Librarians Resist Israel’s Efforts to Destroy Palestinian Cultural Heritage

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Ten months into its assault on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 40,000 people from the besieged strip and also demolished some of the main repositories of Palestinian cultural heritage, including the Central Archives of Gaza City, the Gaza Municipal Library and the Islamic University of Gaza Library — acts condemned by the American Library Association in January. As the United States funds Israel’s aggression and supplies its weapons, librarians are documenting and sharing information about destruction of the region’s information sector in solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues. Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP), a network of activists, is leading this charge.

LAP’s solidarity efforts began in 2013, when an international delegation of librarians and archivists from the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and Trinidad and Tobago traveled to Palestine to meet with colleagues for discussion, collaboration and connection. The trip was organized by Hannah Mermelstein, a librarian who led more than 25 delegations to the region prior to joining the field, including through Birthright Unplugged, an organization she co-founded; participants were engaged in various ways in the struggle for Palestinian freedom. “The substance of these professions are information access, cultural heritage and information literacy,” says LAP member Melissa Morrone, a public librarian in Brooklyn, New York. “We all had shared concerns.”

For Palestinian librarians, Israeli restrictions on imports dating to 2007 meant that school librarians faced inordinate challenges in building collections of culturally relevant materials. Twenty years before the recent mass destruction of Palestinian schools, universities and libraries, the delegation visited a library in Lyd that had been turned into a police station.

For librarians from the U.S., concerns about fact and narrative in public conversations about Palestine were primary. “The ideas we have about Israel and Palestine are shaped by distorted information flows,” says Morrone. “We have reasons to interrogate what we know about the so-called conflict in the Middle East and have particular roles as information workers in the struggle for peace and justice in the region.” Such distortion includes a U.S. mainstream discourse that overwhelmingly prioritizes the perspectives of Israelis, as well as long-standing challenges in obtaining published materials from Palestine. As stewards of public memory who are committed to ensuring that all sides of every story can be told, librarians have a particular stake in this struggle.

Following the trip, LAP launched several projects, including Matloub/Wanted, a collaboration with the Tamer Institute in Ramallah, to raise awareness of collections restrictions while supplying books to libraries; producing and distributing zines and other educational materials; and One Book, Many Communities, an annual campaign introducing readers to Palestinian literature. The group read Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail in 2021 with reading events held around the world.

October 7, 2023, and what came after reshaped the organization. “It jolted us,” says Morrone. Everything the group had long been concerned about — the durability of cultural institutions in the face of occupation, the need to ensure information from Palestine could be circulated in the U.S. and beyond — took on a new urgency. The global network of LAP members began asking what they could do in response to the violence. And as one of the only library organizations focused on Palestinian libraries, LAP membership began to grow.

“People would be googling for organizations for library people working on Palestinian issues and we came up,” says Morrone. The group saw an exponential increase in member interest. In response, LAP developed a toolkit to assist those new to solidarity organizing find a way in. Projects include ongoing research on the destruction of Gaza’s libraries and archives and efforts to preserve social media as evidence of genocide.

This work has coincided with growing workplace repression for information workers in the U.S. Maggie Schreiner, LAP steering committee member, says this took many forms. “We were hearing about prohibitions on people using internal communications platforms to talk about what was happening, limits on pins and buttons and what people could wear,” Schreiner says. Book displays, programs, and other efforts to engage with the ongoing war on Gaza faced cancellation. And people were scared. “So many people were entering the movement for the first time, and it can be very hard to do this work if you are not embedded in a movement.”

In response, LAP launched biweekly community solidarity and support calls that brought together information workers experiencing workplace repression for the first time. Out of those calls, the group felt a need to document what people were facing. In June, LAP launched its censorship tracker, inviting library workers to share their stories. In the first six weeks, the group has captured more than 50 individual experiences from library and archives workers across the globe.

“On a workplace-wide call, our Chief Librarian indicated that wearing a watermelon pin while at work would be subjected to discipline, and that if we don’t like that we can quit,” one librarian reported to the censorship tracker. (The watermelon has been widely used as subversive shorthand to demonstrate support for Palestinian liberation.) Another was directed to remove their keffiyeh in the workplace. “I have been told that I did not break any code of conduct, policy, or dress code, but that the decision was made because my actions made a patron feel unsafe,” the librarian told LAP. The tracker maintains the anonymity of those making reports, a sign of the fear many workers in the sector experience.

These stories take place in the context of ongoing struggles against censorship in libraries that have spiked since 2021. The bulk of that attention has been on the suppression of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC stories, and LAP is working to ensure that censorship of Palestinian stories is documented, too. “As one of the last remaining commons, we have to be sure that these discussions can take place in libraries,” says Schreiner.

Such discussions depend, of course, on there being a library in the first place — impossible in the Gaza of today. Beyond the loss of buildings and books, LAP notes in its preliminary report, such destruction “impoverishes the collective identity of the Palestinian people, irrevocably denies them their history, and violates their sovereignty.” For members of LAP, these are library issues too.