Through books history speaks, and with her death he becomes silent.
When the Mongols invaded the city of the first civilization Baghdad led by Hulagu Khan, they burned the House of Wisdom, which contains valuable books in various fields, and threw a lot of books in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and killed many people of science and culture, so they shut up a long and important part of history.
And because the Jews are the Mongols and barbarians of this era, they almost for Palestinian books and literature, after the establishment of their statelet on the ruins of its legitimate people, they exterminated more than 26,315 books in a new and lethal form to deal with cultural property. These forms were characterized by the systematic demolition of civilization, books and libraries, and this demolition was not in vain or unintentional, but we can say that it is a programmed product of occupation and political ferocity and an integral part of it.
At the beginning of June 1957, the director of the Jewish book repository department expressed to Mr. Salmon, the director of the Arabic Knowledge Department at the time, his regret for not moving forward with the “extermination of Arabic books… Meanwhile, the Accountant General’s tender for the sale of waste paper has ended, so you can move forward,” he said.
Here came the word “extermination of books”, a barbaric word that assassinates the memory of a people, even its civilization and history. This is what the occupying Power has sought and is seeking to abolish the other and replace it with another rootless people.
Today, in its war on Gaza 2023-2024, the barbaric Jewish bombing destroyed more than 70% of public and private libraries in the Strip. For example, the enemy bombed the Gaza Municipality Library, and none of its books or historical belongings were spared from the bombing.
The library consisted of three floors containing a large number of historical documents and volumes containing old Palestinian newspapers. The central archive of the city belonging to the Gaza municipality, which contained very important historical documents ranging from one hundred to one hundred and fifty years old, was also destroyed. They also killed dozens of Gaza’s scientists and intellectuals.
We also do not exclude schools with their libraries and warehouses that contain thousands of books, whether educational or those representing all fields, whether literary, philosophical and others. Quoting the Palestinian Ministry of Education, it said that the Israeli warplanes bombed 281 public schools and 65 schools belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Thus, the education sector, with its libraries and books, is one of the victims of the genocide of this war. If we assume the reconstruction of libraries and schools, how will the books that have been destroyed be returned to the shelves of new libraries???