Earlier this week, Israel’s police arrested Mahmoud and Ahmad Muna – the owner and his nephew, respectively, of the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem – and raided two of their shops. (Mahmoud is the co-editor of Daybreak in Gaza, from which Vashti published an excerpt last October). The police confiscated dozens of the shop’s Arabic and English books, looking for anything with the word Palestine or the Palestinian flag.
Authorities entered the premises on the basis of suspected terror offences and accused Mahmoud and Ahmad of “inciting and supporting terrorism” through their books (including a colouring book). The police maintained their assertion of incitement even though the arrests were ultimately made on the basis of “disturbing public order”, a similarly absurd, if less severe, charge. The two were held for multiple nights in the Russian Compound prison, and released on Tuesday to house arrest and a ban on entering their shops for 20 days.
On the same day of the arrests, Afro-Palestinian activist Shaden Quous was released on bail, following a month of arbitrary detention. She was arrested on 6 January and similarly accused of incitement, in this case for social media posts. Shaden was released, one can only assume deliberately, hours after the funeral of her father, writer and African Community Society executive director Mousa Quous, who died unexpectedly in a fire on 9 February. …..more