“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?” – Captain Beatty, Fahrenheit 451.
In Ray Bradbury’s timeless McCarthy-era dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, knowledge is contraband, and firemen ignite rather than extinguish. Fireman Guy Montag takes pride in torching books under antagonist Captain Beatty, until a spark of curiosity reveals the state’s deepest fear: the written word. As he awakens to the possibilities within the written word, Montag sees how censorship suffocates thought, individuality, and truth.
1984 (the year, not the novel)
Ahmad Muna, born in the Shuafat refugee camp, founded the Educational Bookshop in east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as a hybrid between a bookstore and a communal space for its awaiting eclectic, feisty, political, and active cohort of Israelis, Palestinians, and internationals, centered around the power of education and the sharing of ideas.
The bookstore was later owned by Imad, one of Ahmad’s seven children, and run by his brother Mahmoud together with Imad’s son Ahmad. It eventually opened in two additional locations, one across the road from the first, on Salah Ad Din Street, and the other in the famed American Colony Hotel.
Fast forward to 2025
On the afternoon of February 9, 2025, members of the Israeli Police and a Shin Bet officer raided two branches of the Educational Bookshop on suspicion of “affiliation with a terror organization and ‘inciting material.’”
Legally speaking, however, a search warrant for such offenses requires the authorization of the State Attorney’s Office, which they did not have.
Ahmad told me that when he arrived at the bookstore, he saw Mahmoud arrested in front of his 12-year-old daughter.
“They arrested him in front of her,” corroborated another of Mahmoud’s brothers, Morad. Ahmad was also taken into custody.
Morad said that the police used Google Translate to decipher the Arabic of the books, and seized everything they claimed was “inciting,” such as books with the word “Palestine” or the Palestinian flag on them, a copy of a Haaretz article with a photo of the hostages on it, the books of Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, and My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit.
After arresting Mahmoud and Ahmad, both permanent residents of Israel, the police charged them with breaching the peace and detained them for one night. This was followed by another day of detention after a request for an additional eight days was denied.
An application to detain the brothers further under house arrest and ban them from their stores was also made by the police, the BBC reported their lawyer, Nasser Odeh, saying.
A STATEMENT issued by Israel Police in the matter read:
“Israel Police will continue countermeasures against offenses of incitement and terror support while exhausting capabilities and means. This is in addition to locating and arresting those involved, as well as in crimes of intent to harm the security of the State of Israel wherever they are.”
To their statement, shared on WhatsApp, Israel Police attached a photo of the cover of a children’s coloring book titled From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book, also seized from the Educational Bookshop, though still available on its website – and on Amazon.
The book, published in South Africa, showcases anti-apartheid and Palestinian champion Nelson Mandela, the Nakba [Palestinian national disaster], the Dome of the Rock, and the First and Second Intifadas. It also has images of children throwing rocks at the IDF and of Palestinian activist and symbol Ahed Tamimi.
The police could have tried to charge the booksellers with incitement or terror support, but they didn’t. Instead, as noted before, they ordered an investigation based on the disturbance of public order because they knew they did not have grounds for that allegation, in accordance with the State Attorney’s Office.
Mahmoud and Ahmad were released on Tuesday. Neither had been questioned since the day of their arrest.
A GROWING trend in the Israeli police’s arsenal of absurdities over the last few years (accentuated following Oct. 7 and the high tensions within Israeli society) has been the use of “disorderly conduct” and “breach of the peace” charges to circumvent the need for legal authorization from the State Attorney’s Office to be able to investigate, thus blurring the lines between facts and fiction, guilt and innocence.
Morad called it “First-degree political persecution and sabotaging the good relations between local Israelis and Palestinians.”
The practice has been used countless times against Arab and Israeli civilians, from the Tamra teacher taken in a police car [for a video she posted dancing, with the caption “On this day 10/7/23”] to the thousands of Arab residents exercising their free speech, all the way to hostage protesters. In most cases, they are released a few days later with no charges or suspicions, and we forget about it until the next time.
It appears to be an intimidation tactic.
THIS ISN’T the first case of the political persecution of the cultural aspect of Palestinian identity, either. Over the last few years, east Jerusalem centers such as the Yabous Cultural Center, El-Hakawati theater, and the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music have been raided; and there’s been the long tragicomic saga of funding for Haifa’s Al-Midan Theater, featuring Miri Regev and former attorney-general Yehuda Weinstein.
Incidents of movie censorship surface every few months, such as with the recent documentaries The Governor and Lyd.
It’s all out in the open.
HOWEVER, THE case of the Educational Bookshop is a darker one, revealing a concise target bank, aimed at the core of our existence here, and precisely because everything the bookstore stands for – from its vibrant community to its radical empathy to its safe uncomfortability and to its political action stemming from knowledge, not ignorance – should be the ethos of Israeli-Palestinian society.
After Mahmoud and Ahmad’s arrests, Iyad, another of his brothers, told me, on the verge of tears, “I’m very angry. We believe in peace, we believe we have to live together, but look what has happened to us!
“Mahmoud is 41 and married, with three children. Ahmad is married, with one. They both have degrees from universities in England, are well educated and well read, and love the community here,” Morad said – whose own four children study at a bilingual Jerusalem school.
“The only place in which you can find Hebrew writers, English writers, Palestinian writers, you name it, on the same shelf, with books talking to each other, writers talking to each other, readers talking to each other, is here [at the Educational Bookshop],” he said.
“If that’s incitement, I’m an inciter,” Avraham Burg – former MK and speaker of the Knesset and former Jewish Agency chairman – told me outside the bookstore.
The assortment of books really is vast.
Discussing the range of publications and describing the atmosphere at the bookstore, Iyad said: “We tell everyone that anything can be done with dialogue. We have books about Golda Meir, Ben-Gurion, and Netanyahu.”
He quipped: “They may have taken Bibi’s book for incitement, too!”
“Israelis come here, they feel comfortable, they speak Hebrew, they’re not afraid to come. They know us, they know the family, they know the place, they know the clientele. We hold book readings for Israeli reporters,” Morad said.
“I don’t come as an Israeli, I come as a human being. In the craziness and lunacy all over us, it’s a spot of normalcy. It’s a place that you can walk into and slow down. And you can contemplate rather than compete. It’s not a race here, it’s a journey,” he explained.
Mahmoud might disagree with him, being someone who often exclaims, “There is nothing that’s not political!” when speaking about Palestinians and the conflict.
Notwithstanding, he said that those heated discussions are “exactly... where we should be.”
A successful event at the Educational Bookshop is “edgy,” “inconvenient,” and “provocative,” Mahmoud was quoted as saying in the independent, nonprofit publication The Urban Activist.
Morad continued to describe the Educational Bookshop: “The discourse is open. It’s a sane and safe space where anyone can say anything on their mind with no fear of head-butting.”
“It’s not about openness,” Burg told me, “It’s about enabling people from different walks of life to meet, to encounter, to accept, and to contradict. And this is the beauty of dialogue. You live in a society of so many harsh monologues, and all of a sudden you have a dialogue in this place.”
ELIANA PADWA, an activist who stands in front of the magistrate court, said: “I ran an event with Mahmoud, so we had a lot of conversations around that. And with Ahmad, he’s just one of my favorite people.
“Whenever I go in there [Educational Bookshop], we joke that I’m there to babysit his toddler, who’s often at the shop with him. When I took my parents there, it was their first time doing anything related to Palestinians in their lives, and it was the only thing they felt comfortable doing.
“They were all like, ‘East Jerusalem, I’m kind of nervous’ ... ‘I have to wear a baseball cap over my kippah.’
“And then, they entered the shop and I was like, ‘This is Ahmad, he’s my bestie.’ And he’s chatting with them and chatting with me and showing them around and, for the first time, helped them enter that whole world.
“And then, he and I were in a conversation for two hours, until my parents said, ‘We can’t solve the conflict right now, so it’s time to go.’
“But just the most amazing, open, welcoming, willing to talk about anything honest and steadfast, without being mean, the best person I’ve met.”
SO, WHY, despite all of this, would things turn out the way they did?
“Don’t ask me to explain any police around the world on any given day in history, especially not the Israeli one, now,” Burg said.
“I was very, very sad to see that this is what it became. But on the other hand, I was very, very happy. It means somebody is afraid of the written word. Somebody is afraid of content. Someone is afraid of alternatives.
“And the more fearful they are, the more optimistic I am.”
The loaded gun Beatty speaks about ends up being Fahrenheit’s society and its own ignorance, as the city crumbles and obliterates itself with nuclear bombs, and Montag joins a rebel group dedicated to preserving literature.
As it pertains to the Educational Bookshop and the bullish governmental police, the loaded gun isn’t the presence of Palestinian identity, political and educational action, and books. It will be the absence of them.
“At the end of the day, our books are stronger than their shallowness,” Burg said. “Go and buy them.”
At the end of Fahrenheit 451, the leader of the rebel group, Granger, says: “And when the war is over, someday, some year, the books can be written again; the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it down. And someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We’ll pick up where we left off and go on.”