Everyday Activist - The Great Book Robbery

Posted on Monday, May 18, 2015 at 11:00 PM

Review: The Great Book Robbery

Movie Review by Everyday Activist X CalgaryMovies.com

The Justice for Palestinians Mini-Film Festival 2015 is on Saturday, May 23, 2015 from 1:00pm onward at the CommunityWise Resource Centre (223 12th Avenue SW, Calgary, AB). They have three films, discussion and free popcorn. The last movie at 4:15pm is The Great Book Robbery (2012 | 57 min).

Art and culture shape who we are as people and help us understand the past. One of the great tragedies for Old English scholars was a fire that destroyed many ancient manuscripts. A few dedicated people managed to save the epic tale of Beowulf and few shorter works. These stories provided the scaffolding for great works enjoyed today, such as Lord of the Rings. Now imagine someone intentionally chasing you out of your home with gunfire and bombs and then because your house is abandoned goes in and takes all your stuff. If you watched Woman in Gold, you might think I’m talking about the Nazis coming into Jewish homes and taking all their stuff. I assure you I’m not.

The Great Book Robbery talks about Israeli soldiers forcing Palestinians from their homes and then going into abandon homes to collect the valuables; in this case books. They sent the books to the National Library for cataloging. From the Jewish side, they say they were saving the books from further destruction and had every intention of returning them to the original owners, which of course still hasn’t happened sixty years later. The result is generations of people with missing pieces of their past, not because of flood or fire, but because of war.

One of the historians in the movie had a fantastic idea to build a Nakba (Catastrophe) museum and to display all the collected books and other artifacts from the war in 1948, as an act of reconciliation between the Jewish settlers and the Palestinians. Of course the government turned him down; because that means admitting that the books weren’t collected in an appropriate manner. Also, as seen in the documentary, Speed Sisters, the Israeli soldiers have no problem shooting at unarmed women and thus we can assume reconciliation isn’t a priority. Another idea to reunite Palestinians with their books came from a lawyer who helped catalog the books when they first came into the National library. He suggested they should go to the Palestinian universities, which hasn’t happened yet either.

To access some of the works, a curator published some beautiful photographs about the Palestine resistance that had been locked in the Israeli archives. The photographer’s studio had been looted, but his pictures survived. People can check out the books from the National Library, but that’s where the transparency ends. The Custodian for Absentee Property (the keeper of confiscated books from the war in 1948) refused to be interviewed and the film maker was not allowed to officially film in the library. After all these years, it’s still a political mess.

If you can make the Justice for Palestinians Min-Film Festival, check out this and the other documentaries there. But if you’re like me and can’t make it, this film is also available on YouTube.

Calgary Local Scene: Justice for Palestinians Mini-Film Festival 2015 >
YouTube:  The Great Book Robbery >