Ten months into its assault on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 40,000 people from the besieged strip and also demolished some of the main repositories of Palestinian cultural heritage, including the Central Archives of Gaza City, the Gaza Municipal Library and the Islamic University of Gaza Library — acts condemned by the American Library Association in January. As the United States funds Israel’s aggression and supplies its weapons, librarians are documenting and sharing information about destruction of the region’s information sector in solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues. Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP), a network of activists, is leading this charge.

LAP’s solidarity efforts began in 2013, when an international delegation of librarians and archivists from the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and Trinidad and Tobago traveled to Palestine to meet with colleagues for discussion, collaboration and connection. The trip was organized by Hannah Mermelstein, a librarian who led more than 25 delegations to the region prior to joining the field, including through Birthright Unplugged, an organization she co-founded; participants were engaged in various ways in the struggle for Palestinian freedom. “The substance of these professions are information access, cultural heritage and information literacy,” says LAP member Melissa Morrone, a public librarian in Brooklyn, New York. “We all had shared concerns.”

For Palestinian librarians, Israeli restrictions on imports dating to 2007 meant that school librarians faced inordinate challenges in building collections of culturally relevant materials. Twenty years before the recent mass destruction of Palestinian schools, universities and libraries, the delegation visited a library in Lyd that had been turned........

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