Five days under house arrest for selling books on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
Mahmud and his nephew Ahmed Muna look very different from the tired and worried appearance they wore when they appeared in the Jerusalem magistrate’s court 10 days ago, in handcuffs. They belong to a well-known Palestinian family that opened Educational Bookshop 40 years ago — today one of the city’s most emblematic bookstores — and they had never been arrested. Until February 9, when six Israeli policemen burst into the two bookshops and searched them for two hours, examining book covers and translating titles with the help of their cellphones, looking for volumes that could be classified as inciting violence. Mahmud and Ahmed were then detained.
