The Little will screen The Great Book Robbery (Gish Amit, Rona Sela, Netherlands 2012, 57 min.) followed by a videoconference with producer Benny Brunner as part of the Witness Palestine series.

This film describes the looting of 70,000 Palestinian books by the newly created State of Israel in 1948. When Palestinians were expelled from their homes, part of Palestinian culture was also destroyed: furniture, musical instruments, carpets, and also valuable books.

Some books were saved and arrived at the National Library and the Hebrew University, labeled "AP" for Abandoned Property.

The film interweaves various story lines into a structure that is both dramatically compelling and emotionally unsettling. The interviews center on eyewitness accounts and cultural critiques that place the book-theft affair in a larger historical-cultural context. In the process, new light is shed on the Palestinian tragedy of 1948, and the moralistic-heroic Israeli narrative of the 1948 war is deconstructed.

[source: Little Theatre calendar, 2019-Oct-21]