Israeli police raid Palestinian bookstore in east Jerusalem and confiscate books about the conflict Israeli police have raided a long-established Palestinian-owned bookstore in east Jerusalem, detaining the owners and confiscating books about the decades-long conflict.
As an example, the police referred to an English-language children’s coloring book entitled “From the River to the Sea,” a reference to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that today includes Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The three-story bookstore that was raided on Sunday has a large selection of books, mainly in Arabic and English, about the conflict and the wider Middle East, including many by Israeli and Jewish authors.
The bookstore's owners, Ahmed and Mahmoud Muna, were detained, and police confiscated hundreds of titles related to the conflict before ordering the store's closure, according to May Muna, Mahmoud's wife.
She said the soldiers picked out books with Palestinian titles or flags, “without knowing what any of them meant.” She said they used Google Translate on some the Arabic titles to see what they meant before carting them away in plastic bags.
