The Great Book Robbery
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Dan Walsh liberation@igc.org
3:25 PM (3 hours ago)
to me
The Great Book Robbery
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yndra/4937647556/
Chronicles of a cultural destruction: The story of 60,000 looted books.
The film will reconstruct in a multifaceted approach the systematic looting - by the newly born State of Israel - of 60,000 Palestinian books during the 1948 war.
Documentary teaser: vimeo.com/6303260. The project's website: www.thegreatbookrobbery.org
The story of the stolen books is not only at the heart of our project but also the launching pad of a much bigger and wider endeavor: We intend on communicating the scope and depth of the Palestinian tragedy through the destruction of Palestinian culture in 1948.
Dramatic new light illuminates the disaster that wreaked not only the Palestinian people in 1948 but also their culture. A particularly chilling document, from March 1948, lists tens of Jerusalemites whose libraries were looted.
For decades Zionist and Israeli propaganda described the Palestinians as “people without culture.” Thus, the victorious Israeli state took upon itself to civilise the Palestinians who remained within its borders at the end of the 1948 war: They were forbidden to study their own culture or to remember their immediate past; their memory was seen as a dangerous weapon that had to be suppressed and controlled.