To share and to shield: Book blocs at the UvA Staff Walkout

On May 13^th, the University of Amsterdam staff and students joined the national walkout at the Roeterseiland campus. It’s a solidarity action against genocide in Gaza and also against the repression of academic and political freedom through police violence in evicting the earlier encampment in Roeterseiland (6/5) and Academiegebouw (9/5). Many mainstream media and the university magazine Folia ran a series of live blogs and coverages. Attention increased when students set up an encampment inside the Roeterseiland building ABC after the walk-out. It grew intensely soon after, focusing on the vandalism by a group of people in black hoodies. Concerns and criticisms about property destruction and campus safety proliferated in the following days. That is the context, but it is not what this blog post will discuss. Instead, we want to write about a seemingly small yet poignant important detail from the walk-out that has been missing from the conversation. Since it is a library blog, you might have guessed it already, it’s still about books. It’s about the book blocs.

If you happened to be at the walkout, you might have noticed those oversized book covers held by the protesters on the bridge. That way, they shared various book titles on Palestine and (decolonial) resistances, the knowledge sources connected to the main issue of the protest: Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza. The books are printed on thick cardboard and, when held, will cover at least half the body of the person holding them.

 And then, a few hours later, you might also see how the cardboard-made book covers were being used as handy shields when the riot police came to dissolve the protest. They protected the protesters from the blows of the police batons at the frontline of the protest. It is surreal for me to see how the book bloc’s function immediately shifted. But perhaps it did not shift after all? Books are not merely things that we love. Books bring us pleasure, unlimited imagination, and lessons to learn, but books also have a long history to be feared, banned, and burned because… yes, books are weapons. Authors have reiterated it, from Bertolt Brecht in his play The Mother, “Hungry one, reach for the book–It is a weapon,” to Franklin D. Roosevelt saying, “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.”

Well, okay, the use of books as literal shields is quite new. To be precise, it started in 2010 by the students in Rome to protest Silvio Berlusconi’s government’s budget cuts to education. You can read the whole genealogy here: https://libcom.org/article/book-blocs-genealogy. Since then, students, artists, and workers have often used book blocs in protests, including in the UK and the US.

Back to the student and staff protest in our university. Below is the list of the books exhibited and, again, served  their job well as the shields against the batons:

• Azoulay, Ariella, and Adi Ophir. The One-State Condition : Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Azoulay, Ariella. Potential History : Unlearning Imperialism. London ; Verso, 2019.
• Davis, Angela Y. (Angela Yvonne), and Frank Barat. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle : Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2016. Print.
• Erakat, Noura. Justice for Some : Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019.
• Fanon, Frantz, and Constance Farrington. The Wretched of the Earth : Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, Translated [from the French] by Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Print.
• Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage the Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston : Beacon Press, 2009. Print.
• Khaled, Leila, and George Hajjar. My People Shall Live : The Autobiography of a Revolutionary. London [etc: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973. Print.
• Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine : A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. First edition. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2020. Print.
• Khalidi, Rashid, and Rashid Khalidi. De honderdjarige oorlog tegen Palestina : een geschiedenis van kolonialisme en verzet. Trans. Annemie de Vries. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2023. Print.
• Lim, Audrea, and Omar Barghouti. The Case for Sanctions against Israel. Verso, 2012.
• Masalha, Nur. Palestine : A Four Thousand Year History. London: Zed, 2018. Print.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Print.
• Pappé, Ilan, and Ilan Pappé. De Nakba : de etnische zuivering van Palestina. Trans. Roelof Posthuma. Utrecht: Uitgeverij Omniboek, 2023. Print.
•  Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza. Trade paperback edition. London: Jonathan Cape, 2019. Print.
• Sacco, Joe, and Tineke Funhoff. Gaza 1956 : in de marge van de geschiedenis. Amsterdam: Atlas, 2011. Print.
• Said, Edward (Edward William). The Question of Palestine. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Print.
• Wind, Maya, Robin D. G Kelley, and Nadia Abu El-Haj. Towers of Ivory and Steel : How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. London: Verso Books, 2024.