Two Palestinians are gathering donations to create a public library in Gaza, after Israel’s war and genocide destroyed nearly all existing libraries, schools, and universities. The two men, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim, are avid readers who have spent years trying to save books as they struggled to survive in Gaza.

On their donation page, Omar wrote about his early love of books, and how as a child he saved, “coin by coin, until at the end of each month I could buy two or three books.”

When he received an evacuation order on October 8th, 2023, Omar packed up what books he could and fled. But each time he was forced to evacuate, his collection dwindled. He nearly lost his entire salvaged library when the hospital he was sheltering in was attacked:

When the soldiers stormed the building, they dragged us out with insults, blows, and humiliation. I said goodbye to my books and left a note among them:

“Whoever finds these books, please take care of them.”

I deliberately left it unsigned — I wanted the books to remain free, without an owner.

Miraculously, the books survived.

Omar kept trying to rescue books as he was repeatedly displaced. Books felt essential to him, and as he wrote in Lit Hub back in June, “My library was like paradise—I would travel and sail through its books to seize wisdom and the self I had forgotten since the first day I was forced to abandon reading.”

Salvaging books from wrecked libraries and schools has led to some agonizing choices, Omar told The Jordan Times, and he’s found it “very difficult to preserve the cultural spirit amidst this destruction.” Omar has been documenting his library on Instagram, in particular his favorite Russian writers like Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Svetlana Alexievich, and Mikhail Bulgakov.

The other librarian behind this effort is Ibrahim, who fell in love with books in university, particularly Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Tamim Al-Barghouti, and Gabriel García Márquez.

Ibrahim’s house was completely destroyed by Israeli forces, but miraculously, his bookshelf survived: “And then I saw it — my small book cabinet, perched at the top of the rubble, its pages breathing through the stones as if refusing to die. In that moment, something inside me returned to life.”

With their new library in Gaza, the two are hoping to preserve as many books as they can, but also build a space for rebuilding collective memory and fostering expression, creativity, and play. Their tenacious defense of books amidst brutality and genocide is not only an attempt to preserve objects, or institutions, or even a culture under assault:

“With your support, you are not rebuilding a place —
you are rebuilding a life that can continue.”

You can donate to help Omar and Ibrahim’s library here.

The post » You can help build the first public library in Gaza since the genocide began. appeared first on Our Story Insight.

August 1, 2025, 1:18pm

David Grossman, widely considered to be Israel’s most prominent novelist, has described his country’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide.

Speaking to Italian daily La Repubblica, in an interview published earlier today, the award-winning author and recipient of the 2018 Israel Prize for literature said that, after years of resistance to the term, he now “can’t help” but use it:

But now I can’t help myself—not after what I’ve read in the papers, not after the images I’ve seen, not after speaking with people who’ve been there.

Grossman’s comments come just days after two major Israeli rights groups—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights—said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, amid growing global condemnation of the enforced starvation that has brought the strip to the brink of famine. Israel’s 22-month assault on the besieged enclave has claimed the lives of more than 60,000 people, at least 18,500 of them children (though leading authorities such as The Lancet consider these figures to be a significant undercount). B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights join Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and dozens of other human rights organizations in classifying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

“The occupation has corrupted us,” Grossman—an outspoken peace activist who was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2017 for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar—went on to say. “I am absolutely convinced that Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. Maybe people are tired of hearing about it, but that’s the truth. We’ve become militarily powerful, and we’ve fallen into the temptation born of our absolute power, and the idea that we can do anything.”

Grossman’s comments are welcome, and will hopefully encourage other prominent cultural figures to finally speak up, but one wonders what took him so long. As is the case with the dozens of western politicians, journalists, and assorted public figures who have concluded that this is the opportune week to become a vertebrate, I can’t help but think about the thousands—the tens of thousands—of innocent lives that would have been saved had those with clout decided, at any point during the last year and a half, that stopping the indiscriminate slaughter of caged civilians was more important than protecting Israeli and American Zionists from terminology they find distasteful.

[h/t The Guardian]

Like this:

Like Loading…

The post Israel’s most famous novelist says his country is committing genocide. ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Early on Friday, Elon Musk shared a post written by an X user about the actions of three 20th century dictators — then quickly deleted it after it sparked a backlash.

The post falsely claimed that Joseph Stalin, the communist leader of the Soviet Union until 1953; Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party in Germany; and Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, didn’t cause the deaths of millions of people under their watch. Instead, the post said, their public sector workers did.

Mr. Musk shared the post without any other comment. He removed it soon after users on X criticized the post, saying it was antisemitic and dismissive of genocide. Historians have widely chronicled that millions of people died under Stalin, that millions of Jews were massacred under Hitler during the Holocaust, and that millions of Chinese were displaced or killed during Mao’s cultural revolution.

It was the latest post by Mr. Musk to devolve into controversy. In 2023, Mr. Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on X as “the actual truth” of what Jewish people were doing, prompting advertisers to flee. And after an assassination attempt on Mr. Trump last year, Mr. Musk wrote — then deleted — a post suggesting it was odd that nobody had tried to kill former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. or former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mr. Musk has long appeared to favor strongmen and has promoted right wing modern-day leaders. He has repeatedly used X to support politicians like Javier Milei of Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Narendra Modi of India, leaders in countries where he also has business interests. Most recently, he threw his support behind the hard-right Alternative for Germany party, hosting an online town hall for its candidate for chancellor.

“It is deeply disturbing and irresponsible for someone with a large public platform to elevate the kind of rhetoric that serves to undermine the seriousness of these issues,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement about Mr. Musk’s sharing of the post.

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk frequently uses X as a megaphone to share everything from juvenile memes to major U.S. policy proposals, blasting his opinions to his more than 219 million followers. But his viewpoints are drawing more scrutiny since he has become a close adviser to President Trump helping overhaul government spending.

Mr. Musk has transformed X, removing many rules around hate speech and disinformation and allowing thousands of accounts banned by the company’s prior leadership for problematic posts to return to the platform — including Mr. Trump’s.

Around 2:30 a.m. on Friday, Mr. Musk shared the post written by an X user that said, “Stalin, Hitler and Mao didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.”

Mr. Musk in recent weeks has battled with public sector workers in Washington as part of his work with his cost-cutting initiative, known as the Department of Government Efficiency. He has accused federal workers of trying to conceal fraud and encouraged them to quit their jobs.

The post sparked backlash from federal employee unions, among others.

“America’s public service workers — our nurses, teachers, firefighters, librarians — chose making our communities safe, healthy and strong over getting rich. They are not, as the world’s richest man implies, genocidal murderers,” Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement.

Mr. Musk on Friday shared several comments on X defending himself from accusations of antisemitism and claiming his critics were the ones aligned with Nazism. Mr. Musk also recently came under fire for a making a gesture that resembled the Roman salute, which is also known as the “Fascist salute” and was later adopted by the Nazis.

“Look at what they did to President @realDonaldTrump,” Mr. Musk wrote in one post. “He was loved by democrats until he ran for president. Now they call him Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc and try to kill him,” referring to another dictator, the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

The post Elon Musk Shared, Then Deleted X Post Absolving Hitler, Stalin and Mao of Genocide appeared first on Our Story Insight.