Subject area: Discussion on a documentary about a book robbery in Palestine

Format: Podcast

Length: 1 hour

Audience: library workers, historians, general audience interested in libraries and Palestinian history

Organisers: Library Punk Podcast

Presenters: Librarypunk hosts

 

Reflection:

The objective of listening to this episode was to gain insights, awareness and knowledge about a vast collection of Palestinian books housed in the National Library of Israel that were stolen by the Israeli army during the Nakba (1948-1949). The hosts discuss the film ‘The Great Book Robbery’ by Benny Brunner which is freely available on Youtube. As Palestine is a pertinent topic of our current political climate, I wanted to seek out if any library workers were engaging with this topic and considering its relationship to libraries. I also felt that it was important to consider this historical example of settler colonial ownership of stolen Indigenous cultural materials to reflect more deeply and honestly about the parallels we can draw to the Australian context, and what questions and considerations surround ownership of First Nations archival material and collections that are found in library institutions across the country.

I learned about the way the speed of genocide and cultural destruction of the Palestinian people translated into systematic looting of an enormous collection of up to 70,000 cultural items. It was part of the colonial project to exploit old Arabic texts to build up the legitimacy of the Hebrew University as a research university and hold onto antiquities to raise their prestige. Overtime, Palestinians who were interested in this collection were also prevented from accessing it and prevented from claiming custodianship of collection items. The documentary interviewed people who were processing the collection and revealed issues about culturally appropriating Palestinian literature as their own and alienating Palestinians from these cultural artefacts, which was an extension of the broader project of land theft and cultural destruction.

This was an incredibly interesting documentary and was refreshing to listen to a podcast that is very explicit about their values and leftist politics that surrounds such a controversial and highly contested political issue. It was valuable for me as an aspiring public librarian also to make the connections between past and present, and made me think about what special collections or Indigenous cultural material do public libraries hold and how did they gain possession of this material? Is there a question of what family or mob certain cultural items belong to and are there any policies or processes in place to return items to traditional owners? These are difficult, deeply complicated questions I believe all GLAMR institutions are still grappling with given our historical context as organizations built on stolen aboriginal land.