"At a cabinet session around the time of Israel’s establishment, the country’s first interior minister, Yitzhak Greenbaum, reported that the Hebrew University had organized a group of librarians which followed Israel Defense Forces soldiers and collected books from the occupied homes of Arabs. The minister’s explanation followed a question from another minister, who wanted to know what had been done with the food the Arabs left behind.
Many years later, the government minutes were opened to researchers, but Greenbaum’s words about collecting the books were in the sections meant to remain classified. (His words remain classified to this day, although they were published in Haaretz 10 years ago.) The War of Independence was accompanied by mass looting of Arab property and incidents of vandalism: the government took most of the land and the houses; soldiers and civilians took herds, tractors, cars, jewelry, carpets, furniture, radios, kitchen implements and books. Hebrew University librarians rescued the books from looters.
There are thousands of volumes that were privately owned, as well as tens of thousands of textbooks. The National Library was proud of rescuing the books from destruction, and wrote about it in several publications. Amit links the collection of the Palestinian books to the argument that the Hebrew University adopted the objectives of the state after its establishment. The truth, of course, is that the university was established in the first place as one of the cornerstones of the Zionist movement, as Amit himself writes. Several members of its faculty, including its first president, Y.L. Magnes, belonged to Brit Shalom, a Zionist coexistence movement that favored a binational state, and to the Ihud political party. Amit writes that they collected the Palestinians’ books despite their political worldview; as genuine humanists, they should perhaps have left the abandoned books to the mercies of the soldiers.
Appropriating the Palestinian books also testified to a “Eurocentric and Orientalist” worldview – a belief that the Palestinians themselves could not understand their value. How could the libraries that remained in the homes of Palestinian intellectuals lead anyone to such a conclusion?
There can be no doubt that the Palestinian books were brought to the National Library because of their cultural value. At least some of them were marked as abandoned property; some are still marked as such to this day. Others – perhaps most of them – are no longer identifiable as Palestinian books that were abandoned. A great number are available for public perusal in the library.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, several Palestinians showed up at the library to retrieve their books. The library was evasive. How nice it would have been had the books been returned to their true owners. They were not returned, like most of the cultural treasures that have been looted in wars throughout history.
Over 20,000 Arab books and textbooks collected from schools also were destroyed in the early 1950s. In official correspondence, Amit found that only in a few instances was it said that they shouldn’t be restored to use due to their content, which was hostile to Zionism. Some were sold to Arabs. The documentation provides a basis for the assumption that, like most used textbooks, these were also in tatters. Nobody wanted to buy them and so they were sent to the shredder.
It’s not such a terrible story, but here the Israelis are portrayed almost like an early incarnation of the Taliban thugs who shattered statues of Buddha. Nor is there any connection between the shredding of those textbooks and the destruction of the abandoned Arab villages, just as there is no connection between the theft of books from Yemenite Jews and stories about the abduction of their children. That’s the third story in the book. "
Many years later, the government minutes were opened to researchers, but Greenbaum’s words about collecting the books were in the sections meant to remain classified. (His words remain classified to this day, although they were published in Haaretz 10 years ago.) The War of Independence was accompanied by mass looting of Arab property and incidents of vandalism: the government took most of the land and the houses; soldiers and civilians took herds, tractors, cars, jewelry, carpets, furniture, radios, kitchen implements and books. Hebrew University librarians rescued the books from looters.
There are thousands of volumes that were privately owned, as well as tens of thousands of textbooks. The National Library was proud of rescuing the books from destruction, and wrote about it in several publications. Amit links the collection of the Palestinian books to the argument that the Hebrew University adopted the objectives of the state after its establishment. The truth, of course, is that the university was established in the first place as one of the cornerstones of the Zionist movement, as Amit himself writes. Several members of its faculty, including its first president, Y.L. Magnes, belonged to Brit Shalom, a Zionist coexistence movement that favored a binational state, and to the Ihud political party. Amit writes that they collected the Palestinians’ books despite their political worldview; as genuine humanists, they should perhaps have left the abandoned books to the mercies of the soldiers.
Appropriating the Palestinian books also testified to a “Eurocentric and Orientalist” worldview – a belief that the Palestinians themselves could not understand their value. How could the libraries that remained in the homes of Palestinian intellectuals lead anyone to such a conclusion?
There can be no doubt that the Palestinian books were brought to the National Library because of their cultural value. At least some of them were marked as abandoned property; some are still marked as such to this day. Others – perhaps most of them – are no longer identifiable as Palestinian books that were abandoned. A great number are available for public perusal in the library.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, several Palestinians showed up at the library to retrieve their books. The library was evasive. How nice it would have been had the books been returned to their true owners. They were not returned, like most of the cultural treasures that have been looted in wars throughout history.
Over 20,000 Arab books and textbooks collected from schools also were destroyed in the early 1950s. In official correspondence, Amit found that only in a few instances was it said that they shouldn’t be restored to use due to their content, which was hostile to Zionism. Some were sold to Arabs. The documentation provides a basis for the assumption that, like most used textbooks, these were also in tatters. Nobody wanted to buy them and so they were sent to the shredder.
It’s not such a terrible story, but here the Israelis are portrayed almost like an early incarnation of the Taliban thugs who shattered statues of Buddha. Nor is there any connection between the shredding of those textbooks and the destruction of the abandoned Arab villages, just as there is no connection between the theft of books from Yemenite Jews and stories about the abduction of their children. That’s the third story in the book. "
