vague accusations against them.
At about 3pm last Sunday, plainclothes police raided two branches of the shop on East Jerusalem’s Salah Eddin Street, one selling books in Arabic, and the other selling works in English and other foreign languages.
“They started going through the books and if they were of no interest to them, they would just throw them on the floor,” said Ahmed Muna, 33.
The raids triggered international outrage. Over generations, the Educational Bookstore has become a respected institution, selling academic, historical and political works and fiction alongside espresso coffee and teas to students, tourists, journalists and foreign diplomats. There were street protests after the raid and at least nine diplomats from the UK and other European countries attended the Munas’ court hearing.
Some analysts suggested the targeting of the bookshop was a measure of the increasing radicalisation of the country’s coalition government, which includes far-right parties.
Israeli journalist Noa Simone called the raid a “fascist act”, adding that it “evokes frightening historical associations with which every Jew is very familiar”.
The Munas pointed to elements of dark comedy amidst the turmoil. The police raiding squad had not brought any Arabic speakers, so they resorted to Google Translate on their phones to try to find evidence of incitement in the books they were confiscating.
“That was not very successful because sometimes the covers are written in such a font or in handwriting that is untranslatable,” Ahmed said. “So then the judgment became about the cover, the design – what colours it had, if it had a flag, if it had a picture of a prisoner.”
After a couple of hours in both branches of the shop, the police took away about 300 books for further examination, including a children’s colouring book, a guide to climbing in the Palestinian territories, and a book profiling Hamas by a German author.
“It was in German, but the policeman was using Google Translate set on English, so he couldn’t understand the blurb on the book,” said Mahmoud Muna, 41, who was managing the English and foreign language branch on Sunday. “If he had been able to read it, he would have seen it actually is quite objective. It is critical of Hamas for their use of violence as well.”
The Munas spoke out about the experience in interviews in their separate apartments, which are on different floors of the same East Jerusalem building. The terms of their house arrest mean they cannot be in the same place or talk to one another.
After the raid on Sunday afternoon, Ahmed and Mahmoud were taken to a police station just inside Jerusalem’s walled old city, where the confiscated books were laid out on a table for inspection.
Mahmoud said: “Someone smart came in in a proper uniform, and he looked at all of them and I overheard him say: these books are all inconvenient for our ears but they are not exactly illegal.”
“That gave me a little bit of relief,” he said. However, they were not released. The Munas were subjected to perfunctory 15-minute interrogations about their lives which they said did not touch on the contents of their books or politics in general. There was no more talk of incitement, which would have required authorisation from state prosecutors under the direction of the attorney general, and the charge was changed to causing public disorder, a catch-all accusation that does not need such authorisation to justify detention.
There was space in a notorious overcrowded prison in the Russian Compound district for just one more prisoner on Sunday night. So Ahmed was kept in a holding cell in the police station, while his uncle was locked up in the Russian Compound prison.
“It’s a place that’s simply unfit for a human to live in,” he said. There were ten detainees sharing his 25 sq metre cell, sleeping on mats on the concrete floor in near-freezing night temperatures.
“It’s all very crowded with no heating, no electricity, no lights, no electric light or sunlight and no clock,” he said. The inmates have no idea of time, he said, and were woken by guards every two hours or so and made to stand to be counted.
When he was moved around the jail, he said he was cuffed, blindfolded and dragged through the corridors.
“When they drag you they cut the corners, and I believe intentionally make you hit the side of the doors or the side of a corner,” he said. “There’s a huge risk of actually always bumping your head.”
After 48 hours in detention, the Munas were released, though ordered to remain confined to their homes for a further five days. For another five days after that they are allowed to move around, but forbidden from talking to each other, though they can converse with anyone else, including the press. No explanation was given for the regulations.
The police have handed back almost all the confiscated books, except eight. One of those is the children’s colouring book. That is titled From the River to the Sea, a controversial phrase used by both Palestinians and Israelis to imply territorial claims. But the Munas pointed out that the book had simply been sent for review and was in a back room. It was not for sale.
For all the apparent arbitrariness of the raid, Mahmoud argued it was part of a deliberate and worsening pattern of constraints on Palestinian culture and free speech.
“We should not look at this as an isolated event,” he said. “There have been a series of attacks on cultural institutions in Jerusalem and beyond. I think there is an awareness in the Israeli establishment that cultural institutions are playing a role in galvanising and protecting Palestinian cultural identity.”
“The question is how far are they going to go?” he added. “If they’re attacking Palestinian bookstores now, they will be attacking Israeli bookstores next.”
The Munas say they emerged from the experience convinced their fate would have been far worse if they did not have foreign supporters.
“If we were not working in a bookstore with an international outreach with good international connections, what would have happened?,” Mahmoud said. “Probably the case would have been manipulated against us.”
“It showed how easily your freedoms can be taken away from you – the rights you think you have but you actually don’t have,” Ahmed said. “You can be in your shop and within 30 minutes you don’t have your phone, you don’t have your rights, you’re completely disconnected from the world ... I started to think about the people who spent 10 years in these conditions, or 15 years – what kind of damage does that do to your mind?”
• This article was amended on 14 February 2025. An earlier version implied that a judge’s authorisation is needed for a charge of incitement. Rather, this authorisation must come from Israeli state prosecutors.
