Books On Fire

 

If you can spare 40 seconds, check out this video of a Palestinian child going through the rubble of destroyed buildings looking for books. Several other such vids are also easily available.

The book hunters are not looking for reading material, although Palestinian culture has always valued literature and poetry.

These kids need the books for fuel to cook the last scraps of food they have available. It’s been well over a month since Israel – with full U.S. support—cut off their cooking fuel supplies.

If you can spare a few more minutes, you could also read a rather poignant essay by a young Palestinian woman whose family is now burning the books from the shelves in their homes for the same reason.  She writes about her childhood in a family that placed enormous value on books and reading.  She writes:

I still remember the day our parents surprised us with a home library. It was a tall and wide piece of furniture with lots of shelves that they had placed in the living room. I was just five years old, but I recognised the sacredness of its corner from the very first moment.

 

Family outings were often to bookstores, and over time they built a library of which they were very proud. And when a ceasefire was declared this past January, the author thought the books had survived. But, as she continues:

… in early March, the genocide resumed. All humanitarian aid was blocked: no food, no medical supplies, and no fuel could enter. We ran out of gas in less than three weeks. The full blockade and the massive bombardment made it impossible to find any other source of fuel for cooking.

So the author did what she had to do, though she maintained a rich sense of irony:

I had no choice but to concede. Standing before our library, I reached for the international human rights law volumes. I decided they had to go first. We were taught these legal norms at school, we were made to believe that our rights as Palestinians were guaranteed by them and that one day, they would lead to our liberation.

 

 And so, it turns out that book burning can be a symbol of bad times in more ways than one. It’s bad enough when your government wants to burn your books to control your thinking. It’s even worse when you have to burn your own books to survive.

Palestinians are in that position as a direct result of U.S. government policies over the past several decades. That government – ours – has long since stopped pretending to respect human rights abroad. It has disdained human rights in countries too numerous to mention here.

 Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised that the same government is now showing such disdain for basic human rights here at home.