IN MAY 1933, Nazi-influenced student groups publicly burned more than 25,000 books by Jewish authors and those deemed liberal or leftist in 34 university towns across Germany. Newspapers supported it as “action against the un-German spirit,” and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, said to a crowd of 40,000 that “the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. ... The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character.”
This anti-semitic act of censorship and intolerance is memorialized at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem, where a display about book burnings sets the tone for the rest of the museum. Before you enter the display on the rise of Nazism, you must first consider the gravity of book burnings. A prophetic quote from 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine concludes the display: “Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.”
Across the city, in East Jerusalem, is the Palestinian-run Educational Bookshop. It consists of an English store, which doubles as a coffee shop, workspace, and community hub, and an Arabic store across the road. This family-owned business, which opened in 1984, sells all sorts of titles related to Palestine. There are Palestinian books on cooking, art, and history; there are novels, textbooks, and children’s books. The Educational Bookshop carries titles that are hard to find within Israel, and on a Sunday afternoon in February, this popular bookstore was raided by undercover Israeli police for the first time.
“They came into the shop with a search warrant,” Ahmad Muna, assistant manager of the shop, told me. “They demanded a search that happened over the course of two hours. The officers were aggressive, brutal, were not polite.” According to Muna, the officers didn’t speak Arabic or English; at first they used Google Translate to figure out book titles.
“At some point they had enough of Google Translate,” Muna said, “It was getting too tedious. So, they started to judge the books by their covers, by the design, by the picture on the cover, any book that had the flag of Palestine, any book that had a picture of a prisoner, of a boy being arrested, a picture of the wall, a picture of a Palestinian flag, it was confiscated.”
Police took away about 300 books in trash bags. Muna and his uncle were arrested and detained for two nights. After release, both were put under house arrest for five days and banned from entering their shop for more than two weeks.
A month after the initial raid, the bookstore was raided again. This time the police did not have a search warrant. They detained Muna’s father, confiscated the keys to the store, and took 50 more books, although most were later returned. The store reopened shortly after the second raid and has received an outpouring of support from Israelis as well as diplomats from eight countries who attended the hearing of Ahmad and his uncle, Mahmoud, in February.
These raids point toward increased intolerance for Palestinian perspectives within Israel, where 21% of the population is Palestinian Israeli (a larger percentage of the population than that of any minority group in the United States). And as such intolerance grows in Israel, it also grows in the U.S., Israel’s biggest political and economic ally.
On March 8 in New York City, Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the U.S. who is married to an American citizen, was detained in his apartment building lobby by immigration agents who arrived in unmarked cars. Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University until December, was a lead organizer and negotiator for the pro-Palestine campus demonstrations last year. He was transferred to an ICE detention center in Louisiana to await deportation, despite having no criminal record. A judge has stayed the deportation and ordered Khalil returned to New Jersey for a hearing. According to an Associated Press report, Khalil’s attorney spoke to one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said “they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa.” Once the ICE agents were informed that Khalil had a green card and not a student visa, they said that they were revoking the green card instead.
The raids on the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem and Khalil’s detainment are both attacks on free speech, a foundation of healthy democracy. The free exchange of ideas is fundamental to a culturally pluralistic society, and banning books and arresting protesters are attempts to limit exposure to ideas unpopular with a current administration, not the so-called “anti-terrorism” measures that governments claim.
I asked Ahmad Muna why people of faith should particularly care about the raids on the Educational Bookshop. He said, “Raiding bookshops, getting into what people read, attacking places where knowledge is spread, where knowledge is written, where people come so they can get introduced to new ideas, to new struggles, to new challenges, a place where people can or should feel safe — everybody should stand to condemn such actions, regardless of what religion they follow.”
In the U.S., defending free speech is part of defending religious freedom too. When one part of the First Amendment is attacked, the others are endangered. Suzanne Nossel, former CEO of PEN America, an organization defending free expression, explains it this way: “As set out in the First Amendment, free speech is a series of interlocking rights that collectively ensure that citizens have the ability to perpetuate and perfect their system of governance.” These protections — of freedom of belief, speech, the press, and assembly, and the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances — are both private and public. “Those freedoms are the essence of democratic citizenship,” writes Nossel.
A bookstore raid in Jerusalem and a green-card holder detained in New York may feel far away for some people — but people of faith, and people of privilege, must stand against these attacks. In his famous poem, German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller (who initially supported Hitler, then spent his life repenting that support) reminds us why “First they came for the Communists / and I did not speak out / Because I was not a Communist ... Then they came for me / And there was no one left / to speak out for me.” As Christians, we are called to speak up for the silenced until they can speak for themselves, to speak up for the bookseller and the activist. This is how God’s justice is loosed in the world. How are you speaking up?
