Palestine in International Arab Book Fair

Agencies – Sudan Events

The 65th Beirut Arab International Book Fair opened on Friday, with the participation of more than 100 Lebanese publishing houses.
This year, the Arab Cultural Club alone, without the Publishers Union Syndicate, is organizing the exhibition – which continues until December 3rd – at the Beirut waterfront.
The event includes about 120 exhibitors from publishing houses and libraries, but its pavilions are missing some important local names in the field of publishing, while most Arab publishing houses were absent from the cultural event.
Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said, in his speech during the opening, that the exhibition represents the best embodiment of cultural resistance to all terrorism represented by the Israeli enemy, and that the word was and will remain the strongest and noblest response to all the lava it unleashes against our valiant south, harvesting people and stones.
Mikati added, “If the times of prosperity that the Lebanese experienced in periods of the nation’s life united them and gathered them around their state, then it is more important that dangers like the one we are experiencing today unite them, so that every call for distance becomes misplaced selfishness and unjustified surrender in the face of difficulties.” .
For his part, the media official at the Beirut International Arab Book Fair, Dr. Akram Hamdan, pointed out in a special statement to Qatar News Agency that the insistence on holding the exhibition in its current session is an affirmation of Beirut’s role as a capital of culture and knowledge, and the challenge to the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon.
Palestinian presence
The Palestinian issue is strongly present at the exhibition through solidarity initiatives or through publications, defying the “difficult circumstance” that Lebanon is witnessing in terms of security and economics.
The head of the Arab Cultural Club, Salwa Siniora Baasiri, noted in a statement to Agence France-Presse that “the harsh conditions in Lebanon and the region are what prevent the participation of Arab publishing houses,” stressing that her absence “is not out of lack of appreciation” for “the dean of book fairs in the Arab world.” Organized by the club since 1956.
Since Friday morning, calm has prevailed in the border area in southern Lebanon since the entry into force of a truce between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the Gaza Strip for a period of 4 days.
Baasiri believed that “holding the exhibition in this difficult circumstance confirms the role of Lebanon’s intellectual leadership and the cultural radiance of the capital,” noting that “organizing it today is not an untimely adventure or a tweet outside people’s concerns and priorities, but rather it is a type of struggle.”
The organizers enriched the program by holding a series of seminars and art exhibitions, and Baasiri said, “What distinguishes this session is the number of recent publications that publishing houses make available to readers,” and not only the signatures of their authors, “but it is also addressed with seminars about them.”
Other seminars will also be held on the sidelines of the exhibition, focusing on topical topics such as “Independence of the Judiciary” and “Lebanon’s Economic Advancement.”
In light of the continuing Israeli war on Gaza Strip, and the tensions in the border areas of southern Lebanon, the exhibition allocated a pavilion at its entrance, the walls of which were decorated with a picture of Al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestinian flags.
Visitors write down words in support of the Palestinians on a white board, including Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who wrote during the opening of the exhibition, “She said she wanted a word from the heart for Palestine, as if she did not know that Palestine was in my heart.”
Within the framework of the announcement, the participating publishing houses highlighted their publications related to the Palestinian issue, and a number of them covered the Palestinian journalist Sherine Abu Aqla, who was martyred on May 11, 2022 while covering an Israeli incursion into the West Bank.
Among the books published by her is “The Martyrdom of Sherine Abu Aqla” by the Institute for Palestine Studies, and the head of the organization’s distribution department, Ziyad Marouf, said that the best-selling among its publications at this stage is “Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine” by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Recent works include “Ghazawi: A Narrative of Misery and Hope” by Jamal Zaqout.
An-Nahar publishing house also published a book by Haitham Zuaiter entitled “The Witness and the Martyr,” on the authority of Sherine Abu Aqla.
New books
The house’s official, Carla Ziadeh, told Agence France-Presse that “more than 20 books are published annually by the house,” and the most prominent of them in the exhibition is “The Moment of Arab Nationalism” by former Lebanese Minister Charles Rizk.
In a book entitled “Arabs on the Train of the World Order… Threatened Maps or Renewed Globalization?” Published by Dar Riad Al-Rayes, Lebanese writer and journalist Mounir Al-Rabie discussed “division and fragmentation” in the Arab region, and the exit from the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which demarcated its borders during World War I, “to new agreements.”
Riad Al-Rayes Publishing House published 40 books annually.