Last week, as the missiles rained down on Gaza, one had a very particular and peculiar target – Samir Mansour’s bookshop. Mansour had built this extraordinary library over two decades and perhaps 90,000 volumes were stacked up on the shelves and stairways. Many were in Arabic, but it was also the premier foreign language bookshop in Gaza.

It was May 18, at 5:50 am and Mansour had seen the warning that the Israelis were going to bomb his building. He was two hundred meters back, watching, wishing there was something he could do. After the first missile, his feet dragged him forward, longing to save his treasured books.  Fortunately, he was held back, while more missiles littered his volumes all over Gaza University Street. Mansour started stumbling through the rubble. The tattered pages included War and Peace, but the heavy emphasis was on war.

The Israeli bombs have taken the lives of several children in recent days, yet the missile that destroyed the bookstore sought to rob an entire generation of their dreams. The destruction of books has been the hallmark of the despot for centuries, as the oppressor is forever threatened by knowledge, always incinerating the words of those who challenge their tenuous grasp on power. In their song “Books are Burning”, the British band XTC wrote about this: “I believe the printed word is more than sacred, beyond the gauge of good or bad: The human right to let your soul fly free and naked above the violence of the fearful and sad.”

My fellow American lawyer, Mahvish Rukhsana, and I were moved to start a GoFundMe page where all donations will go to restore Mansour’s life’s work: with your help, we will ensure that the library rises from the ashes. Yet we need to go much further.  In addition to raising money, we are soliciting second-hand books from people around the world, in all languages, where the erstwhile owner describes inside the cover the inspiration she found in its pages. We hope you will include an email address so that any Gaza reader can make a friend somewhere far from the mayhem.

And those who profit from all this devastation need to be called to account. One of the pictures I saw of the wreckage of Sami Mansour’s bookshop showed the book Curtains among the rubble. It is cast as the “last case” of Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot, but we have another mystery for the famous Belgian detective. We have asked Mansour to comb the wreckage for fragments of the missile that destroyed his vast library. We have asked him forensically to photograph the serial number of the weapon so that we can trace it back to the manufacturer. Those who relish death and destruction are, in the end, simply deranged and their madness must be exposed.

“I agonized over why this happened,” Samir Mansoor told me. “I did not spread hatred. I tried to spread culture, science, and love. I wept, but I swore that I would rebuild my library all over again no matter what it took from me.”

I can only speak for myself, but the Jewish half of me hopes that enlightened people in Israel will reach across the Gaza border themselves with books – instead of bombs. There is an eternal truth encapsulated by another lyricist, Michael Franti: “We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can’t bomb it into peace.” Selling weapons is an awful profession; promoting peace, on the other hand, brings benefit to us all.

 

Clive Stafford Smith is an Anglo-American human rights lawyer. If you wish to learn more about this project, he can be contacted at clive@3dc.org.uk. He asks everyone to be sure that donations go to their intended beneficiary; the GoFundMe page authorized by Samir Mansour is “Rebuild Gaza’s Samir Mansour Book Store” at https://www.gofundme.com/f/rebuild-gazas-samir-mansour-book-store?utm_campaign=p_cp_url&utm_medium=os&utm_source=customer.