Summer Film Series: “The Great Book Robbery” by Benny Brunner 

Monday | 16 June | 12:30 p.m.

Director: Benny Brunner / 57 minutes / 2012

 

70,000 Palestinian books were systematically “collected” by the newly created State of Israel during the 1948 war. Today, about six thousand of the these books can be found on the shelves of the National Library, organized like a fossilized army of a dead Chinese emperor, accessible but lifeless, indexed with the label AP – Abandoned Property.  This entirely unknown historical event came into light by chance; an Israeli PhD student – while researching in various state archives – stumbled upon documents from 1948-9 that mentioned “collecting books in Arabic from occupied territories.” The plunder affair is a remarkable illustration of how one culture emerges from the dust of another after it has laid it to waste; the moment Palestinian culture is destroyed is also the moment a new Israeli consciousness is born, based not only on the erasure of the Arabs’ presence in Palestine but also on the destruction of their culture. A particularly chilling document from March 1949 lists tens of Jerusalemites whose libraries were “collected” – it reads like a Who’s Who of the Palestinian cultural elite of the time.