Gaza bookstore destroyed by missile …

Forty years of her life fell apart in a fraction of a second Loop. The bookseller and publisher Samir Mansour he walks through the rubble of what used to be his bookstore, among cement blocks, pieces of paper and crushed plastic chairs. There are 100,000 books destroyed, Koran, from various textbooks to translations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and other classics of world literature in Arabic. It wasn’t the moths, the acidity of the paper, or the environment. It wasn’t humidity, leaks, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, fires or thefts. It was the Israeli army that killed more than 240 Palestinians in eleven days and which is included in the catalog of barbarism involved in the destruction of books.

On Tuesday, May 18, at five in the morning, Samir Mansour was at his home watching Arab news channels when he learned that the israeli army He had issued a notice that he would destroy the property where his bookstore is located. Two hundred yards from the spot, he stopped short and watched a missile wipe out the work of a lifetime, the dream of a childhood reduced to rubble. In the early 1980s, Samir was 14 when he started working with his father in the bookstore, which he later took over until he also created a publishing house in 2000. In the basements of this bookstore. settlement, which looked like a cave, there were also books by Palestinian authors like Talal Abu Shawish, born in Nuseirat refugee camp in 1967, who has published storybooks and novels such as The rest is not for sale, We deserve a better death (2012) and Seasons of love and blood (2014), among others.

The IDF based the destruction of the library on the argument it usually uses when bombing the Palestinian civilian population: that it attacked the infrastructure and homes of commanders of Hamas. The Palestinian bookseller and publisher denies this version: “I have nothing to do with an armed group, with a political faction; it is an attack on culture. I lived through two intifadas and three wars in Gaza (…) but that had never happened, the bookstore had never been destroyed ”, declared Mansour. “With the destruction of Al Mansour, Gaza loses one of its main cultural sources,” he warns Mosab Abu Toha, poet and founder of the Edward Said Library, created after the Gaza war in 2014. “Al Mansour is more than a bookstore, it is also a publishing house that publishes authors from Gaza. The manuscripts were printed in Egypt, some books returned to Gaza, but others remained in Egypt and circulated in the Arab world. This made it possible to lift the blockade of Gaza through literature, ”adds the poet.

Literature is a very minor market in Gaza. The local prints are around a thousand copies and among the authors published by Samir Mansour, the most important are Ghareeb Askalani o Yusri al-Ghul. On the Instagram page of Samir’s bookstore Mansour a question appears: What have we lost by losing the library? “We have lost the stories and tales that housed the corners, the whispers and the wishes of the children who came to visit us anxious to take what their innocent eyes chose – the losses are listed in the bookstore. We have lost the smell of stale paper and thick old blankets that readers were looking for. The smell of coffee brewed daily and incense to welcome you. We have lost face of the books, hundreds of thousands of precious and irreplaceable books, which were not easily brought to besieged Gaza. We have lost track of passers-by to and from students, adults and children. We have lost a lot, my friends! “.

There is a campaign for rebuild the bookstore that managed to raise more than 108 thousand dollars. Stories from Palestinian readers are circulating on the bookstore’s Instagram account. As young Yara Eid from the UK where she resides, writes: “The bookstore changed my life, I went there every month with my mom and bought a few books and waited so anxiously for the next month that my mother buys me more. . In my room in Gaza I still have hundreds of books that I read with passion until five in the morning. These books changed my life and changed many Palestinian lives in Gaza. This bookstore and these books were the only escape from our reality. I read foreign novels, history books, poems by Mahmoud Darwish, love stories and met some of my best friends to chat and swap these books. This bookstore gave me hopes, dreams, new friends, amazing memories and a new life. One of the first things I intended to visit on my return to Gaza is this beautiful place, but yesterday the Israeli bombs made it disappear as if to admit that our books, our hopes and our dreams are a threat.