Gaza's largest bookstore is reborn from the rubble

More than 3,000 homes declared uninhabitable.

Some 50 schools and six hospitals damaged by the bombs.

And, for the first time in the four wars in Gaza since 2008, three bookstores razed.

Israel reduced to rubble in May the premises with 100,000 volumes that Samir Mansur had converted in the last 20 years into the largest and most prestigious bookstore in the Palestinian Strip.

Two other establishments specialized in university texts were also totally or partially destroyed in the attacks.

Thanks to an international popular microfinance collection and donations of copies offered from abroad, the bookseller and publisher is preparing to reopen this fall in a new space in the capital of the coastal enclave.

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"When the Kahil building is rebuilt, in the center of the city, which was bombed in the early morning of May 18, our project is to create a cultural center there with the donated works," explains Mansur, 54, in the office located in the attic that crowns its other bookstore, located next to the faculties of the Islamic University. "I was born among books and my father taught me the trade at the foot of the shelves since I was 14 years old," he details while his eldest son, Mohamed, offers coffee and orange juice to the foreign journalist, "and now I have a new generation with me of the family to move on ”. University students, elementary school students, intellectuals and authors, language students, for all of them its large bookstore was a must-see, unparalleled in the whole territory, before being devastated.

Led by human rights lawyers Clive Stafford Smith and Mahvish Rukhsana, who have defended detainees at Guantánamo, the collection for reconstruction has already reached $ 240,000 (about 200,000 euros) and is about to reach the target set for cover the popular patronage campaign. Thousands of works have also been offered by publishers and individuals to replenish their publishing fund, although Mansur acknowledges that it will be difficult for them to reach their new premises from the Israeli port of Ashdod. "The Army controls everything that enters Gaza," he warns.

Mansur received the latest editorial news published in Cairo, Amman or Beirut, and had the best offer of literature and essays in English on the Mediterranean fringe.

"We had many children's, religious, language teaching works ...", he recalls with nostalgia of the disappeared establishment in the center of the city, a meeting point for authors and intellectuals and that for many readers of Gaza was a cultural escape route from the blockade imposed by Israel on the Palestinian enclave for 15 years.

Crammed into just 365 square kilometers, the Strip's two million inhabitants suffer from one of the highest population densities in the world.

The bookseller and publisher Samir Mansur, in front of the remains of his bookstore, destroyed by an Israeli bombing, in May in Gaza.Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag

“I don't understand why they attacked us. We are not a military target, nor are we affiliated with any political organization, ”Mansur wonders four months after the bombing. The Israeli Army assured then that the library building had been used by Hamas militiamen to manufacture weapons and that the Islamist organization hid its activities in civilian buildings, but the bookseller replied that there were only offices of private educational centers.

Mansur published an average of a hundred works by local authors a year, always in limited runs of between 500 and 1,000 copies. He has also published translations into Arabic of classics such as

Les Miserables

, by Victor Hugo, or

Crime and Punishment,

by Fiódor Dostoyevski. But his editorial work has ceased since the May escalation, which claimed more than 250 deaths, including 66 children, in Gaza in some 600 Israeli bombing waves, and another 13 lives in Israel as a result of the shooting of more than 4,000 rockets by Islamist militias from the enclave.

Two other bookstores, among a total of a dozen relevant establishments, were also destroyed or seriously damaged in the fourth war in Gaza, in an unprecedented cultural setback for the battered Palestinian territory. Shaban Eslim, 34, treasures the elegant calligraphic printed Quran that he rescued from the rubble of the Irqa (Read, in Arabic) bookstore, located near university campuses. He has just rented an adjoining premises with which the bombs destroyed in May to try to resume activity in October, coinciding with the start of the course in the faculties. “The Israeli military only gave us time to evacuate the bookstore. We could not save any work, ”says Eslim, who claims to have lost more than 70.$ 000 for the destruction of the copies of your establishment.

The bookseller Shaban Eslim points out the place where his bookstore, destroyed by Israeli bombings, with a Koran rescued from the rubble, stood on 9 September in Gaza.

Juan Carlos Sanz placeholder image

Although he also tried to organize a popular fundraiser abroad, this bookseller regrets that the authorities of Hamas, the Islamist movement that has ruled de facto in the Strip since 2007, have prevented him from pursuing the microfinance campaign.

"I prefer not to comment on this matter," ditch when asked to detail what happened.

"Nor have I received public aid to rebuild my business," he adds.

"I wonder if there is any official interest in books in Gaza."

The attack on the Mansur bookstore and others in the Strip represents a devastating blow to the dissemination of knowledge from which the Palestinian territory will take time to recover. Thanks to the editorial work of some booksellers, the Gazan authors were able to break their forced isolation and send computer media containing the composition of the works to Egypt so that they could be printed in the neighboring country before being distributed in the Arab world. Many of these texts also finally returned to the Strip in the form of books, bypassing the barriers of the blockade.

The international collection campaign aims to exceed the threshold of $ 250,000 set to refloat the Mansur bookstore from the rubble of the last war. “We are victims of an attack on culture; collateral damage from a dispute in which we are not directly involved. It is clear that Israel made a serious mistake with us ”, concludes the veteran bookseller and publisher. Now he dreams of organizing the opening ceremony of his new store with tens of thousands of volumes, predictably in November. He hopes to invite all the architects of the international patronage operation and the authors of the enclave whose works he has published in the last two decades. "Our bookstore survived two intifadas and three wars, but it has not been able to withstand the bombs of the fourth conflict," laments Mansur,"But books are still my life, my spiritual children."