librarypunk - 114 - The Great Book Robbery (2012)

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

We’re watching a documentary about Palestine! Libraries and museums are implicated in settler-colonialism and we’re gonna talk about it! Media mentioned Film: The Great Book Robbery: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/witness/2012/5/24/the-great-book-robbery  Reddit Question: https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/17w0bu8/other_trans_library_directors/ Salvage or Plunder? Israel's "Collection" of Private Palestinian Libraries in West Jerusalem: https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42473  Overdue Books Paper: https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/78440#:~:text=At%20the%20same%20time%2C%20the,other%2C%20still%20in%20historic%20Palestine.  Overdue Books Zine: https://librarianswithpalestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Overdue-Books-AP-zine.pdf  Antiquities Trafficking: https://2017-2021.state.gov/tackling-illicit-trafficking-of-antiquities-and-its-ties-to-terrorist-financing/  Hobby Lobby’s Hammurabi Robbing Hobby: Power and Appropriation at the Museum of the Bible: https://theijournal.ca/index.php/ijournal/article/view/39322  Other stuff related USPS General Delivery: https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-General-Delivery  Librarians with Palestine Readings and Resources: https://librarianswithpalestine.org/readings-and-resources/  Land Grab Universities: https://www.landgrabu.org/ Join the discord https://discord.gg/bYBNxPbT

I'm Justin, I'm Skalkaum Library, my pronouns are he and they? I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. And I'm Jay. I'm a music library director, and my pronouns are he him? I'm transgender. Speak your truth, Miss Robinette. There was another thing Biden said. I saw a video of him saying, like, you know, it would be so much easier if I just woke up one day and decided I was transgender. And Audrey from Radio Free Topag told me about that. And I already seen it. And I was like, oh, I just assumed that was a deal. deep fake, but he could have said it.

I just will never get to the fact that his middle name is Robinette. Like, that's like my favorite fun fact in the whole world. And this Robinette, like, it's so good. I love it when guys have like a Victorian grandma middle name, you know. Yeah. All right. Let me see if I can find something real last second on libraries. I think I've got, there's a lot of questions in our libraries, which is actually pretty good.

It'd be nice to answer a bunch of questions. But I think we have a question box in the Discord, right? So join the Discord, put stuff in the question box, or I guess you could email it to us. I had a question box thing, but I didn't like the software. It was annoying. So those are your two options. But sending questions. There's one here.

Other trans library directors? Hello. I'm looking to connect anyone else who has experience as an outtrans person serving as a library director. Ooh, who. Yeah. Hi. They just say, hey, shout out. Come in the discord.

Yeah. Maybe I'll just post the episode in the comments like I did that one time. Greetings, comrade. Like, hello. I googled this one time or search engineed this one time actually because I was very curious. So far, I've mainly seen public library directors, like one or two here or there, mainly trans-masculine people. I haven't seen many trans women as library directors. It's mainly been trans men, which I think says something not good.

But I don't even think there are dozens of us, dozens, but there's a couple of us. There's like news because one had like stepped down because the community got mad for something. I don't know. Reasons. But yes, hello, comrade. I saw a good one. They're actually two about like computer access times. But this one, B.C. reservation print management software. What do you all use and how much does it suck or not suck?

I'm doing some research into reservation and print management software. I have used in Visionware a lot in the past and haven't had too much issue with it. But I'm looking into alternatives. So may I ask what reservation print management software does your library use currently? And do you recommend it? Is it easy for patrons to use? Do you have many issues with it? Someone says Sam is bad. It all sucks. Cassie. Cassie sucks. And then in Visionware. Sadie, you should do some like slam poetry about how that all the library printing software is. It'd be pretty good, I think. That could be fun.

It was a related question, which is like, how long do you let people who are not patrons use the PCs? Because we have to give someone a guest pass. As long as they fuck it. And then you only get one a day, and it's only 30 minutes. Well, I understand if you only have like eight computers and you have like a one room library, like you've got to like rotate people out. I mean, you don't have to. but like you got to balance the needs of people. Yeah.

Maybe like have like like something I tell my students all the time with any kind of material is that like you check it out and you have it for this amount of time and you can do it for this amount of time. However, because we're so small, it's like if no one puts a hold on this, I don't mind extending your checkout date because if no one else is like putting a hold on it or asking for it or anything, then like I don't see why you can't just keep it. You know, so maybe that kind of thing. We're thinking you have a standard time for guest pass, but if no one else has been asking for it or a computer, then just let him hang out. That would be how I would approach that. That was pretty much the policy of my old library,

is if there were other open computers and you needed, you wanted another guest pass or you wanted an extension. They just did that. Also, like a lot of these things auto extend if there is, if you're using a reservation system, they'll just auto extend a session if you, the patron clicks a button. Yeah.

And like anytime there's like stuff like this, I always like to remind people that so many library policies like this are designed to keep homeless people from using the library. And so like think about that kind of access. Like if you're putting a rule on time, what is it actually doing? What is it actually for? Is it to make sure that people cycle in and out and actually can use the computer or is it to keep homeless people from using your computers? Yeah. And this is in this case, it is most of their regulars are homeless. But they don't have a regular address.

And I guess they have to have like a library card to not use the guest pass. And so since they don't have fixed addresses, they can't get a library card. So it does seem like an anti-homeless thing. There's a lot of comments. One of my old libraries did it. If you did if you had general delivery at like a local post office, you could have a library card. And they did that specifically. So more of our homeless patrons could actually have a library card.

What's general delivery? Basically, you don't have like a post office box or anything. They just deliver it to the post office and you go up there and you pick it up by name. I don't know if there's more to it than that, but the post office in one of the cities that had a particularly high population of unhoused people did general delivery. I don't know if every post office does it, but that one did. Is it different than a Pia box? Yeah, you don't pay for it. Oh.

Basically, it's a kind of like a, it's, you're taking your chances on whether or not you get all of your mail, like, which like is better than not having any place to get mail if you don't have a house. So. Yeah. It's also used for, so there's a, is an FAQ on the USPS website. It's for those without a permanent address, often uses a temporary mailing address. For post office locations without a city carrier service, non-suitable. city delivery offices for those who prefer not to use post office box service would be an unreasonable inconvenience, participating post office to serve transients, people who travel

extensively, and those without permanent address. Anyone who wants a post office box service when post office boxes are unavailable. So I guess it's also like a rural thing. Cool. Well, we've learned a lot. Thanks, Reddit. Goodbye Reddit. All right, we watched a movie. Legally acquired materials. Actually, this movie is free on the internet on Al Jazeera.com. It's called The Great Book Robbery, 2012. And it's based on, well, it's a documentary by Benny Bruner, who learned about this because he read a book about it while he was filming another documentary. I don't have the book title on hand, but we watch the documentary. And basically what it focuses on is a collection that is in the National Library of Israel. That is a...

is about, I'm getting different numbers here, but let me see if I can find the largest number that I saw. It was like, there was like thousands and thousands and thousands, like maybe 30,000 books that they know were like stolen or looted. But in this specific collection of ones that like they've labeled as AP of property, I think it's around 6,000. Yeah, yeah, I remember one about saying. I just remember there being a larger number mentioned than 30,000. And anyway, so during 1948 to 1949, when Israeli forces were going through unarmed areas of Palestine and moving people out, pretty quickly there was a military intelligence lineup with, I want to say Hebrew University, who then started sending out people to pick up books that were left behind from people who had evacuated. Left behind, air quotes. Well, yeah, left behind while evacuating.

And in the course of this documentary, there actually is someone who was in the IDF at the time. Was it the IDF in 48? No, we're a Palestinian, like, prisoner who was forced to be part of the looting team. Like, they made the Palestinian prisoners loot the houses. Right. There was him, but I think there was another person who wasn't in the IDF. And it was saying people were, it was towards the end. I don't think he was in the documentary a whole lot.

But he was saying how people were waiting outside of the cities. So like in Jerusalem was one of the major places where a lot of looting happened because that's where a lot of the rich families were. They were waiting to go back in. And he was talking to other IDF soldiers and saying like, you know, these are their houses. And the IDF soldiers who didn't speak Hebrew yet were like, no, they're not from here. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was near, that was closer to the end.

So, yeah, these were, it was pretty quick. And we also talk about two waves of looting. So basically the civilians would get pushed out. There would be initial settler looting. And then there would be the official looting, which would be done by the connections between the military and Hebrew University. And that was where we had Muhammad Batrawi, who was a POW who was forced to loot homes in different cities. I want to say in like the west of Palestine. Like Isdud, I think was one of them.

Yeah, I think that's where he was from. Yeah. Yeah. Like he had to loot his own house or watch his own house getting lit it, I think. Yeah, well, he went to Romla and then they were taken to Izud, and that was where he was from. So when they came to his house, he dug in the yard for something he had buried there before his family fled. Then he found it, and they realized it must be his home and told him to take the rest of the day off. So he watched other Palestinian prisoners loot his house.

Fucking A. So, yeah, I'm pulling from a zine by Anna Mermelstein, who wrote a paper on this and then wrote a zine about it, which will link to both. But she was also in the room for the interview with Batrawi. And he died right after this interview. And she's part of the group of librarians and archivists with Palestine. That's how we found all of this stuff was on their list of resources. Great. So we'll be linking to that too in the notes, but it's also we've been posting it in the Discord. So if you want to talk about all this stuff, during the Discord.

We haven't really been pushing it, but I've been putting the links in the notes. So go be in my head. I'm posting at 3 a.m. having existential crisis. And I'm like, I found resources. And then I put it in the Discord. That's usually how it happens. Seasons are changing. Everyone's being weird.

Yeah. November's a bad month in general. So these, about 30,000 of these books, I want to say there was another count that was higher, but whatever, can't find it. They end up in the National Library. It was really interesting because there was a letter that they were reading from during the documentary, which is talking about how the old Arabic text would be very good for building up their legitimacy as a research university, which I was like, that's such a fucking research university. concern is like we're taking all the really important books. But I think that the documentary really focused on was like during the 20s and 30s, there's this rich like art movement in Palestine that subsequently like, you know, everyone leaves in 48, like all the rich people get out,

all the artists who are rich who get out and take things with them or leave them behind. Then what gets left behind is not even like all that important because like the novels and things like that, the university's not interested in. They want the old, valuable, prestigious stuff. And so a lot of this stuff is just sitting and not being circulated back into the community. And then people aren't building, like, new works off of them. So you've got, like, decades of missing culture because of the looting of these books and films and all kinds of other cultural materials, which is, you know, just straight up. It's really, like, the speed at which, like, genocide happens, the speed at which, like, cultural destruction

happens because you think about it with like, with, like, Meso-Americans. Like, Spanish were immediately destroying books and immediately destroying, like, whatever they could culturally. And you think, like, wow, that's really fast to be, like, on the genocide path. But then watching it, like, on film

and watching, like, hearing people who are still alive talk about, like, yeah, like, we go through, we settle the area and then we just, like, steal all the culture. And we're completely... It's the same process. In this, like, I want everyone to, like, you know, oh, we look at this distance, university off and we're like, oh wow, look, they did the bad thing. Think about your own library.

Have they done? Like, what kind of special collections have you got? Where do your books come from? What, you know, collections of, like, oppressed or colonized people do you have? And why do you have them? Like, what have you as a librarian personally held in your hands? Like, I, yeah. Like, this isn't just an Israel problem. Yeah. Well, one of the stories was from that that really kind of struck me was, if I say this right, Nashashibi library that somebody had, he had a really big library that was heavily looted. And I think it was his grandson that they were interviewing said he was at one of the university

and introduced himself to somebody. And they were like, oh, I know who you are. And he was like, how do you know who I am? And he says, well, we have some of your grandfather's books and like actually pulled them off the shelves. and showed him his own grandfather's books that had been looted from his house. And we're like, oh, yeah, they're part of our collection. One thing I love in the zine that's not in the documentary is because the person who made the zine, like, wrote up this paper.

Someone realized that they had one of these books because they had bought it at, like, a used bookstore and contacted and, like, was able to get it back to the family of the person who originally owned it. And it was just like, I was, that's really powerful that that happened. I know we like to talk shit about books on our fuck the fuck books library podcast, but like, it's the sort of like Western like book library and culture more that is like, but like thinking about this isn't just a book, you know, like this is a connection to family, to lineage, to history, to people.

culture to land and is something that colonizers took away and now is being returned. Like, it's, that's, that's cool shit. So I'm glad that that happened. Yeah, there are lots of, um, there are lots of, like, dedications and stuff. So in the, in the research that Rommelstein does, because all of these, so of the 30,000 books, about 6,000 of them are in this AP collection, abandoned properties. So they all have the call number that starts with AP, which is really nuts. I'm also seeing like a Dewey Decimal underneath it in one of these photos. But they began to catalog the books early on by subject and often by owner's names.

But in the 1960s, close to 6,000 were revisited and labels with the letters to AP for abandoned property. Library catalog shows no information on provenance. If that information had been recorded, it seems to have been erased or at least carefully concealed. the remainder of the 30,000 were embedded in the library's general catalog, and so they're harder to identify. But there was something in here about change in, I guess it was the change from owner's names to AP. But anyway, in the documentary and in the article, the books are in a closed circulating collection. So you have to request them like special collections, and you get, you know, so many at a time. And so they were only able to study a small amount of them.

But of the ones they were able to study, they saw, let's see, oh, right, the request slips and checkout cards showed that they had the books are once cataloged differently. And then almost half-contained librarians' notes that provided more information than what was in the online catalog, further indicating a previous organizational system. And about a quarter of books that she was able to see or have someone else look at for her when she was out of country, had owner's names written in them. Yeah, in the documentary, the group that goes and gets some books and looks at them, the guy, the guys in the groups, like, recognizes, like, oh, this book belonged to this person and whatever.

And so holds the barcode up to the camera and says, if you are the family of this person, they have your book, you should come get it. like being like and it's this book right here request this one and like the camera like the documentarian like highlights that bit of the screen and stuff yeah that was one of the things that really got me about the documentary was like there didn't seem to be any real forms of like returning these books like you could set a claim for them but then they couldn't even talk to what was it the the custodian of abandoned property or whatever. Absentee property. Absentee property. So like they wouldn't even talk to them. So like how are

other people supposed to know how to come get their family's books? Right. Like they tried to like ask like speak to this person and like even just like other librarians about the collection in a way that like was not confrontational, you know, is like quote neutral. Like I just want to look at the books as like as you could. And they still just like never heard. back or I was like, oh, did I think, oh, did this person look? Oh, I don't know. Oh, I think your request got sent to this, like, you know, that kind of bullshit and just like tossed around. So even when like people tried to just like ask questions about the collection, they were basically just like told no. Yeah. When they, when they called the library, they said, oh, media requests go

to the director, but those usually get approved. So you just have to explain what you're doing. And then the director said, actually, these books, even though they're in our library, you have to talk to the custodian of absentee property. And so that was when they called the custodian of absentee property and they just got stonewalled. Yeah. So I think that's where you go to like not answer questions. But it's like it's in your library and you're loading it out. Property, you know. Yeah, they don't exist.

Pay no attention to the librarian behind the curtain. But yeah, they interviewed people who were processing the books in the late 50s and early 60s, early 60s. there are a couple graduate students who are interested in studying this collection at the time, so people are aware of it. I bet probably after this came out, the collection is much more tightly controlled. Oh, yeah. Wouldn't be surprised. And they filmed in it without permission as well.

They tried getting permission, but we're denied it. So they just did it anyway, but sneaky. Yeah. So they do some hidden camera stuff. It's pretty cool. There was a good amount of discussion. I wasn't quite sure how it was all tied into the theme of the documentary, but about rail lines between Beirut, Yafah, Haifa, Damascus, and Cairo.

So how people had more or less free travel in between, like, Egypt, and then up and down the coast, in between these hubs of Arab cities, and at cultural hubs and how those rail lines don't exist anymore. To alienate the culture, right? Mm-hmm. This is all, that's all part of it as well. You destroy the existing culture or you isolate people. I mean, that's also what capitalism does, is it isolates.

Yeah. I really appreciated how they were talking about as they were moving through Palestine and occupying land. They were also appropriating literature as part of that same project. So someone said there was like the real war of land and occupation, and then a secondary war of stealing culture and alienating people from culture and also stealing, you know, just bank accounts and furniture and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I mean, you see this now with all of the, like, Israeli celebrities and, like, stuff, like posting pictures of themselves eating, like, hummus and stuff.

I mean, like, look at this delicious Israeli food that I'm eating. And it's like, that's not, that's not yours. like that's not Israeli right but this sort of like reinforcement of like this hey this thing Americans that you like guess what it's Israeli it's like no it's not that's Palestinian but this sort of appropriation of culture

yeah it's like food you know yeah and it's like you're Russian dude it's like the whole thing of like people who are like Russian and like just make up very tenuous Jewish heritage is to go move to Israel it's like a whole thing apparently

oh yeah oh yeah There's a very strange, like, phyllosemitism in Russia that's, like, where it's like anti-Semitic. Oh, philosemitism is like a form of anti-Semitism, right? But it's like, I wish I was Jewish, so I'd be good with banking, you know? And they're like, like, that's like this kind of thing like Russians would say. Milo, God, what's his last name? One of the presenters on Trash Feature. Oh.

I was going to say Yonopolis, but no. No. Please, God, no. No, but I'm thinking of another. That's another Milo mixing his name up with, so it's taking me a second. But anyway, he's fluent in Russia, and he lived in Russia for a long time. So he's one of those rare people who's, like, lived in the UK, like, his whole life, but no, it's just, like, a crazy amount of, like, about the actual Russian people and just weird things about day-to-day life in Russia that you don't really get, like, a real insight into. So he tells all these weird stories like that. But anyway, that's what this made me think of, though, because.

this movie is about like the amount of looting that goes into building up like the Hebrew University was also the artifact trafficking rings that we've seen in the past 10, 20 years, probably more like 20 years now, which is Hobby Lobby's Homer, Robbie Robbing Hobby. Say that 10 times fast. Nope. I showed this title. I showed this journal title to a student today who had a research consultation with who you know, is a conservatory background,

so hasn't had to write humanities papers before? And so I was like, oh, in the humanities, we like to do stupid quote or pun or something, colon, the rest of the title, and she was like, I don't understand what you mean. That's what you're talking about. Hobbies, love you, hobby, robbing, hobby. Colin.

Thanks, Tumblr. At the museum of the Bible. The second part's the thing you're actually talking about. The first part's just to show off how clever you are. Or you put a quote from like something in the book. I did that with my thesis. I did the quote. and then colon the actual title.

Yeah. The quote has to be like, you know, meaningful and poignant or something. Yeah. So anyway, Hobby Lobby, which is the main funder of Museum of the Bible, got into trouble. I haven't read about this in a while. So actually, I'm just pulling it up now and looking at it. I'm not going to, I'm just going to do this off the dome. I'm not going to read this.

But after the formation of ISIS, this was going on to a certain degree, but ISIS was really into destroying any kind of idols, which meant antiquities. So any kind of, so they would destroy like a lot of old shrines. Like they blew up like the shrine of Jonah. They blew up like a whole city. But because of the antiquities market, they made a lot of money just selling the stuff instead. And it brings in like huge amounts of traffic. And everyone knows where these antiquities are coming from.

Everyone knows this is funding ISIS. And like no, like no federal agencies. do anything about it. But eventually, Hobby Lobby got into some hot water for trafficking in antiquities that should not be trafficked then. It was just a little too obvious. So getting these old manuscripts and things like that is one of the ways that you gain money for fighting wars. And I was curious if there was a similar thing happening during the funding of the Nakpa in 48 and 49 of selling off antiquities. But it seems like a lot of these antiquities were also just hung on to so that the universities could then have more prestige and build on that wealth.

So it's still like holding on to the wealth in one way or another. Kind of similar to I wanted to bring up the land grab university project. So you can look up any land grant university. And I'll put a link to that in the notes. But any property that was basically what happens with land grant universities, people think is they got land and built on it. No, they got land out west and you sold the land and you used that money. It was given to a university. The university sold the land most of the times and then put that into a fund that they cannot

into an endowment and they cannot spend that money. So that money is still in their balance sheets today according to like the Moral Act, which did the land grant university. So that money is still in your university's endowment generating interest and has been for the past 130 years, 150 years. So all of the seed money for your university's land grant endowment is from the sale of unseated territories. And you can see there's someone's done like a great amount of work on it.

So you can see like what areas had not been seated and like what areas were later treaty territories and which ones were like treaty after invasion sort of thing like treaty under duress kind of situations. And you can show exactly which parcels of land. were sold to bond your university. So you look at like Texas A&M and you'll see no land in Texas, but it's all out west. And then it shows it all sort of like spiraling into and funneling into Texas A&M because that's where the lands were. And then the money was sold and then was part of the seed money for the university.

I'm looking at that right now and it's like, that's wild. Yeah, go play around on that site. It'll make you real mad. Yeah. Yeah. Zoom in on Washington. Washington State University. Yeah, I remember I learned about this a couple of years ago when I was working at UNH

because we were talking about indigenous librarianship and trying to have like a reading and resource group among the faculty librarians and this resource was brought up and how like part of the land grab site is that like they reached out to these universities for like comment and it states if they commented on it or not. And UNH of course did not respond to comment because UNH. Because UNH is a Langley University. Yeah. I also wanted to bring up the connections to, like, pre-contact or early-contact books in the Americas,

one of which I was talking to someone on Blue Sky about, I don't know if they want to be mentioned. I don't really know them all that well. But they have an interest in, like, this era of books, like pre-contact, early contact. And the Library of Congress has a bunch of these for, like, some reason. And it has, like, digitized versions of them. And one of them, I was just, like, clicking around. round, and I found Albin Tonalomadol. And it's a pictorial codex.

It originally included a couple other folios that have since been lost. Tonala model is bark paper of the days, so book of days. It's in divination rituals. So this liturgical calendar was part of a collection owned by Lorenzo Baterini Beneducci, 1702-51, that was confiscated on his expulsion. from New Spain in the mid-1740s. The Codex appears to pass through several hands before it was sold for 2,000 francs to the Americanist Alexis Albin. That's work its name Albin.

October 24, 1841, who purchased it from Frederick de Waldeck. Waldick owned the manuscript from the early 1800s. Eugene Gopil of Mexican and French origin purchased Albin's large collection of Mesoamerican manuscripts, including this work in 1889. His widow donated it to the National Library of France in 1898. And then the last line, this precious manuscript is subsequently stolen and is currently in Mexico. Mexican authorities who are refusing to return it have entrusted it to the country's National Institute of Anthropology and History, INAH. Who are refusing to return it.

If subsequently stolen, that's the first time the word stolen comes up, by the way. I like the, and it's just like the goose me. Stolen from whom, motherfucker. Stolen from whom? I just thought of the I just posted the Princess Bride meme

when I saw it's like you're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen Yep So there is repatriation and it's a totally no problem

You just have to steal to do it Yeah Hell yeah And also Like they were saying There's a lot of Popular culture that was stolen And there was an argument

made by A couple of people in the documentary. I'm not exactly sure who they were. One was a librarian who had cataloged in like the 50s. Another person, I couldn't figure out what his deal was. Who were saying, well,

you know, the lawyer? Yeah, I think he was a lawyer that had worked in the library. Yeah. He talked about cataloging. Because then there was also the other guy who was a librarian there. Yeah. Yeah. So they were talking about how the

books were at least preserved and not sold off and looted. And of course, we all know that's kind of a bullshit argument because they weren't preserved. They were kept away from Palestinians who were then not able to create new works off of them for decades. And also, like, it doesn't really matter. It's not yours, is it? Like, they weren't preserved. They were just taken from people's homes, people who were, like, right there ready to, like, go back into their homes, you know. And is there any active preservation happening on them? Like, all the bindings and spines on the pictures look like garbage.

You know, like they weren't taking, they're not taken care of. You know, they're not preserved. Holding something does not equal preservation. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it brings up this related thing. Yeah, like, I'm glad, like, they had like the guys being like, oh, yeah, well, at least was preserved. And then this one guy was like, no, fuck that.

Like, they had some people actually, like, dispelling that rhetoric in the documentary, which, like, of course. But, like, you know, it was good to, like, have someone to be like, no, like, that's, that's, that's, bullshit like in the documentary. I was like, oh, cool, good. That was a little worried. Yeah. But there was another part that they didn't respond to as well, which was, I believe it was the lawyer again who said, who was on the preservation side,

said, well, you know, maybe they could digitize them. Or no, I might have been the guy who said like, fuck that. It should be returned. But he was also, I think that the novelist. Yeah. But he was saying, you know, at least they could maybe have a facsimile copy. But if there's going to be any truth and reconciliation, the originals have to be returned to Palestinians. And then the lawyer guy said, you know, they could be returned to the, they could make a copy or digitize them or put them in the catalogs and then return them to the Palestinian universities, which, as we all know, all of which have been bombed in the past month.

So I don't think there's any Palestinian universities that haven't been bombed. In fact check me on that. But I think all of them have been. But digitization is sort of like a technological solution for colonization is something that I thought the documentary could have handled better as like, no, because it's not, they're not going to give the books back. They're going to digitize them and say, look, you have access now. Yeah, like, they'll digitize them, but not give the books back. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, this was made in 2012, right? So that was back when people still thought digitization was like going to be the big next book thing. Yeah, I think that's part of it. But it's kind of related because there was this, this completely skipped. I don't know how we missed this news. Hang on. Let me get the news drop. This is belated news.

British Museum will digitize 2.4 million records estimated to take five years. So British Museum had a major, it was announced by October 18th. Oh, that's why, because we were all paying attention to Israel. After news of 2,000 items had been stolen from the institution by a former staff member, former curator Peter Higgs. Oh, it's an inside job. Oh, this is great. So only 350 have been recovered so far. And the museum is asking for public appeal for assistance.

If you find something from the British Museum that has been stolen, and it's from, I don't know, like Mexico. Send it to Mexico. Send it to the INAH. They won't give it back. They'll take care of it. Hell yeah. Put it in a box and send it somewhere that's not going to send it back to the British Museum.

Give it to the Zapatistas. Yeah. That'd be cool. So, anyway, Brie, friend of the show, Bree Watson mentioned that making digital copies is, they're available to you, even if. you cannot visit the museum, you're able to access them digitally. And I think there was more discussion about this, about how people have also said, well, cataloging is just as good as digitizing as well. So if it's cataloged, then you know how to find it, plus, you know, like, the information

you need. So really, cataloging is as good as digitizing. And that's also why we don't have to give the books back. So it's just sort of this layers of, well, we're taking care of it by preserving it and making it available. So what's your complaint? Metadata is bad, actually. Medidate is bad actually. You two said that in perfect sync. That was great. Did we? I hope so.

Yeah, no, like, speaking of medidatea is bad, actually. I said this, so when we were watching this last night in the Discord, and folks joined us, and we had a little commentary after, the thing that, like, riled me up the most about,

that I just, like, I don't know, the fucking AP call numbers with Dewey. With Dewey, the fact that they, it's a dooey is just icing on the cake. But like the AP call numbers. So I think I said this like in the metadata anarchy episode, but like with taxonomy, like any kind of taxonomy or classification system, right? Like I'm going to like quote derrida or something here. Like, you know, things are defined by what they are not. Right. And so in order to have classifications,

in order to have taxonomy, you have to like draw boundaries around things. Right. You have to make borders and borders require policing of some kind to protect them. Right? And then with classification and call numbers, like, that has like a literal, like, material effect because it affects where something goes on a shelf.

Then if you go to that shelf and you see what is around that book or that object, like this is, I think it was Bree, I think, who wrote about the HQs, like all the queer shit in Elsie being near the pedophilia shit in Elsie. and how, like, seeing those near each other on the shelf, like, creates that association in your mind. And so, like, thinking about how these abandoned property books, like, that taxonomy, like, is not just a metaphorical border that is policed.

Like, when I say, like, metadata is, like, policed violence. Like, I'm not being metaphorical. That's, like, a literal example of that. like, like, metadata is bad actually. Is, yeah. I was just like losing my mind about that. Like, oh my God.

Like the call number is literally just abandoned property. Like, plus some dewy decimal numbers, which you know, fuck that guy. Yeah. I like how when the two in the documentary were like checking books out. And for one, the documentary makes it looks like they're going to straight up steal them, which I was kind of excited about. And then they said they were joking about it. They were joking.

But one of them, I think it was one of them, like, holds up a spine to like the camera and says AP. It should be SP for stolen property. Yeah. I was like, yeah, dude. That guy was cool. Is it abandoned if you know exactly who should go back to? It was like the younger guy who was. was one of the like

Palestinians in Israel Right He's an Israeli Arab Yeah And he talks about how he doesn't like that term He's like I'm not Israel's Arab Oh why can't I be an Arab's Arab Yeah

Yeah he was cool But he was the one mostly talking about like the loss of Popular culture And the loss of he's the one who brings up the train lines And the connections between Cultural hubs And then how he'd think You know, for him growing up, he thought Palestinian literature started in the 60s, and then he had to find out, no, actually, it was going on before that.

There was popular culture and movies and film and photographs and things that he was entirely unaware of. Yeah, and how, like, isolated he said he felt. Well, a lot of this takes place in, I want to say, like, near Jerusalem, right? Isn't most of this filmed around there? Yeah, I guess. It's kind of in, like, Israeli parts. part of Jerusalem, I think. There is a part of the documentary where this one woman who was a child during the NACWA goes back to her family's house and wants to show like the inside of the house.

I think her father, her father was writing a dictionary. That's what it was. Yeah. It was her father. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to do it by note cards and you have files and files and files of note cards. And so he had lots of books and lots of note cards.

And when they evacuated, they obviously thought they'd be back in like a few weeks or whatever. And so she was talking about how it must have felt to lose all of that. And like all of his library, I don't think she talks about finding any of the books, but just like his books are gone. And he had quite a large library because he was working on this early Arabic English dictionary. Yeah, she said he was a linguist. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

The thing that got me was the tree that was there when she was. she was growing up, it was still there, like, it was the same tree. Like, she, like, was so happy to see that it was the same tree outside of the house was when she was a kid. And they showed the tiling on the floor. Yeah, like, this didn't happen that long ago. Yeah. And, yeah, she just wanted to show the inside of the house, but the people living there wouldn't let her.

Yeah, and it wasn't part of that. Like, it was an affluent Palestinian, like, Palestine neighborhood when she lived there. And now it's like entirely Israeli and affluent. So it's like. Yeah. And some of the buildings have been repurposed. So she was saying like, oh, this is so-and-so's house. He was like the mayor or something.

Yeah, now it's like a Canadian embassy or something like that. Yeah. There was some weird Canadian building. I don't know. She was like, what is this? It was written in Hebrew. So it was, it had the English title didn't make sense. And the rest was written in Hebrew.

So I don't know. I don't know where they were. I want to say they were in a Jerusalem suburb. But I took as many notes as fast as I could while I was watching it, but I didn't want to pause it because we were all watching it together. Yeah. It's only like a 50-minute documentary. It's pretty short. Yeah, it's 50 minutes.

You can watch it in no time. It's free on Al Jazeera. I'll have the link in there. But there's also an article in a zine that has more. And I think there's an original book that inspired the documentary, which you can find mentioned in the zine. And then also I wanted to find out if that grad student ever wrote anything. But I didn't follow up on that. So let me search real quick.

Yeah, he's got an article back in 2011 about this. But he was interviewed in the documentary. But okay, well, at least I found his article. So I can throw that link in there too. But it's called Salvage or Plunder, Israel's collection of private Palestinian libraries in West Jerusalem. So let's see. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the time. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and part of a doctoral thesis, the Jewish National and University Library in 1945-55, the transfer of Israel Holocaust victims books, and the appropriation of books of Jewish immigrants from the East and the collection of Palestinian books during 1948 war.

That's a lot to put in one dissertation, but that's dissertation life for you. I covered every major thing I wanted to cover. Was there anything else? Oh, some of their suggestions for what can be done with the books, aside from digitization, like the idea of having a museum of the Nakaba. Right. It was also something that was brought up, sort of using the construct of the museum, this thing that is actually a tool of colonial violence, right?

But as a way to force Israel to reckon with what it did of, like, showing. And that way, it's like the stuff. the physical objects that may not, you know, that might not have owners anymore. They're protected. Like, not having Israel do this, obviously. You know, like, I know that there's, like, a Palestinian museum in the United States as well. But, yeah, like, this, like, having, like, a museum at the Nakhpah where objects could go and be protected as well as to show, like, you know, here's, because there's, like, not a lot of

material history of the Nakhpa in museums, right? at least not in any obvious way. So I'm not sure if I love that idea, but I'm also not Palestinian. So I'm just thinking, like, wouldn't that just be the same issue of the books being and like institutionalized or something? But like if like Israel or if Palestinian museums or groups put this together instead of Israeli groups, that'd probably be better. Yeah.

Yeah. It would definitely be something. you know, how they used the prestige of these books to build the Middle Eastern Studies Department. It could serve as the seed for a Palestinian Studies Department at a Palestinian-controlled university or something. You know, do the same thing and be like, we're going, because one of things the younger guy that I think he was a novelist said is why these books have been used to study, but they've been used to create literature that is anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian. Why can't Palestinians be the ones reading these books and doing research on them. So using them as a seed

for study, you know, using them for funded graduate students or Palestinians, you know, whole truth and reconciliation thing would have to be done. And repatriating them when like if families ask for them. Yeah, have like a like a return law, abandoned property return law or something. Yeah. Yeah, like when I worked at the University of Utah, We obviously under digital collections had a lot of things related to Mormon settler colonialists and interactions and stuff with the local Ute and Navajo people. And like our digital collections like had a policy like and like a thing on the website that's like, hey, if you know the people in these photos and we don't know them. like if you know this and want to give us more information or if you don't want this photo to be up or you know anything like that like here is a form that you can fill out sort of like we we recognize

what this represents and if the family of this person you know either wants to give us more information or wants us to take this down that we will um not a perfect solution but they were doing it in concert with the utah american indian digital archive so I was part of that project. But I feel like some digital libraries are starting to do that now because it's as simple as putting a little link to a form on all of the pages of your digital objects. I say, hey, give us more information

or ask us to take this down. It's like the bare fucking minimum, right? It's easy to do that. So it's harder, I think, with like a physical collection. And so that's probably what a lot of people don't do it. But they should. The thing I was thinking about like, like with what's currently going on, like, with the current sort of active month-long, like, increased genocide

is like, okay, we're watching this. How is this related? Like, what can we, what can we do to help? And, like, how does this help us analyze and frame? Like, what's currently going on? And, like, again, like the destruction of culture and reckoning with our own roles in these settler-colonialist institutions that have these collections, I think is important, especially, I don't know if this will be out by the time so-called Thanksgiving happens here in the United States. I know I am going down to Plymouth for the National Day of Morning on that day. Now that I live in Massachusetts, It makes it real easy. But like, you know, what materials do we have from indigenous people in our libraries and museums?

I think I've been trying to do lately is trying to make obvious how various struggles and issues are connected to what's going on in Palestine. Like, this shit's all connected and it's important to see that and then to like act on that. Yeah, I mean, colonialism follows a certain trend, and that's how you can understand that these are all connected because it's all been connected since the 40s and before with the sort of neighborhood watch kind of encroachment that we're seeing in the West Bank now. It's just a reforming of the tactics of the Boer War, where you just send settlers, and the Western expansion in the U.S., you just send settlers out. They sit there, they get attacked or something, or they attack someone and provoke a fight. And you send the army and you attack the indigenous people, and then they just move in and take the area, right? And so this has been an opportunity for Israel to ramp up the settlements in the West Bank. And so, you know, keep an eye on any kind of destruction of cultural institutions that's going to be going on now because it's, they're going to try and make Gaza uninhabitable.

You know, that's the current trajectory of the war is to just fully occupy and make uninhabitable the area and start settling it and reoccupy it permanently. And unless there's a change in the direction of the war, either externally because other countries force Israel to stop or Israel's government implodes because of this, which is possible because they've got a very unpopular prime minister than otherwise, you know, I imagine something similar is already going on as the ground invasion is going in. probably something like this is currently happening. Yeah, there's probably looting happening, you know, if there's, if it hasn't been bombed. And yeah, a reminder that also the IDF trains many of the police forces here in the United States. And currently there's been a lot of actions with the Stop Cop City movement where that training will be ramped up tenfold. And remember that your libraries might be cooperating with the police and you should stop that right now. Um, no fucking police in our libraries.

Yeah, it's all connected. We, yeah. Stop using ex-Liebris. Primo's bad anyway. I think I fucking hate Primo so much. Even without the genocide. Primo's bad. Primo Explodo.

Cremo Explodo. Um, yeah, in the resources, in the notes, can we put some resources like if people aren't familiar with, because I'm also still. learning about like the history of like the Israeli occupation of Palestine and everything. Can we put some resources in the notes for people who might want to learn about this if they don't already know about it or wanting to learn more? Yeah. If there's not already thing already in the Palestinian librarians and archivists group, then

I'll find something. Yeah. I think on that website, they had a great website link to this thing that had a list of like myths. It was like a decolonizing Palestine website, I think, and it had like a list of like myths that it was debunking and talking about. And a lot of them were popular

like media point, talking points. And so it's good to be like, no, actually. I think was one that I was looking at. All right. I'll put that on there. There's not already something in the resource lists that they already have. And yeah, we've been

actively talking about this stuff in the Discord. Please join the Discord. join the conversation, the more people that talk about this, and think through these things and share resources, the better, I think. Yeah. And it's not about what you can do for Palestine, but how you can realize your connection to other struggles for liberation around the world, because it is all connected. Yeah. All right. Free Palestine. Good night.